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h2oetry 's review for:
The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
by David Foster Wallace
For those particularly satisfied with a book after reading it, may I exhort you: read it again a few years later. The familiarity of the material makes the characters stand out, and the sentences scream nearly toward sentience.
Thus was the case when I dove back into D.F. Wallace’s ‘The Pale King.’ I re-read it after nearly the same length of time as had passed between Wallace’s death and its official published date.
“An Unfinished Novel” is a title-cased epitaph sandwiched between the book’s title and the author’s name on the title page. It’s sad, apt, and misleading. Sad for the obvious reasons; apt w/r/t descriptiveness; misleading in that it might dissuade a reader to plunk down hard-earned $ for something unfinished.
While the whole of the narrative surely would’ve been longer, is the upfront negation not dissimilar to defining shooting stars as unfinished? We see its, the star’s, partial arc and we revel in its beauty. We wonder where it will end up. But beautiful is the illumination of which we are able to view the star’s parabolic scattering of reflected dusty light, no matter its length or brightness.
The epigraph explains the entirety of this book’s reading experience, from the initial heads up, the purchase, the pre-reading When/Should I Read This? Toil, the actual work of reading it, to the completion/fugue that both empties and fills the reader at The End. It’s the ability to be immersed:
And but so you’ve heard of boredom. That the book is about boredom. How to manage boredom. Sure, but don’t stretch ‘This Is Water’ as a Hallmark-ishly thin mask over the entire novel. The speech is great, but the clean platitudes are easily misinterpreted. In The Pale King, they are etched in stone, dealt with at times in detail so penetratingly deep that there is no wiggle room, so to speak. Alas, Wigglers -- those human machines filing, sorting, and finding meaning in various IRS documents -- try to find a meaning in life. I know the way this is going to sound, but I felt each character was as if they were at the end of the line in string theory, sitting there wiggling, with no real way to describe fully what is going on. Indeed, something is happening, but we don’t know what it is (do you, Mr. Jones?).
A character in an early section in the book is looking out an airplane’s window at a car on the road, driving what seems to be in slow motion from that great height. Much of the book reads along that type of scaling. From above, down a microscope. Scaling, finding meaning at whichever length befits the occasion.
Several characters are fully-fleshed out, such that one could place them in any type of scene and know what’s likely to transpire. Think of Seinfeld’s characters: you get to know them so well that when you see them react to the current environment, it rings so true you feel as though you predicted what was going to happen.
A pale, marbled, stoic Jesuit substitute instructor offers kingly words to those about to take a graduate level accounting exam, “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” He mentions heroism as the individuals’ benefact of dealt with banalities, the mundanity that is found in far more happenings than simply accounting. It’s life. Deal with it. The theatrical valor shown in venues of entertainment offers a fallacious understanding about existence. No audience. No applause.
Whole stretches of the novel are as comic and sad as ‘Infinite Jest,’ and, in some cases, funnier and sadder. The cruel irony is that you could laugh to death reading this.
Thus was the case when I dove back into D.F. Wallace’s ‘The Pale King.’ I re-read it after nearly the same length of time as had passed between Wallace’s death and its official published date.
“An Unfinished Novel” is a title-cased epitaph sandwiched between the book’s title and the author’s name on the title page. It’s sad, apt, and misleading. Sad for the obvious reasons; apt w/r/t descriptiveness; misleading in that it might dissuade a reader to plunk down hard-earned $ for something unfinished.
While the whole of the narrative surely would’ve been longer, is the upfront negation not dissimilar to defining shooting stars as unfinished? We see its, the star’s, partial arc and we revel in its beauty. We wonder where it will end up. But beautiful is the illumination of which we are able to view the star’s parabolic scattering of reflected dusty light, no matter its length or brightness.
The epigraph explains the entirety of this book’s reading experience, from the initial heads up, the purchase, the pre-reading When/Should I Read This? Toil, the actual work of reading it, to the completion/fugue that both empties and fills the reader at The End. It’s the ability to be immersed:
“We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed. --- Frank Bidart, ‘Borges and I’”
And but so you’ve heard of boredom. That the book is about boredom. How to manage boredom. Sure, but don’t stretch ‘This Is Water’ as a Hallmark-ishly thin mask over the entire novel. The speech is great, but the clean platitudes are easily misinterpreted. In The Pale King, they are etched in stone, dealt with at times in detail so penetratingly deep that there is no wiggle room, so to speak. Alas, Wigglers -- those human machines filing, sorting, and finding meaning in various IRS documents -- try to find a meaning in life. I know the way this is going to sound, but I felt each character was as if they were at the end of the line in string theory, sitting there wiggling, with no real way to describe fully what is going on. Indeed, something is happening, but we don’t know what it is (do you, Mr. Jones?).
A character in an early section in the book is looking out an airplane’s window at a car on the road, driving what seems to be in slow motion from that great height. Much of the book reads along that type of scaling. From above, down a microscope. Scaling, finding meaning at whichever length befits the occasion.
Several characters are fully-fleshed out, such that one could place them in any type of scene and know what’s likely to transpire. Think of Seinfeld’s characters: you get to know them so well that when you see them react to the current environment, it rings so true you feel as though you predicted what was going to happen.
A pale, marbled, stoic Jesuit substitute instructor offers kingly words to those about to take a graduate level accounting exam, “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is.” He mentions heroism as the individuals’ benefact of dealt with banalities, the mundanity that is found in far more happenings than simply accounting. It’s life. Deal with it. The theatrical valor shown in venues of entertainment offers a fallacious understanding about existence. No audience. No applause.
Whole stretches of the novel are as comic and sad as ‘Infinite Jest,’ and, in some cases, funnier and sadder. The cruel irony is that you could laugh to death reading this.