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David Foster Wallace

The Pale King Hardcover – April 15, 2011

by David Foster Wallace (Author)

418 ratings

Goodreads Choice Award nominee

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The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote.

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has.

The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions -- questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society -- through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time.

"The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." --Laura Miller, Salon

Print length

560 pages
Language

English
Publisher

Little, Brown and Company
Publication date

April 15, 2011
Dimensions

6 x 1.38 x 9.25 inches
ISBN-10

0316074233
ISBN-13

978-0316074230
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"One hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace.....Stretches of this are nothing short of sublime--the first two chapters are a real put-the-reader-on-notice charging bull blitz, and the David Foster Wallace sections...are tiny masterpieces of that whole self-aware po-mo thing of his that's so heavily imitated.... often achingly funny...pants-pissingly hilarious....Yet, even in its incomplete state...the book is unmistakably a David Foster Wallace affair. You get the sense early on that he's trying to cram the whole world between two covers. As it turns out, that would actually be easier to than what he was up to here, because then you could gloss over the flyover country that this novel fully inhabits, finding, among the wigglers, the essence of our fundamental human struggles."―Publishers Weekly

"The final, beautiful act of an unwilling icon...one of the saddest, most lovely books I've ever read...Let's state this clearly: You should read THE PALE KING.... You'll be [kept up at night] because D.F.W. writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe...because again and again he invites you to consider some very heavy things....Through some function of his genius, he causes us to ask these questions of ourselves."―Benjamin Alsup, Esquire

"Deeply sad, deeply philosophical...breathtakingly brilliant...funny, maddening and elegiac...[David Foster Wallace's] most emotionally immediate work...It was in trying to capture the hectic, chaotic reality--and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters--that Wallace's synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes...because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including THE PALE KING, he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life."―Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times

"The overture to Wallace's unfinished last novel is a rhapsodic evocation of the subtle vibrancy of the midwestern landscape, a flat, wind-scoured place of potentially numbing sameness that is, instead, rife with complex drama....feverishly encompassing, sharply comedic, and haunting...this is not a novel of defeat but, rather, of oddly heroic persistence.... electrifying in its portrayal of individuals seeking unlikely refuge in a vast, absurd bureaucracy. In the spirit of Borges, Gaddis, and Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985), Wallace conducts a commanding and ingenious inquiry into monumental boredom, sorrow, the deception of appearances, and the redeeming if elusive truth that any endeavor, however tedious, however impossible, can become a conduit to enlightenment, or at least a way station in a world where 'everything is on fire, slow fire.'"―Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)

"THE PALE KING represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist...Wallace made a career out of rushing in where other writers feared to tread or wouldn't bother treading. He had an outsize, hypertrophied talent...THE PALE KING is an attempt to stare directly into the blind spot and face what's there...His ability to render the fine finials and fractals and flourishes of a mind acting upon itself, from moment to moment, using only the blunt, numb instruments of language, has few if any equals in American literature..this we see him do at full extension."―Lev Grossman, TIME

"To read THE PALE KING is in part to feel how much Wallace had changed as a writer, compressed and deepened himself...It's easy to make the book sound heavy, but it's often very funny, and not politely funny, either...Contains what's sure to be some of the finest fiction of the year."―John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

"A thrilling read, replete with the author's humor, which is oftentimes bawdy and always bitingly smart.... The notion that this book is 'unfinished' should not be given too much weight. The Pale King is, in many ways, quite complete: its core characters are fully drawn, each with a defining tic, trait, or backstory... Moreover, the book is far from incomplete in its handling of a host of themes, most of them the same major issues, applicable to all of us, with which Wallace also grappled in Infinite Jest: unconquerable boredom, the quest for satisfaction in work, the challenge of really knowing other people and the weight of sadness.... The experience to be had from reading The Pale King feels far more weighty and affecting than a nicely wrapped story. Its reach is broad, and its characters stay with you."―Daniel Roberts, National Public Radio

"The four-word takeaway: You should read it!"―New York Magazine

"An astonishment, unfinished not in the way of splintery furniture but in the way of Kafka's Castle or the Cathedral of St. John the Divine ... What's remarkable about The Pale King is its congruity with Wallace's earlier ambitions ... The Pale King treats its central subject--boredom itself--not as a texture (as in Fernando Pessoa), or a symptom (as in Thomas Mann), or an attitude (as in Bret Easton Ellis), but as the leading edge of truths we're desperate to avoid. It is the mirror beneath entertainment's smiley mask, and The Pale King aims to do for it what Moby-Dick did for the whale ... Watching [Foster Wallace] loosed one last time upon the fields of language, we're apt to feel the way he felt at the end of his celebrated essay on Federer at Wimbledon: called to attention, called out of ourselves."―Garth Risk Hallberg, New York Magazine

"Wallace's gift for language, especially argot of all sorts, his magical handling of masses of detail...[these] talents are on display again in The Pale King."―Jeffrey Burke, Bloomberg

"An incomplete, complex, confounding, brilliant novel...Reading THE PALE KING is strangely intimate...it also comes with a note of grace."―Sam Anderson, New York Times Magazine

"The most anticipated posthumous American novel of the last century...[Wallace was] America's most-gifted writer...American literature will rarely, if ever, give us another mind like Wallace's...ferociously written...richly imagined...a deep panoply of lives and the post-modern awareness of how this all was constructed, both the work and the vortex of current life."―John Freeman, Boston Globe

"THE PALE KING represents Wallace's effort, through humor, digression and old-fashioned character study, to represent IRS agents...as not merely souled, but complexly so. He succeeds, profoundly, and the rest of the book's intellectual content is gravy. Yes, parts are difficult, but 'boring' never comes into it. And it's very, very funny."―Sam Thielman, Newsday

"It may be unfinished, but the reviews-cum-retrospectives all soundly agree: It's still a book to be read."―The Miami Herald

"A fully imagined, often exquisitely fleshed-out novel about a dreary Midwestern tax-return processing center that he has caused to swarm with life.... a series of bravura literary performances--soliloquies; dialogues; video interview fragments; short stories with the sweep and feel of novellas...This is what 360-degree storytelling looks like, and if it doesn't come to a climax or end, exactly, that may not be a defect."―Judith Shulevitz, Slate

"It could hardly be more engaging. The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying and rousing."―Laura Miller, Salon

"Strange, entertaining, not-at-all boring...Wallace transforms this driest of settings into a vivid alternate IRS universe, full of jargon and lore and elaborately behatted characters, many of them with weird afflictions and/or puzzling supernatural abilities....hilarious...brilliant and bizarre, another dispatch from Wallace's...endlessly fascinating brain."―Rob Brunner, Entertainment Weekly

"Exhilarating."―Hillel Italie, Associated Press

"Heroic and humbling...sad, breathtakingly rigorous and searching, ultimately hysterically funny."―Matt Feeney, Slate

"Brilliant...[it] glimmers and sparkles."―Richard Rayner, The Los Angeles Times

About the Author

David Foster Wallace was born in Ithaca, New York, in 1962 and raised in Illinois, where he was a regionally ranked junior tennis player. He received bachelor of arts degrees in philosophy and English from Amherst College and wrote what would become his first novel, The Broom of the System, as his senior English thesis. He received a masters of fine arts from University of Arizona in 1987 and briefly pursued graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University. His second novel, Infinite Jest, was published in 1996.

Wallace taught creative writing at Emerson College, Illinois State University, and Pomona College, and published the story collections Girl with Curious Hair, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, the essay collections A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and Consider the Lobster. He was awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, a Lannan Literary Award, and a Whiting Writers' Award, and was appointed to the Usage Panel for The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. He died in 2008. His last novel, The Pale King, was published in 2011.

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Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Little, Brown and Company; First Edition (April 15, 2011)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 560 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0316074233
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0316074230
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.83 pounds
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6 x 1.38 x 9.25 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #212,831 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #1,362 in Classic American Literature
- #3,961 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #6,413 in Classic Literature & Fiction

Customer Reviews:
418 ratings

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David Foster Wallace

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David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More. He died in 2008.

Customer reviews

5 star		70%
4 star		17%
3 star		6%
2 star		3%
1 star		4%

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Jessica Sullivan

Excellent insight into where his mind was at in the later part of his life

Reviewed in the United States on June 26, 2017

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David Foster Wallace's final, incomplete novel is literally a book about boredom, dullness and the IRS. Why would anyone ever bother reading about that? Well, partly because Wallace had an knack for making anything transcendent. But the main reason, perhaps, is one that Wallace presents as one of the books main theses: there's virtue in enduring dullness.

"To me, at least in retrospect, the really interesting question is why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull. Maybe it's because dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that's where phrases like 'deadly dull' or 'excruciatingly dull' come from. But there might be more to it. Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that's dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that's always there, if only in an ambient, low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention."

The Pale King is comprised of a series of anecdotes about employees at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois. It's disjointed and unfinished, with not a whole lot of narrative cohesion. In some ways, it's an interesting companion piece to Infinite Jest: where Infinite Jest focuses on the problems of a modern American culture saturated in mind-numbing entertainment and distraction, The Pale King offers somewhat of a solution to living a meaningful life within this reality.

If you've ever read or listened to Wallace's commencement speech, "This Is Water," it's sort of a hyper-condensed version of the solution offered in The Pale King. We're each tasked with constructing meaning out of experience and choosing what and how we pay attention to the world around us. What Wallace seems to be suggesting is that we must have the self-discipline to deliberately endure the inevitable tedium and dullness of day-to-day adult life without succumbing to endless distraction.

"The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable. It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you can't accomplish."

Wallace loved playing around with form, and The Pale King is a testament to this. It's a book about boredom and dullness, and so Wallace made it intentionally boring and dull. There are entire chapters dedicated to IRS codes. There's 50+ pages of a man showing up for his first day of work. And yet there's such brilliance within these pages. Take, for example, the beautiful phrase "every love story is a ghost story" sandwiched arbitrarily in between dozens of sentences about IRS agents turning pages. Or the chapter-long anecdote about a little boy whose goal "was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body"—a passage that will haunt me for the rest of my life. The novel itself proves Wallace's point: that if you discipline yourself to pay attention and endure tedium, you will be deeply rewarded.

"Almost everything you pay close direct attention to becomes interesting," says one character, Wallace's equivalent of a modern-day hero, toward the end of the book. We live in an age where we're constantly bombarded with information, entertainment and stimuli. If, as Wallace suggests, "almost everything" has the potential to be interesting, this is even further incentive to make smart, disciplined choices about where we direct our attention.

I highly recommend this book for fans of David Foster Wallace who want further insight into where his mind was at in the later part of his life.

40 people found this helpful

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M.D. Kuehn

THE PALE KING is brilliant writing

Reviewed in the United States on February 18, 2018

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The unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace.

It pains me to contemplate what THE PALE KING could have been had DFW not committed suicide September 12, 2008 at age 46. There is some indication it would have rivaled INFINITE JEST, his 1000-page masterwork. As it is, THE PALE KING is a 538-page patchwork of episodes revealing that DFW brilliance, pieced together from notes, finished chapters, and fragments by his editor, Michael Pietsch. My first reflex on Goodreads was to give this a rating of 4-out-of-5 stars -- I know, I feel foolish even rating literary works like this on some arbitrary scale, but I do anyway, feel foolish, I mean -- since it doesn’t really hold up as a novel in the traditional sense, due partly, I’m sure to its unfinished nature. However, as a patchwork of scenes, character sketches, stories, asides -- footnotes even! -- THE PALE KING is brilliant writing. So 5-stars it must be.

The themes of boredom, loneliness, addiction are woven heavily into INFINITE JEST, and now into THE PALE KING. For those who know something about the author, it’s natural to read reverberations of DFW’s life in those themes, which, while legitimate or not, add another deeper layer onto THE PALE KING.

THE PALE KING is about boredom, and it revolves around a cast of IRS agents at the Regional Examination Center -- REC, for short -- in Peoria, Illinois. It is work so tedious and repetitive that boredom survival training is provided as part of the job. What sort of personality type would willingly submit to day after day of such mind-numbing, soul-tormenting tedium? Ah, this is the interesting cast of characters DFW has assembled for us in THE PALE KING: Shane ‘Mr. X’ (short for, sarcastically, Mr. Excitement) Drinion, who levitates from his chair when in full concentration mode over a particularly complex return; Claude Sylvanshine, GS-9, a ‘fact psychic’ ; Frederick Blumquist, dead at his tax examiner’s desk for four days before anyone noticed; Director of the Midwest REC, DeWitt Glendenning; Leonard Stecyk, who gives out National Zip Code Directories door to door as tokens of greetings to his new neighbors -- there are many more.

THE PALE KING is very funny, darkly funny. Where DFW was going to take THE PALE KING is anyone’s guess. In a short two-page chapter 44, one of the characters sums it all up: The underlying bureaucratic key [to survival] is the ability to deal with boredom. To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human. To breathe, so to speak, without air. The key is the ability, whether innate or conditioned, to find the other side of the rote, the picayune, the meaningless, the repetitive, the pointlessly complex. To be, in a word, unborable... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune from boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish. [438]

18 people found this helpful

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Jon Waters

Even IRS Agents Have a Secret Life.

Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2017

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Unfinished, but brilliant in parts. These IRS tax professionals take on a larger-than-life character in DFW's sympathetic vision of work life. His subject is the modern work-a-day condition, and his vision is nothing less than our complete absorption in our bureaucratic endeavors. The raw, unfinished aspect of this, his last novel, highlights the technical accomplishment of the finished, polished "Infinite Jest," his masterpiece and legacy.

Still, whole sections are vintage, brilliant David Foster Wallace. Check out the long chapter (#46) toward the end of the novel describing the Pod C's revenue officers one Friday at leisure with their cocktails ('necessary to blow off some of the unvented steam that's accreted during a week of extreme tedium and concentration, or extreme volume and stress, or both') during the one hour Happy Hour at Meibeyer's (most of the revenue officers leave when the H2 discounts end), but the 'wrist-bitingly beautiful' (married) Meredith Rand stays on to chat up a new cohort, the enigmatic, inscrutable Shane ("Mr. X") Drinion in a tete-a-tete, which she begins by saying, "You know, if you want to know the truth, you kind of interest me" and which gradually opens into a heart-breaking, slow-moving, intimate encounter.

6 people found this helpful

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Amazon customer2016

If you enjoy over-analysis (à la Asperger's) you will love this. It is funny.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 8, 2018

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This is quite a long and sometimes patchwork read but totally engrossing especially the sections involving the tax office staff.
I found the comedic moments particularly powerful. See paperback pages 352-356 (disgustingly but hilariously described) and pages 524-525 pig Latin dialogue:
'Atiencepay, Aylortay. Onay uttingcay etyay.'
'You think I don't speak Latin?'
'Sir, I'm pleased you speak Latin.'

"Everyone conducts a rapid unconscious scan of each social sense object they encounter. Some scans' big concern involved fear and the threat-potential of each new datum; others' involved sexual potential, revenue potential, aesthetic grade, status indicators, power, and/or susceptibility to domination. Toni Ware's scans, ...were concerned entirely with whether the object could be affected." (p 513).

DFW was a uniquely insightful person.

6 people found this helpful

Amazon Customer

Very reasonable price and pretty prompt delivery.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 9, 2019

Verified Purchase

Very good price, book in very good condition too.

One person found this helpful

E. Snowdon

Four Stars

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 9, 2017

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fine

2 people found this helpful

Hugh de Lacy

Addictive Complexity

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on April 23, 2011

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"The Pale King" is a novel assembled from a large collection of fragments left by the author after his untimely and tragic death in 2008. According to the editor's note at the beginning of the book there was no synopsis or outline of the novel as a whole and months of work were needed to attempt to put together a novel that approached what may have been Foster Wallace's intentions. There can be little doubt that a writer as meticulous as DFW would have been dismayed at the idea of an editor taking his unfinished work and publishing without his intervention; however, in the circumstances I think the decision was the right one. Unlike some posthumous works, this is not some early novel unfit for publication or the work of an author in decline: there is writing of the highest quality here.

My sense is that probably 70-80% of the novel was completed but there is clearly considerable uncertainty about the final structure and for this reason the novel is perhaps best approached initially as a series of short stories with a strong unifying theme: the activities of a group of employees of the US Internal Revenue Service in the mid 1980s when the organisation was undergoing some radical reorganisation.

The novel is at least to some extent autobiographical; Wallace apparently worked for the IRS for a year or so during the period when the novel is set. Chapter 9 is a strange `Authors Forward' in which DFW addresses the reader directly and states that the `characters and events are fictitious' disclaimer at the front of the book is completely misleading and that in fact everything is true. He then goes into a lengthy discourse about discussions with his publisher's lawyers, the obtaining of legal releases from some of his former colleagues featured in the book (plus the refusal of one of his family members to give such a release) and the extent to which autobiography can be truly accurate when filtered through memory and the writer's subjectivity etc. This all has the ring of truth but to what extent this is DFW throwing red herrings to his reader is hard to guess.

The book itself consists of 50 chapters of greatly varying length and no clear narrative structure connecting one chapter with the next; events do unfold through the novel however via the activities of the people in the group but the reader has to be very alert to the allusive character of the work.

DFW chose to set the novel largely at an IRS `Examination Centre' where employees are tasked with sifting through hundreds of tax returns that have been flagged up by a primitive computer system as possibly containing discrepancies indicative of underpayment; the work is unremittingly tedious while at the same time requiring a continuous high level of concentration and alertness in order to do it well - a production line without the option of switching off one's brain.

The main theme of the novel is around the people who have submitted themselves to this work regime, their individual characteristics and the way they approach the work and interact with each other. Many of the players have unusual personalities with several having strange and magical talents: Chris Fogle's ability to track the exact number of words he has spoken at any point during a conversation; Sylvanshine's unconscious acquisition of random facts about people in his vicinity (two colleagues unknowingly related `through a liaison five generations ago in Utrecht') and Drinion, a high-functioning autistic, gradually levitating from his chair during a lengthy and intense conversation with Meredith Rand, the office beauty. All this leavens long passages describing in comprehensive detail the inner workings of the IRS bureaucracy in DFW's meticulous and rather addictive prose (plus footnotes). Many chapters are in the first person where the speaker is not explicitly identified; the reader had to pick up clues and cross-correlate information from other chapters to fully work out what is going on.

This book will undoubtedly be compared with `Infinite Jest'; `Pale King' has a similar convoluted structure but is much more circumscribed in its theme. It is also a darker work with none of the big set comic pieces which intersperse `Infinite Jest' though not without a lot of black humour. Above all, DFW's writing is a huge pleasure to read and the novel has a great degree of empathy with its characters. Not perhaps the best novel for newcomers to DFW but definitely recommended for fans.

11 people found this helpful

P4!N1C

Buona edizione, ottimo libro

Reviewed in Italy on April 18, 2017

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È Foster Wallace. Non mi dilungherò sull'autore, ma complessivamente, da appassionato, l'ho trovata una lettura tanto impegnativa quanto soddisfacente.

L'edizione è economica, ma ben fatta.

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