The Pale King
Encyclopedia
The Pale King is an unfinished novel by David Foster Wallace
, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. After Wallace's death in September 2008, a manuscript and associated computer files were found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
in Peoria, Illinois
in 1985. One of the characters, one of two who narrate their chapters, is named David Wallace, but he is a wholly fictional counterpart of the author and not the focal point of the novel. Pietsch called the organization of the manuscript "a challenge like none I've ever encountered".
The fictional "Author's Foreword" is chapter 9 and is the place in the novel where Wallace's trademark footnotes run most rampant. In this chapter, he introduces an "irksome paradox" that the only bona fide fiction in the book is the copyright page's disclaimer that states 'The characters and events in this book are fictitious,' while at the same time acknowledging that this Author's Foreword itself is necessarily defined by that disclaimer as fictional. He further goes on to state, in the context of the same self-referential paradox, that "The Pale King is a kind of vocational memoir" and that "the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher." Other primary characters include Lane Dean Jr., Claude Sylvanshine
, David Cusk, and Leonard Stecyk, men drawn for vastly different reasons to a career in the IRS.
. He started writing around 2000 and continued until his death in September 2008. The novel (or "long thing," Wallace's usual term for it) had numerous working titles throughout this period, including Glitterer, SJF (Sir John Feelgood), Net of Gems, and What is Peoria For?
In 2007, Wallace estimated that the novel was about one-third finished. One of his notebooks found by his widow, Karen Green (who designed the American edition's cover art), suggested a possible direction for the novel's plot: "...an evil group within the I.R.S. is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration." The author's ultimate intention for the plot, however, is unknown.
Wallace in his final hours had "tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel." On her blog, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reported that the Pale King manuscript edited by Michael Pietsch began with "more than 1000 pages ... in 150 unique chapters". The published version is 540 pages and 50 chapters.
On September 14, 2010, Pietsch announced the publication date of the novel and provided further information about the plot. He revealed that the novel "takes agonizing daily events like standing in lines, traffic jams, and horrific bus rides—things we all hate—and turns them into moments of laughter and understanding", a theme Wallace addressed in his commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. Pietsch added that "although David did not finish the novel, it is a surprisingly whole and satisfying reading experience that showcases his extraordinary imaginative talents and his mixing of comedy and deep sadness in scenes from daily life."
Although Little, Brown and Company
set The Pale King’s publication date for April 15, 2011, Amazon.com
and Barnes & Noble
were allowed to sell copies of the novel through their websites as early as March 22, 2011. That elicited protest from many bookstore owners, who felt it put them at an unfair disadvantage. Little, Brown defended the split dates, maintaining it was common practice.
, claimed that The Pale King "isn't the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction." He added, however, that it is “one hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace.”
Keith Meatto, in Frontier Psychiatrist, wrote that The Pale King was as "if Kafka
, Borges
, and Thomas Pynchon
teamed up to write a season of The Office", calling the result a "masterpiece."
In Esquire
, Benjamin Alsup wrote that The Pale King is an "incomplete and weirdly fractured pseudo memoir" that is "frustratingly difficult in places" and "potholed throughout by narrative false starts and dead ends." Despite that, Alsup stated, "you should read The Pale King." While conceding that the novel is not conventionally gripping in terms of narrative, the reviewer asserted, "If it keeps you up at night, it won't be because you've got to know what happens next. If you're up, you'll be up because D.F.W. writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe."
Lev Grossman, in Time
, wrote that "if The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist."
In The New York Times
, Michiko Kakutani
wrote that “[The Pale King] feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished [Wallace’s] work from the beginning.” She described the novel as both “breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull — funny, maddening and elegiac,” and predicted that “The Pale King will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life” and will also “snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window — albeit a flawed window — into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America.” Kakutani claimed that it is Wallace’s “most emotionally immediate work.”
"Good People", in the February 5, 2007, issue of The New Yorker
."The Compliance Branch", in the February 2008 issue of Harper's.
"Wiggle Room", in the March 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker
."A New Examiner", in the January 2010 issue of The Lifted Brow
and the September 2010 issue of Harper's."Backbone", in the March 7, 2011 issue of The New Yorker
."The Pale King," an extract from chapter 22, in the April 9, 2011 issue of The Guardian
s Saturday Review.
Before the novel's publication, there was some speculation that two of the short stories included in Oblivion
— "Incarnations of Burned Children" and "The Soul is Not a Smithy" — might have been excerpts from the Pale King manuscript, but they did not appear in the final book. Also, the short story "All That" in the December 14, 2009, issue of The New Yorker
was widely assumed to be an excerpt from The Pale King but does not appear in the book.
in Belgium over two days from September 22nd til September 23rd 2011, the first ever official academic conference considering The Pale King took place. Organised by Toon Staes, the conference consisted of two days of papers and discussions about the novel by numerous scholars, notable speakers including prominent published Wallace scholars Marshall Boswell, Adam Kelly, and Stephen J. Burn.
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American author of novels, essays, and short stories, and a professor at Pomona College in Claremont, California...
, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. After Wallace's death in September 2008, a manuscript and associated computer files were found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
Overview
Like much of Wallace's work, the novel defies straightforward summary. Each chapter stands almost alone, with text ranging from straight dialogues between coworkers about civics or masturbation to snippets of the 1985 Illinois tax code to poignant sensory or character sketches, and each brings something different to the whole of the novel. Many of the chapters relate the experiences of a handful of employees of the Internal Revenue ServiceInternal Revenue Service
The Internal Revenue Service is the revenue service of the United States federal government. The agency is a bureau of the Department of the Treasury, and is under the immediate direction of the Commissioner of Internal Revenue...
in Peoria, Illinois
Peoria, Illinois
Peoria is the largest city on the Illinois River and the county seat of Peoria County, Illinois, in the United States. It is named after the Peoria tribe. As of the 2010 census, the city was the seventh-most populated in Illinois, with a population of 115,007, and is the third-most populated...
in 1985. One of the characters, one of two who narrate their chapters, is named David Wallace, but he is a wholly fictional counterpart of the author and not the focal point of the novel. Pietsch called the organization of the manuscript "a challenge like none I've ever encountered".
The fictional "Author's Foreword" is chapter 9 and is the place in the novel where Wallace's trademark footnotes run most rampant. In this chapter, he introduces an "irksome paradox" that the only bona fide fiction in the book is the copyright page's disclaimer that states 'The characters and events in this book are fictitious,' while at the same time acknowledging that this Author's Foreword itself is necessarily defined by that disclaimer as fictional. He further goes on to state, in the context of the same self-referential paradox, that "The Pale King is a kind of vocational memoir" and that "the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher." Other primary characters include Lane Dean Jr., Claude Sylvanshine
Sylvanshine
Sylvanshine is an optical phenomenon in which dew-covered trees of species whose leaves are wax-covered retroreflect beams of light, as from a vehicle's headlights, sometimes causing trees to appear to be snow-covered at night during the summer. The phenomenon was named and explained in 1994 by...
, David Cusk, and Leonard Stecyk, men drawn for vastly different reasons to a career in the IRS.
Writing, editing, and publication
Wallace had been doing research for The Pale King since 1997, following the publication of Infinite JestInfinite Jest
Infinite Jest is a 1996 novel by David Foster Wallace. The lengthy and complex work takes place in a semi-parodic future version of North America, and touches on tennis, substance addiction and recovery programs, depression, child abuse, family relationships, advertising and popular entertainment,...
. He started writing around 2000 and continued until his death in September 2008. The novel (or "long thing," Wallace's usual term for it) had numerous working titles throughout this period, including Glitterer, SJF (Sir John Feelgood), Net of Gems, and What is Peoria For?
In 2007, Wallace estimated that the novel was about one-third finished. One of his notebooks found by his widow, Karen Green (who designed the American edition's cover art), suggested a possible direction for the novel's plot: "...an evil group within the I.R.S. is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration." The author's ultimate intention for the plot, however, is unknown.
Wallace in his final hours had "tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel." On her blog, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reported that the Pale King manuscript edited by Michael Pietsch began with "more than 1000 pages ... in 150 unique chapters". The published version is 540 pages and 50 chapters.
On September 14, 2010, Pietsch announced the publication date of the novel and provided further information about the plot. He revealed that the novel "takes agonizing daily events like standing in lines, traffic jams, and horrific bus rides—things we all hate—and turns them into moments of laughter and understanding", a theme Wallace addressed in his commencement speech to the graduates of Kenyon College in 2005. Pietsch added that "although David did not finish the novel, it is a surprisingly whole and satisfying reading experience that showcases his extraordinary imaginative talents and his mixing of comedy and deep sadness in scenes from daily life."
Although Little, Brown and Company
Little, Brown and Company
Little, Brown and Company is a publishing house established by Charles Coffin Little and his partner, James Brown. Since 2006 it has been a constituent unit of Hachette Book Group USA.-19th century:...
set The Pale King’s publication date for April 15, 2011, Amazon.com
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
and Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble
Barnes & Noble, Inc. is the largest book retailer in the United States, operating mainly through its Barnes & Noble Booksellers chain of bookstores headquartered at 122 Fifth Avenue in the Flatiron District in Manhattan in New York City. Barnes & Noble also operated the chain of small B. Dalton...
were allowed to sell copies of the novel through their websites as early as March 22, 2011. That elicited protest from many bookstore owners, who felt it put them at an unfair disadvantage. Little, Brown defended the split dates, maintaining it was common practice.
Themes
Richard Rayner in the Los Angeles Times writes that The Pale Kings subjects are "loneliness, depression and the ennui that is human life's agonized bedrock, 'the deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and most which most of us spend nearly all of our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from' [quoting Wallace] ... The Pale King dares to plunge readers deep into this Dantean hell of 'crushing boredom,' suggesting that something good may lie beyond."Reception
Jonathan Segura, writing in Publishers WeeklyPublishers Weekly
Publishers Weekly, aka PW, is an American weekly trade news magazine targeted at publishers, librarians, booksellers and literary agents...
, claimed that The Pale King "isn't the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction." He added, however, that it is “one hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace.”
Keith Meatto, in Frontier Psychiatrist, wrote that The Pale King was as "if Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
, Borges
Jorge Luis Borges
Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo , known as Jorge Luis Borges , was an Argentine writer, essayist, poet and translator born in Buenos Aires. In 1914 his family moved to Switzerland where he attended school, receiving his baccalauréat from the Collège de Genève in 1918. The family...
, and Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon, Jr. is an American novelist. For his most praised novel, Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon received the National Book Award, and is regularly cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature...
teamed up to write a season of The Office", calling the result a "masterpiece."
In Esquire
Esquire (magazine)
Esquire is a men's magazine, published in the U.S. by the Hearst Corporation. Founded in 1932, it flourished during the Great Depression under the guidance of founder and editor Arnold Gingrich.-History:...
, Benjamin Alsup wrote that The Pale King is an "incomplete and weirdly fractured pseudo memoir" that is "frustratingly difficult in places" and "potholed throughout by narrative false starts and dead ends." Despite that, Alsup stated, "you should read The Pale King." While conceding that the novel is not conventionally gripping in terms of narrative, the reviewer asserted, "If it keeps you up at night, it won't be because you've got to know what happens next. If you're up, you'll be up because D.F.W. writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe."
Lev Grossman, in Time
Time (magazine)
Time is an American news magazine. A European edition is published from London. Time Europe covers the Middle East, Africa and, since 2003, Latin America. An Asian edition is based in Hong Kong...
, wrote that "if The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist."
In The New York Times
The New York Times
The New York Times is an American daily newspaper founded and continuously published in New York City since 1851. The New York Times has won 106 Pulitzer Prizes, the most of any news organization...
, Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani
is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for The New York Times and is considered by many to be a leading literary critic in the United States.-Life and career:...
wrote that “[The Pale King] feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished [Wallace’s] work from the beginning.” She described the novel as both “breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull — funny, maddening and elegiac,” and predicted that “The Pale King will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life” and will also “snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window — albeit a flawed window — into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America.” Kakutani claimed that it is Wallace’s “most emotionally immediate work.”
Published excerpts
Several excerpts from The Pale King appeared in magazines prior to the book's publication:- "Peoria(4)", in the Fall 2002 issue of
TriQuarterly
TriQuarterly Online is a not-for-profit American literary magazine published twice a year at Northwestern University that features fiction, nonfiction, poetry, drama, literary essays, reviews, a blog, and graphic art....
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
.
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
.
The Lifted Brow
The Lifted Brow is a bimonthly Australian magazine that originated in Brisbane and is now produced from Melbourne..Primarily a literary journal, it also publishes art, comics, and music; it has been considered "uncategorisable"...
and the September 2010 issue of Harper's.
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
.
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
s Saturday Review.
Before the novel's publication, there was some speculation that two of the short stories included in Oblivion
Oblivion: Stories
Oblivion: Stories is a collection of short fiction by American author David Foster Wallace. Oblivion is Wallace’s third and last short story collection and was listed as a 2004 New York Times Notable Book of the Year...
— "Incarnations of Burned Children" and "The Soul is Not a Smithy" — might have been excerpts from the Pale King manuscript, but they did not appear in the final book. Also, the short story "All That" in the December 14, 2009, issue of The New Yorker
The New Yorker
The New Yorker is an American magazine of reportage, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons and poetry published by Condé Nast...
was widely assumed to be an excerpt from The Pale King but does not appear in the book.
"Work in Process: Reading David Foster Wallace's The Pale King" Conference, September 22nd-September 23rd, 2011
At the University of AntwerpUniversity of Antwerp
The University of Antwerp is one of the major Belgian universities located in the city of Antwerp. The name is sometimes abbreviated as UA.-History:...
in Belgium over two days from September 22nd til September 23rd 2011, the first ever official academic conference considering The Pale King took place. Organised by Toon Staes, the conference consisted of two days of papers and discussions about the novel by numerous scholars, notable speakers including prominent published Wallace scholars Marshall Boswell, Adam Kelly, and Stephen J. Burn.