Review: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

The Pale King by David Foster Wallace
published by Little, Brown
547 pages

I've been putting off reading The Pale King for mainly two reasons: I had just finished re-reading Infinite Jest around the time it was published and also, the more obvious reason, this would be the last piece of fiction that was more or less sanctioned by DFW. So reading it has that bittersweet quality.

Like baseball stats and steroids, The Pale King should always have an asterisk next to it. And Little, Brown knows that, and Michael Pietsch knows it, and every DFW should know that too. There are maybe 200 cumulative pages or so that are startlingly good. The rest of the book is a bit unpolished...but as a DFW fan, I'm glad it was still there. And the unpolished stuff isn't even "bad", it's just not up to the ridiculous standard that DFW had left behind.

It stands up against any "finished" novel out there in the book market and is certainly worth reading. And not to say that The Pale King drove DFW to suicide because that would be stupendously naive, but I could see that finishing The Pale King would have seemed like a monumental task as he was essentially writing a novel without action, where the action was mostly hinted at and that he was taking an enormous risk with this project and when asked about it by his editor, Michael Pietsch, he likened working on it to carrying a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.

So if we were to take a step back as critic and try to ponder what he was actually trying to accomplish, using a template of tax code and boredom and systems of systems to try and communicate real truths about life and happiness and love...I don't know. He astounds me and I will continue to use his work as a lighthouse.

Also, here are a list of some of the surnames that were used throughout The Pale King: Eyckz, Moeller, Van Noght, Rath, Candelaria, Geach, Acquistipace, Nugent, Witkiewicz, Biron-Maint, Neti-Neti, Shearwater, Friedwald, De Chellis, Gastine, Sabusawa, Drinion, Drtiz, Keck, Bondurant, Krody, Haight, Sylvanshine, Lehrl, Satterthwaite.

Are you kidding me with these? Brilliant.

“This, according to the fellows who saw me as fit for a Service career, put me ahead of the curve, to understand this truth at an age when most guys are starting only to suspect the basics of adulthood--that life owes you nothing; that suffering takes many forms; that no one will ever care for you as your mother did; that the human heart is a chump.”

David Foster Wallace Is Still Awesome

Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
1,079 pages (including endnotes)
published by Back Bay Books

My second reading is complete and...well, it's still amazing. The first reading, five years ago, was difficult, I'm not gonna lie. It took me a while to get through it the first time. That is not to say that it wasn't thoroughly enjoyable the first time around, it was just a bit bewildering at times. But this second reading was much quicker and utterly transfixing. As I read along, the layers of complexity kept revealing themselves and my prior confusion was replaced with a hazy clarity.

DFW has created in Infinite Jest something entirely unique and endlessly entertaining. It challenges me in ways I didn't think literature could and engages me with the language and story in ways I didn't think possible. I think I'll read it for a third time in another five years and see how it holds up. I suspect I won't be disappointed.

Overcoming Solipsism in the Work of David Foster Wallace

Understanding David Foster Wallace by Marshall Boswell
310 pages
published by the University of South Carolina Press

I read David Foster Wallace for many reasons, really too many to name here. But chief among them is how his work challenges me as a reader, making me feel smarter and actually making me smarter, and by smarter I mean both in the traditional sense but also smarter as in more aware, of the world around me, of the people in this world. His ability, through his language, to make me feel a little bit less alone in this modern world.

Marshall Boswell has done DFW fans like me a great service. Just when I think I am starting to figure out the many, many complexities of DFW's fiction, Boswell comes along and says, "You think you know but you have no idea." Ok, maybe that was the tag line for MTV's Diary, but still, it applies.

In Understanding David Foster Wallace, Boswell goes through all of Wallace's published fiction (The Broom of the System, Girl With Curious Hair, Infinite Jest, and Brief Interviews With Hideous Men) and pretty much dissects the narrative, all without boring the reader. Well, he didn't bore me anyway. But seriously, if you've ever read any of Wallace and thought to yourself, "There's something here I'm not quite getting, I know there's more behind this, etc," then Boswell is the man for you. He explores Wittgenstein's language games in Broom, he highlights the many parodies, criticisms, and declarations of Girl With Curious Hair (Did you know 'Little Expressionless Animals' had to do with John Ashbery's 'Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror'?).

Of course the best chapter is on Infinite Jest, and the more I read about that massive "novel" (I use quotes because it's more than a novel), the more I want to go back for a second reading. Wallace was responding to French psychoanalytic theorist Jacques Lacan's "bewilderingly difficult theories about desire, pleasure, subjectivity, and infantile preoccupations with mothers"? But that's also another great thing about Wallace, is that he does all this stuff below (and not so below) the surface, but you can enjoy his fiction just as good story telling, or amazing use of language, or or or or. You don't have to know Lacan's theories to enjoy Infinite Jest. Hell, I didn't even know who Lacan was let alone that Wallace was responding to his theories.

This is all to say that Boswell does an amazing job adding to the growing realm of Wallace Studies, and we've got to give him credit for being one of, if not the first to recognize Wallace's depth.

Bret Easton Ellis Kicks David Foster Wallace While he's Down (and by down, I mean tragically dead by his own hand)

A question answered by Bret Easton Ellis during his appearance at the Southbank Centre:

Question: David Foster Wallace – as an American writer, what is your opinion now that he has died?

Bret Easton Ellis: Is it too soon? It’s too soon right? Well I don’t rate him. The journalism is pedestrian, the stories scattered and full of that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality and Infinite Jest is unreadable. His life story and his battle with depression however is really quite touching…

Being born into a wealthy family in Los Angeles, I don't really expect you to understand the consciousness of the Mid West. Now, to address a few of those DFW criticisms, point by point:

"Pedestrian journalism"- It just seems like you, Bret, are just trying to go against the grain on this one, since his journalism is regularly regarded as moderately ground breaking, original, and just really really good. So that's curious that you think it completely ordinary.

"Stories scattered with that Mid-Western faux-sentimentality"- I guess it's just a matter of someone calling one thing sentimentality and another person recognizing it as an author risking sincere emotion (the risk being that a hip, ironic, postmodern satirist would call said author 'sentimental', god forbid). And this phrase, faux-sentimentality, I'm not sure I even really understand it. So the sentimentality (as you're calling it) in his stories is false? So is it the sentimentality you have a problem with or the faux-ness of the sentimentality? And is false sentimentality an integral part of the Mid-Western landscape? This is new to me, living in the Mid-West as I do.

"Infinite Jest is unreadable."- Well, now I just feel sorry for you because you're missing out. Unreadable? Really? Can I ask you something? Now, don't be offended. But if you happen to commit suicide next week, do you think that there would be an outpouring of affection and praise of your work? Would scholars begin to form 'Ellis Studies', hold conferences based on your life and work? Hmmm. Something to think about, in turns of why Infinite Jest, and all his other work for that matter, will endure and continue to endure for years to come.

Now, I don't necessarily blame Ellis for the harsh words, considering this is what DFW had been quoted as saying about Ellis some time ago, in an interview with Larry McCaffery:

LM: In your own case, how does this hostility manifest itself?

DFW: Oh, not always, but sometimes in the form of sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them. You can see this clearly in something like Ellis’s "American Psycho": it panders shamelessly to the audience’s sadism for a while, but by the end it’s clear that the sadism’s real object is the reader herself.

LM: But at least in the case of "American Psycho" I felt there was something more than just this desire to inflict pain—or that Ellis was being cruel the way you said serious artists need to be willing to be.

DFW: You’re just displaying the sort of cynicism that lets readers be manipulated by bad writing. I think it’s a kind of black cynicism about today’s world that Ellis and certain others depend on for their readership. Look, if the contemporary condition is hopelessly shitty, insipid, materialistic, emotionally retarded, sadomasochistic, and stupid, then I (or any writer) can get away with slapping together stories with characters who are stupid, vapid, emotionally retarded, which is easy, because these sorts of characters require no development. With descriptions that are simply lists of brand-name consumer products. Where stupid people say insipid stuff to each other. If what’s always distinguished bad writing—flat characters, a narrative world that’s cliched and not recognizably human, etc.—is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it. You can defend "Psycho" as being a sort of performative digest of late-eighties social problems, but it’s no more than that.

And I think it's relevant to note that in Wallace's comments about your own work, he comes off as critical but not petty. Clearly he's given a lot of thought to your brand of literature. You just come off sounding like a jerk. Which I kinda imagined you to be anyway.