Book review: 'The Pale King' by David Foster Wallace

The late author's longtime editor pieced together the novel from scraps left behind, and it shows the brilliant promise of what may have been.

April 15, 2011|By Richard Rayner | Special to the Los Angeles Times

"The Pale King" features an array of laid-back yet scintillating sentences, bucketloads of anecdotes and comic asides, a number of indelible characters to add to the Wallaceian roster, and more dull tax facts than the average CPA or even the most fanatic Wallace nerd will care to swallow. There's plenty of great writing and swathes of dead ink too. Wallace, so discursive, nonetheless fashioned hypnotic and coherent fictional worlds, and this embryo of "The Pale King" really does work in that regard, bounding through different timbres and tones of the American language while gathering the atmosphere of lost struggling people locked together in a strange institutional community. "Infinite Jest" gave us a mega-fiction revolving around Americans' addiction to addiction. "The Pale King" promised to be something deeper and more mournful — using the IRS as a metaphor for American sadness and loss, and American heart too.

Wallace, English novelist Zadie Smith has written, was "an actual genius" who always "chose the path of most resistance." Much of the "The Pale King" is indeed hard work, but it's welcome rather than the reverse, a shadow of the now lost "something long" that Wallace might or might not have completed but still brilliant, a Spruce Goose of a book that barely achieves takeoff but glimmers and sparkles with sufficient suggestions of the grandeur that might have been.

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