Death and taxes

THE PALE KING

By David Foster Wallace

Little Brown, 548 pages

Available at National Book Store

They say nothing is sure in this life except death and taxes. In the case of

The Pale King

, David Foster Wallace’s final, unfinished novel (before he committed suicide in 2008), the two certainties are combined: the novelist himself is a fictional character in the book which takes on the lives of tax form examiners, a kind of slow-death existential crisis that leaches away the very humanity from most souls laboring at the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois.

One wonders if such a subject — boredom itself, boredom magnified, or “boredom beyond boredom,” as Wallace puts it — had anything to do with the writer’s ultimate decision to shuck off this mortal coil. In any case, it is an odd choice for his last endeavor: clocking in at under 600 pages, it doesn’t quite reach the full flowering expression of his 1,000-plus earlier novel, Infinite Jest, but this might be because he wasn’t done yet. While the novel already has a certain curvature of closure, Wallace seemed to work in piecemeal fashion, inserting chapters here and there, bulking up a manuscript with seemingly digressive pieces serving to sharpen and heighten the fictional experience. Characters are introduced briefly, only to reappear 100 or 200 pages later. You can tell he was going somewhere with all of this.

It has to be said, reading David Foster Wallace sometimes feel like examining tax forms. Detailed. Exhaustive. He wrote like this on purpose, I think. There is a sense that, buried in the lengthy discourse, a wormlike truth is just wriggling to emerge, to shed human light on all the prolix prose that has passed. Maximalism — or hyperrealism — was part of Wallace’s style, a way of burrowing deep into reality, not letting a single thought or imagined detail pass without noting it (sometimes elaborating on it in lengthy footnotes). The footnotes are here as well, but it’s really optional whether you delve so deeply into page upon page meant to recreate the sheer plodding dullness of tax examination.

A lot of people will put this book down in a hurry, even after a few pages. It’s similar to those reactions to Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life, maybe: it stretches your patience, past the endurance point, sometimes.

But after finishing the book, I realize I’m going to miss that singular voice among today’s writers. The blurb on the back of The Pale King describes Wallace’s “interior force and generosity.” These two qualities, I think, account for his lasting impact. That interior quality is never quite solipsistic: he merely observes. And observes. And observes. As though you could keep slicing reality down to its very core. And generosity (ladled with humor) is the quality that makes his characters elicit our sympathies — even when the character is the author himself.

Wallace adopts an amusing gambit here: he proceeds through eight haphazard chapters, non-linear snapshots of IRS employees, people living in trailer parks in Peoria, background stories — then inserts an “Author’s Foreward”… on page 66 (“Author here…”), as though to remove any suspension of disbelief, remind us it’s being written by Wallace, and debunk the notion that the book is even fiction. The conceit is that Wallace, during his college days, got in trouble for selling term papers he wrote to lazy frat boys. Facing expulsion and looming federal student loan payments, he opted to take a job at the IRS to defer repayment of the loans. This experience, he claims, forms the substance of his book — which he insists is a “memoir.”

Huge chunks of The Pale King replicate the jargon and IRS-ese of its inhabitants. Those lost souls are there for a reason: they can withstand huge amounts of brain-deadening boredom, yet still function, still do their jobs. They are able “to breathe, so to speak, without air.” Wallace considers them heroes. One character — “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle — has his life changed when he inadvertently stumbles into a CPA final exam instead of his English final, where the professor is saying, in part: “Gentlemen, the old frontier days are gone; in today’s world, the heroic frontier lies in the ordering and deployment of facts. Classification, organization, presentation. To put it another way, the pie has been made — the contest now is in the slicing. Gentlemen, you aspire to hold the knife. Wield it. To admeasure. To shape each given slice, the knife’s angle and depth of cut. Gentlemen, you are called to account.” Soul-stirring stuff, no doubt.

Part of the unfinished plot has to do with changes in the IRS in the mid-‘80s, when the story takes place. Wallace claims moves were made behind the scenes to make the IRS seem less scary and intimidating, more human yet more ruthlessly efficient at the same time. But nobody knew these changes were taking place, because the legislative measures allowing it to happen were so prohibitively dull, nobody paid attention. “The reason why US citizens were/are not aware of these conflicts, changes, and stakes is that the whole subject of tax policy and administration is dull. Massively, spectacularly dull,” Wallace writes. “This stuff is solid rock. The eyes roll up white by the third or fourth paragraph. You just have no idea.”

Wallace claims the boredom is meant to deflect questions, to resist anyone focusing on what’s really going on at the IRS. He posits this is a new form of camouflage, a political weapon: sheer disinterest. 

His colleagues — poised over endless stacks of tax forms which they must decide whether or not to audit — begin to space out, see phantoms perched on their desks, strange ectoplasms who endlessly recite the etymology of the word “boring.” They suffer auditory hallucinations, if you will.

Incursions take place on the sidelines of the story, never shown directly: an irate taxpayer making preparations to bomb a tax center; peoples’ iced tea getting dosed with hallucinogens at a company picnic. This adds an underlying pulse of tension to The Pale King. There’s also a feeling akin to the numbed sadness we recall from Melville’s “Bartelby the Scrivener,” the tale of a man so — literally — bored-out by the futility of examining correspondence in a dead-letter office, he one day refuses to function at all. (“I would prefer not to.”)

Editor Michael Pietsch tells us The Pale King was assembled from a big stack of manuscript pages next to Wallace’s desk and a number of computer disks containing alternate versions of chapters. A glance at Wallace’s appended notes at the back of the book show he was still working out various angles, plot twists. Clearly, the main story was well in motion by page 500 or so; enough is here for us to realize he had a nobler purpose than merely informing readers that tax examination is dull. One note reads: “They’re rare, but they’re among us. People able to achieve and sustain a certain steady state of concentration, attention, despite what they’re doing.” Grad students poring over statistics textbooks. Security guards stoically standing outside a credit union all day long. He likens this to meditation, a higher form of consciousness: Zen surfing waves of boredom, if you will.

After 543 pages, the true nature of The Pale King has only started to surface; you feel Wallace is just warming up, and a sadness arises, because you realize it is all, simultaneously, too much, and not enough.