David Foster Wallace: The Pale King

[miobrien]

Thought this deserved its own thread since it's been released despite its official release on April 15, which is Tax Day in the US of A.

I haven't started reading it yet but I've flipped through randomly as well as skimmed the preface and first two sections. It's exciting to have 560 pages of new DFW in my hands, and I plan to postpone reading it until my schedule is less busy in a few weeks.

First impressions are positive. The cover and jacket were nicely designed by his widow, Karen Green. I noticed two of the previously published excerpts. Some of the chapters are very short, only a page or two, but fortunately there are several longer DFW-esque passages. I assume the majority of the order was determined by Michael Pietsch.

And, curiously, there was a section that resembled the style of the "Brief Interviews" with their long monologues separated by "Q." Seems DFW really worked on this book for a while.

Anyone else reading this yet?

[Liam]

You just HAD to be the first to start this thread, didn't ya?

[Liam]

OK, guys, I'm 4 pages in!

No observations so far, except:

1. He's doing interesting things with the English language (but to what purpose?)

2. The opening chapter strongly reminds me of the beginning of A. S. Byatt's Babel Tower, in which we are asked to decipher forgotten alphabets in the bodies of dead snails. Wallace, meanwhile, remarks on the empty curling shapes left by worms underneath horse-dung and, likewise, invites us to "read them."

Who was it that said Byatt was his favorite writer?

L.

[Mirabell]

Review by Tom McCarthy http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/17/bo...pagewanted=all

It's nice and all, but the revelation at the end, emphasized by a "I think", is, seriously, the first thing every literate person thought of when hearing about the book. Bleedin obvious.

But there’s an older ghost haunting “The Pale King” even more, I think, one whose spectral presence combines both the political and metafictional ways of reading the book: Melville’s Bartleby, the meek and lowly copyist who cannot will himself to complete the act of copying

you don't say.

[Liam]

Well, at least the book is getting reviewed, making sure it doesn't have a shelf-life of about 2 years. What did you expect? In-depth analysis and lengthy quotes from Derrida on nothing being outside the text? It's the NYT, M.

[Mirabell]

Hari Kunzru's review http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/d20a33a2-6...#axzz1JgukRknp

[Liam]

So. Where is your review, M?

[Liam]

Ugh. Had to give up on this one.

Couldn't renew it at the Lib, since there were a bunch of people on hold waiting to get their greasy paws on the book.

Too bad, though, I was beginning to like it.

I have reservations about the overall presentation of information (including character backstories) in Wallace's writing; oftentimes, it feels like he's engaging in very good journalism, or anthropological fieldwork with a bit of psychoanalysis thrown in. I consider this lazy writing. Show don't tell. Present me with a 1-p. situation as opposed to 20 pages of description narrating the character's past.

Formally, there's some experimentation going on, I'm just not sure where it's all going. Several people have remarked that "closure" is perhaps not one of Wallace's main strengths. After all, what human life can be said to have a definitive closure at death; shouldn't good writing in a way replicate that? To me, not at all. Books aren't people, and novels aren't human lives. We live our lives one way and we read our books the other way. If I wanted to throw myself into this phantasmagoria of emotion, movement, neuroses and human fumbling, guess what, I'd go outside and do so: there's really no need to do it from your armchair. That's like refusing to have sex with your partner while reading a ton of erotica on the side.

So yeah, the "human" side of Wallace's characters does not attract me at all. It comes across as visceral and real, but I really don't want it to substitute my genuine day-to-day interaction with people. On the other hand, the painstaking realism that Wallace builds up in creating these intimate portraits does not differ in any way from (I repeat myself) good journalism, only here it is fiction.

I liked the language though. A couple of boys engaged in building a treehouse in summer return home with sap on their lashes. That is, indeed, a beautiful image couched in beautiful writing.

[mesnalty]

Books aren't people, and novels aren't human lives. We live our lives one way and we read our books the other way. If I wanted to throw myself into this phantasmagoria of emotion, movement, neuroses and human fumbling, guess what, I'd go outside and do so: there's really no need to do it from your armchair. That's like refusing to have sex with your partner while reading a ton of erotica on the side.

So yeah, the "human" side of Wallace's characters does not attract me at all. It comes across as visceral and real, but I really don't want it to substitute my genuine day-to-day interaction with people.

Seems like a false dilemma to me. Nobody is saying that reading needs to replace human interaction.

Anyway, I'm about halfway through The Pale King. It's good so far, but also very boring in parts. One might respond that it's meant to be boring, since it's an examination of the soul-sucking work of IRS agents, but that doesn't change the fact that it's boring. Still, DFW has a knack for making his relentlessly detailed analysis of mundane things captivating, which would be beyond a lesser writer, and there are parts that are quite gripping.

[Liam]

Nobody is saying that reading needs to replace human interaction.

Yeah, I'm not explaining it very well, . I guess what I am specifically referring to is the concept of hyper-realism, which a certain literary critic has nicknamed hysterical realism, which many writers and readers present as a kind of virtue. In other words, the characters and the situations on the page seem SO real, they begin to feel real, just like in "real" life, and this is often touted as a good thing. "I felt like I was in the same room with these people," etc.

What I'm saying is that this phenomenon of hyper-realism is not a good thing at all. Literature is literature for a reason; it should never strive to replicate (or god forbid) replace real life. And that is what I am seeing in many of these postmodern texts: we are smothered with useless details that serve to remind us how real these characters' existence ultimately is: it is, in other words, just like ours.

I'm sorry, but Hamlet doesn't seem any less real to me for speaking in iambic pentameter.