David Foster Wallace: The Coming of The Pale King
As you may have heard, in the new New Yorker there is a long piece on David Foster Wallace and the unfinished novel he worked on, on and off, for the last dozen years of his life. And, as you may also have heard, Little, Brown, the publishers of all of his books since Infinite Jest, announced today that they will be publishing that unfinished novel, The Pale King, in the spring of 2010. (It's not listed on our site yet, but we hope to have it there soon.)
The New Yorker piece, by D.T. Max, is, to understate it, a must-read for anyone interested in DFW. It's the story of that book, and of his depression, and also of his entire career, and it's full of the bittersweet drama of how he actually got his books written: the drama of his exuberant intelligence battling with a self-conscious ambition that was never satisfied with the usual ways stories were told, and was often deeply suspicious of his own inventive solutions. That ambition didn't seem to be of the fame-seeking kind: rather, he seemed driven to figure out how to live his own life, and thought he might find the answer on the page. And, at least as Max tells the story, he seems to have been willing to risk his life to do so:
That summer, Wallace went off the antidepressant. He hoped to be as drug free as Don Gately [one of the main characters of Infinite Jest], and as calm. Wallace would finish the Long Thing with a clean brain. He entered this new period of life with what Franzen calls “a sense of optimism and a sense of terrible fear.” He hoped to be a different person and a different writer. “That’s what created the tension,” Franzen recalls. “And he didn’t make it.”
That's not to say that only writers want to make that risky test: I know many people with depression wonder in the same way what life would be like without the scrim of their medication.
The piece is not just a postmortem of a suicide, though. It's equally of interest for the way it shows Wallace's continual battle with the existential question of how and what to write. He was a private man, and kept his personal struggles unknown to people outside his small circle, but they remind, or confirm to me that perhaps the most appealing thing about Wallace, beyond his technical chops or the successes or failures of his individual works, was the palpable sense that you got from him, on the page and in person, that there was something life-or-death about his writing. I don't mean only the in the literal sense of his own life that we get in retrospect, but also in the sense that the writing had to justify its existence as something other than the endless buzz of entertainment he was so suspicious of. He was trying to figure it out, with an intensity (and skill) that, even with all the people pouring themselves into novels and stories every day, was rare.
The article also makes clear that if and when we have a chance to read Wallace's letters and emails, to his editors, Franzen, DeLillo, and others, they will be something (and likely will seem to be of an almost seamless piece with his published writing). Here he is, explaining to his editor Michael Pietsch why he wants to use extensive endnotes in Infinite Jest, and why he has "become intensely attached to this strategy and will fight w/all 20 claws to preserve it." The endnotes
allow . . . me to make the primary-text an easier read while at once 1) allowing a discursive, authorial intrusive style w/o Finneganizing the story, 2) mimic the information-flood and data-triage I expect’d be an even bigger part of US life 15 years hence. 3) have a lot more technical/medical verisimilitude 4) allow/make the reader go literally physically ‘back and forth’ in a way that perhaps cutely mimics some of the story’s thematic concerns . . . 5) feel emotionally like I’m satisfying your request for compression of text without sacrificing enormous amounts of stuff.
And what do we learn about the new book, a characteristically vast story of IRS agents that, among other things, he took accounting classes to prepare for?
His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript—which Little, Brown plans to publish next year—expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment, the book suggests.... Wallace had become convinced that the literary contortions for which he was known had become an impediment to this message. Franzen says of Wallace, “There was a certain kind of effulgent writing that he just wasn’t interested in doing anymore.”
Max describes the book extensively, and the New Yorker books blog includes two manuscript pages, with DFW's edits, as well as two examples of his wife Karen Green's book-based artwork.
I'm looking forward to The Pale King. --Tom
P.S. In all the discussions of DFW, I never hear mention of one of his books, a collaboration with his college roommate, the lawyer and novelist Mark Costello: Signifying Rappers: Rap and Race in the Urban Present. I remember even at the time it came out it seemed like a weird and out-of-place book, an earnest and academicish, white-guy analysis of rap in a very late-80s kind of way (it came out in 1990). Not sure what Wallace thought about it in retrospect, or whether it holds up at all. I just ordered a used copy (the only kind these days): I'll see...
Jess Nevins on March 03, 2009 at 11:02 AM
IIRC, Wallace was ashamed of Signifying Rappers, which--let's be honest--was earnest but not very good at all and displayed more interest than knowledge or understanding of the rap/hip hop genre of the late 1980s.
captive insurance company on February 17, 2011 at 05:48 PM
If its unfinished...why read anything unfinished, I guess is what I'm trying to figure out here. You're left with eternal cliffhangers regardless of the book.