User:Eb2011

The Pale King is an unfinished novel by American writer David Foster Wallace, published posthumously on April 15, 2011. The manuscript and computer files were found by Wallace's widow Karen Green and agent Bonnie Nadell after his death in September 2008, and was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been struggling with this final novel for over a decade, since finishing Infinite Jest in 1997, and despite being incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, totaling 50 chapters of varying length over 548 pages.

Overview
The novel defies summary, like much of Wallace's work. Each chapter is almost stand-alone, from straight dialogues between coworkers about civics or masturbation to straight snippets of the 1985 Illinois tax code to poignant sensory or character sketches, and each brings something different to the whole of the novel. As much as it does any one thing specifically, the novel tells of the experiences of a handful of men around their jobs at the IRS in Peoria, Illinois, in 1985. One of the characters, the only one who narrates his own chapters, is named David Wallace, but he is a wholly fictional counterpart of the author and not the focal point of the novel. Organization (which fell into the hands of editor Michael Pietsch and was "...a challenge like none I've ever encountered" ) is in a unique form similar to other works of Wallace's, with the fictional "Author's Foreword" in place at chapter 9, the place in this novel where Wallace's trademark footnotes run most rampant. Primary characters are named David Wallace, Lane Dean Jr, Claude Sylvanshine, David Cusk, and Leonard Stecyk; five men who all seem to be drawn (for vastly different reasons) to a career in the IRS. The book, like other works of Wallace's, can perhaps best be described as a collection of moments and impressions that lacks a concrete conclusion but arguably is complete enough without it.

Writing and editing
(Previously extant wiki entry that is very much worth keeping in for background purposes. Original entry was posted before the publication of The Pale King.)

As of 2007, Wallace guessed the novel was about one-third finished. One of his notebooks found by his widow, Karen Green, suggested a possible direction for the novel's plot ("...an evil group within the I.R.S. is trying to steal the secrets of an agent who is particularly gifted at maintaining a heightened state of concentration."), but Wallace's ultimate feelings about that framework are unknown.

Wallace in his final hours had ". . . tidied up [his] manuscript so that his wife could find it. Below it, around it, inside his two computers, on old floppy disks in his drawers were hundreds of other pages—drafts, character sketches, notes to himself, fragments that had evaded his attempt to integrate them into the novel." On her blog, Planned Obsolescence, Kathleen Fitzpatrick reported that the Pale King manuscript Michael Pietsch is editing is "more than 1000 pages [long] . . . in 150 unique chapters", that it will be explicitly subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”, and that Pietsch believes the published version will be more than 400 pages.

According to the notes taken by Fitzpatrick, the novel opens with "the book instruct[ing] the reader to go back and read the small type they skipped on the copyright page, which details the battle with publishers over their determination to call it fiction, when it’s all 100% true. The narrator, David Foster Wallace, is at some point confused with another David F. Wallace by IRS computers, pointing to the degree to which our lives are filled with irrelevant complexity". The story's central theme reflects that of Wallace's noted 2005 commencement speech at Kenyon College, in which Wallace encouraged his audience to be "conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience."