Profiles in Boredom: Notes on The Pale King-Part I

Wallace, David Foster. The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. Little, Brown, and Company. New York, 2011. 548 pp. 

While this novel is not among my chosen great 100 books to read, I re-read this work over the previous week and a half, in part, because I am planning on reading Infinite Jest this summer and want to have this book as a proper comparison. The Pale King is the first and last book that I have ever "Pre-Ordered," and I read it with delight as soon as it came out. Approximately two years later, I dipped in again. As a longtime devotee of Wallace, I found this work to be his best effort at fictional narrative. Justifying that last claim would take a lot, so I won't pretend to (i.e. justify the claim that it is his best literary effort).

Instead, I'll ask a few rhetorical questions that I often ask of books and will use them to try to saw what is interesting about the book, and why I find it so compelling. The questions respective inclusion of scare quotes are intended to imply that I have no deep justification of these words, but will instead probably take them to mean many controversial, commonplace, or indefensible things peculiar to my understanding none of which I'm interested in specifying or really quarreling about. As DFW would say, talking about, say, the "weakest" aspect of a novel gets very hard, abstract, and tricky (to use three of his favorite words) and the answer to what it means, if I were to get very very clear about it, would probably be unhelpful anyway since it would involve lots of necessary and sufficient conditions that seem odd and mostly out of place in literary discussion. I'll just post the first of these today. My answers won't usually be this long, but I'll indulge this one. In truth, this book is "about" many things, so my answer is really pretty cursory but, I hope, illuminating in some ways. 
What is this book "about"?

Plans Shmans

I'm currently working on a new fiction reading project. Though I have been reading since the beginning of the year, I have performed terribly at posting about my reading (obviously). The basic goal of my new plan is to read many of the works that I have either wanted to read but put off or read some time ago and either forgot much of it or expect that I will read it with considerably new eyes given that I've grown from where I was. To this end, today I sat down and selected 100 novels and plays that fit this description.

For the most part they are not especially ambitious or shocking choices, and I certainly don't aim to be a tastemaker (Lord help me if that was what I was going for). Instead, I want to enjoy many of the works that have already been recognized as great by many people generally smarter, wiser, and more thoughtful than me. Also, in the past I've been biased in my reading habits toward men, and in my list I aim to include more female authors to better build up my sense of the female authorial voice. I don't I'll regret this, but who can say up front. If the future resembles the past, for a few I'll be a bit baffled at why critics find particular works great, and for others I will castigate myself for not getting to it sooner.

I think that I might do some regular posting to get myself in the habit, and I'll post my thoughts on various chapters as I go along. I shouldn't put too many ambitious thoughts here, though, as my track record with these things is bad. I am going to take  encouragement, though, from the fact that I did successfully watch all 100 of the AFI movie list movies in the first iteration of the list--though watching a long movie (like Dr. Zhivago) and reading a long book (like Dr. Zhivago) are obviously different animals. We'll see if I can tame one like I tamed the other.