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"?
The book is largely a series of profiles, depiction of conversational exchanges, and first narratives from various IRS employees. While the book isn't widely off kilter or stream of consciousness, it doesn't have a straightforward plot structure. Some of what we know about the book's composition suggests that this is intentional. In his notes (published at the end of the book as "Notes and Asides" DFW writes after one discussion of a plot point that comes to nothing, "Again, something big threatens to happen but never does happen." (544). In the most general sense, though, the book is about IRS employees, their behavior and their strange abilities. Many of them seem to have odd or special powers (e.g. one character has the special power of psychically receiving various facts that are totally irrelevant but come to him through telepathic means (e.g. the name of his first grade teacher's husband's first dog that died when he was a child) and appear to be getting drawn in to a particular branch of the IRS by way of some special administration for reasons that are ultimately left unclear. A part of the story concerns the employees role and understanding of the new changes undertaken during the Reagan administration to transition the IRS-the bureaucracy of bureaucracies-to a "for profit business." More specifically, it concerned the transition from trying to adjudicate and punish cases of tax-evasion or errors based on a principle of "did this case warrant an audit based on the rules of fairness" to "does this case warrant an audit based on how much it could likely profit the IRS?" DFW uses this historical moment to explore the "What is it like to examine tax forms all day for a living?" question: which is why, if you look up what the book is about on any Internet search you will find that it is putatively about "boredom." The "transition" question allows him to explore the relationship between individuals, government, and the nature of civic responsibility. If that last phrase seems strange or unclear then that is fine as DFW explores its possible meaning at various points and in various guises in the book and I'll just leave it at that for the moment.
The book is also about intellectual and emotional double-pump fakes (if you are familiar with DFW's writing I think you can guess what I mean here) of the inner life of several IRS employees. One of these involves DFW himself. The book includes a post-post modern device where DFW addresses the reader as a writer of this fictional narrative and assure the reader that the book is actually non-fiction and that it is only listed as otherwise for legal reasons. The twist and pump-fake thing is that the DFW character in the book also assures the reader that this isn't one of those postmodern-turn-and-face-the-camera devices that are oh-so-cute-but-tiresome and that he is really annoyed by these kind of techniques but he just doesn't have a choice here and so on. While this was odd and I'm not quite sure about DFW's justifications, it was kind of amusing and his role in the narrative was interesting as he allows his first person perspective to run wild in some of the chapters in a fun way like he does with his nonfiction essays.
-David Cusk whose thoughts we directly hear in one scene and whose outward behavior we observe in another chapter, has a problem with profuse sweating that causes intense social embarrassment, but who can mostly avoid this sweating IF AND ONLY IF he can avoid thinking and panicking about the sweating problem in question. Thus, he might be sitting in a chilled room, but, if he begins to worry about the possibility of sweating, he might start a small sweat, that worry can metastasize to full out thumb-on-the-garden-hose-water-stream-onto-the-person-next-to-him perspiration. Thus, the character has to employ indirect strategies to avoid sweating opportunities but be careful enough in the planning of these that in situ employment of the strategies does not itself produce the sweating, etc. As a brief aside, I've read that DFW himself apparently had some sweating problems of his own, which is part of the reason for wearing his famous bandanna (for sweat absorption and to avoid drippage).
-Madeline Rand is a beautiful IRS employee who both hates and loathes her beauty and its effects on others. On the one hand, it makes you interesting (i.e. the opposite of boring) to others (in her case mostly males) but, on the other, it makes you interesting at the cost of being losing depth and perspective-which is where ultimate interest seems to lie that is in many-sidedness-as Goethe puts it. The reader learns about Madeline in a long chapter involving her giving her life story to a fellow IRS employee who, it turns out, is such a good and careful listener that he often seems to not really be listening, and, when he is really engaged in listening, actually comes to float above his chair.
- Chris Fogle is a former self-described "wasteoid" college student who got into the service after deciding that his previous embrace of nihilism was actually just immature nonsense rather than the cultivated and deep existential angst that he had pretended it to be. His narrative is especially concerned about coming to this realization and seeing that his father-a serious, conservative, sad, secretly lonely, and disciplined man- was ultimately right about a lot of things and that Fogle had big regrets about never getting to show his father what sort of person he has become (i.e. a responsible IRS employee). Fogle's narrative contained one of the moving, if a bit over the top, moments in the book when he gives his description of how came to regard his life with a seriousness and purpose that he had been avoiding up until then. I'll share more about this in future posts.
-I'll close this entry with discussion of Leonard Stecyck who is the subject of one of my favorite chapters of the book. Stecyck goes on to become one of the IRS administrators but in the early chapter we get to see what he was like as an adolescent. As I read it, this was DFW's exploration of the argument employed by the philosopher Susan Wolf in her oft-anthologized book "Moral Saints."Wolf argues that Moral Saints, people who make morality the dominant and sole-focus of their life, are people that we actually would not want to be or want our friends and/or children to be. DFW explains how the boy is so helpful, generous, kind, gracious, and conscientious that it is obnoxious. In describing how people react to this especially moral behavior he writes that:
Everyone hates the boy. It is a complex hatred, one that often causes the haters to feel mean and guilty and to hate themselves for feeling this way about such an accomplished and well-meaning boy, which then tends to make them involuntarily hate the boy even more for arousing such self-hatred. The whole thing is totally confusing and upsetting. People take a lot of aspirin when he's around. (32)When we see Styck later in the novel he has toned the moral saint thing down a bit. In his notes DFW wonders how Stecyk came to change his approach in life.
What happened to make him realize that the Niceness of his childhood was actually sadistic, pathological selfish? That other people, too, want to feel nice and do favors, that he'd been massively selfish about generosity? (542)As a philosopher I've often talked to people about the concept of moral saints, and I think I might use some DFW's devices for exploring the topic as I think he seems to capture the point very nicely.
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