The Machine in the Ghost

The accumulated weight of posthumous profiles and the opening of his archive in Texas have prompted a reformulation of the coordinates of David Foster Wallace's fiction, casting a fine autobiographical net over much that at one time seemed pure invention. Judging from the first wave of reviews, the publication of The Pale King—the unfinished novel that Wallace's longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, has assembled from the author's various drafts and fragments—represents the apex of this revisionary process. Like the Bröckengespenst phenomenon in Infinite Jest (1996), where Marathe's shadow is "enlarged and distorted...far out overland," so the all-engulfing shadow of Wallace's suicide has made The Pale King seem to be a site where reciprocal exchanges between novel and life are a vital phase of the reading process. Even Jonathan Franzen—probably the novelist who was closest to Wallace—seems to derive the key to Wallace's early death from the novel's subject, noting in a recent New Yorker essay that "David had died of boredom." The tendency to read The Pale King next to Wallace's life is certainly understandable as a substitute for a complete narrative. While Infinite Jest might be considered an exemplary centrifugal novel, with its many divergent explorations and strategic incompleteness, to an even greater extent The Pale King throws out characters and plot lines, narrative arcs that are forever doomed to hang suspended in textual space.

Like William Gaddis's J R (1975) and Richard Powers's Gain (1998), Wallace set out in The Pale King to consider contemporary life as it is dwarfed by the large-scale economic and bureaucratic systems that govern America. The IRS of the early eighties offers Wallace the opportunity to trace the rise of the computer state, with Wallace summarizing (in a note on the manuscript) that the overarching "Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one." Along the way, there are appearances from a pathologically generous boy, a self-harmer, and a "strange team of intuitive and occult ephebes," including Claude Sylvanshine, a fact psychic whose consciousness is overwhelmed by "fractious, boiling minutiae." There's even an appearance by a David Wallace, who assures the reader that as "the real author...not some abstract narrative persona," he can vouch for the fact that "this book is really true," even as he falsifies the details of his own life. There are many tales of how different characters came to work for the IRS—the strongest (because most sustained) is probably the hundred-page section devoted to "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle, which could be a respectable novella in itself—but although the author persona tells us that the book will be marked by "structural fragmentation, willed incongruities," the book as a whole resembles the diffuse "collage art" that Fogle, himself, considers an appropriate analogue for his college transcript.

In the presence of only intermittent narrative momentum, the reader has to settle for the rewards of set pieces that Wallace would surely have revised considerably, or fall back on the abundant local pleasures of Wallace's prose and observational skills. There are plenty of the chains of apostrophed phrases that represent one Wallace signature ("The station's flagpole's flag's rope's pulleys"), while the assonant music that carries so many of Wallace's cascading sentences is also much in evidence. Equally, there is always the typical acuity of Wallace's descriptions—accountancy problems are "like little stories with all the human meat left out"; a cityscape can be collapsed into a bureaucratic lens so the "skyline of Peoria" is "a bar graph of sooty brick and missing windows."

A posthumous novel always makes visible the wormhole between the writer's incomplete intentions and the editor's hand, and partly because Pietsch introduces the book as being about "sadness and boredom"—but also because so many post-suicide readers came to Wallace through the commencement speech ultimately published as This Is Water (2009)—The...