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1 7 8 Y F I C T I O N I N R E V I E W J . D . C O N N O R The Pale King, David Foster Wallace’s last, unfinished novel, deals with the revolutions that beset the IRS in the mid-1980s, and it was released on 15 April, the traditional Tax Day. Tax Day has the strange temporal e√ect of finishing o√ the year just past in a coda. It as if the long stretch from New Year’s Eve to spring turned out to be, on closer inspection, a much too predictable rise out of cold and darkness, and the country needed yet another reminder of the twin inevitabilities. However easily one might file an extension, however unimportant the annual return is for those who file quarterly , however frequently the date is moved to accommodate a minor state holiday, 15 April remains the most prominent secular deadline in the American calendar. You’ve got to get your taxes done. The Pale King is not done, and none of the slew of reviews has sidestepped the basic question of unfinishedness, a question that has taken on three general aspects. Unfinishedness can appear to be a problem internal to the writing process – a matter of editorial T h e P a l e K i n g , by David Foster Wallace (Little, Brown, 560 pp., $27.99) 1 7 9 R control: What did editor Michael Pietsch make of the pile of holograph and the du√el bag of notebooks? Or it can be deflected into a problem entirely external to the writing process – a matter of Wallace’s biography. (Certainly no one seems to believe that the state of the book is somehow deeply connected to its author’s suicide.) Or, finally, incompleteness can be taken up as the crucial fact of the reader’s experience: most charitably, whatever he or she likes or respects or appreciates becomes the essential matter of the book; whatever seems less polished or satisfactory is something Wallace would have changed. In any case, the reader cannot escape asking, Is this the way it would have ideally been? That suspicious, analytic mode of reading guarantees that the novel will not find a particularly wide audience – no Freedom-style crossover awaits The Pale King. Even if Wallace had managed to finish the novel, there is reason to believe that it would not have ended satisfactorily, certainly not as well as it begins. The Pale King opens with a long, almost Nabokovian evocation of the landscape around the Peoria, Illinois, IRS facility: ‘‘Quartz and chert and schist and chondrite iron scabs in granite. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers.’’ In an art where the sense of an ending is crucial, Wallace was not a great finisher of novels (his essays and stories often end better because they are less freighted). But in this case, he seems to have set the thing up so that the disappointment would be built-in, planned. Among the notes and fragments reproduced at the back of the book are various outlines and guideposts that point toward a novel that doesn’t exist. One sentiment returns: ‘‘Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stu√ happening, but nothing actually happens.’’ Monotony, dullness, and boredom have been taken to be the crucial subject of the book. Wallace does not seem to have determined whether he was intent on inducing that feeling or transcending it. His editor (as anyone who is hoping that a book will be popular must do) thinks the latter: ‘‘If anyone could make taxes interesting, I figured, it was him.’’ Despite the fragmentary protocols , Wallace often agreed. The monotony would be the necessary backdrop to a new, bureaucratic sort of heroism: the inability to be bored. ‘‘It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.’’ 1 8 0 C O N N O R Y This unborable hero figure came to the fore in Wallace’s 2000 profile of John McCain, published first...

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