The last tycoon: David Foster Wallace
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It comes as no surprise that there was something unfinished.
When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in September, he left behind roughly one-third of a manuscript that, apparently, will see the light of day by 2010 through Wallace’s publisher, Little, Brown. The novel, ‘The Pale King,’ is excerpted in this week’s New Yorker, along with a 13-page essay by D.T. Max about Wallace and his writing life post-’Infinite Jest.’
Max, author of ‘The Family That Couldn’t Sleep,’ a book about a medical condition called Fatal Familial Insomnia, writes:
From 1997 on, Wallace worked on a third novel, which he never finished — the ‘Long Thing,’ as he referred to it with Michael Pietsch. His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work.
And, further on:
A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: ‘Bliss — a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.’ The problem was how to dramatize the idea. As Michael Pietsch points out, in choosing the I.R.S. as a subject Wallace had ‘posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,’ which is ‘leaving out the things that are not of much interest.’
Max surveys Wallace’s life, the events leading up to his suicide, and also, as noted on Wallace fansite The Howling Fantods, gives away the last lines to both ‘The Broom of the System’ and ‘Infinite Jest.’ Fair warning to folks who haven’t yet managed either book but are interested in doing so.
In the forthcoming novel’s excerpt, published as ‘Wiggle Room,’ we find a world that will be familiar to readers of Wallace’s last published stories.
One of the carts had a crazy wheel that chattered when the boy pushed it; Lane Dean always knew when that cart was coming down the rows. He did another return; again the math squared and there were no itemizations on 32 and the printout’s numbers for W-2 and 1099 and Forms 2440 and 2441 appeared to square, and he filled out his codes for the middle tray’s 402 and signed his name and I.D. number that some part of him still refused to quite get memorized so he had to unclip his badge and check it each time and then stapled the 402 to the return and put the file in the top tier’s rightmost tray for 402s Out and refused to let himself count the number in the trays yet, and then unbidden came the thought that ‘boring’ also meant something that drilled in and made a hole.
Lane Dean Jr. also makes an appearance in ‘Good People,’ which was published in February 2007, while the world of numeric bureaucracy finds its antecedent in ‘The Compliance Branch,’ which Harper’s published in 2008, after it was read by Wallace at Le Conversazioni Festival in Italy in 2006 (there is a five-part video of Wallace at the festival that you can watch).
— George Ducker
Photo credit of Foster Wallace: Marion Ettlinger