An existential hero

Sam Leith is enthralled by a masterpiece on monotony, but is devastated by its author’s death

When David Foster Wallace took his own life two and a half years ago, we lost someone for whom I don’t think the word genius was an empty superlative. He was an overpowering stylist, and a dazzling comedian of ideas. He could be gasp-makingly funny, but had an agonising moral seriousness. There’s more on one page of Wallace than on ten of most of his contemporaries. His mind seemed to have more buzzing in it than the rest of us could imagine being able to cope with, and perhaps than he could.

The Pale King, assembled from his notes and papers by his editor Michael Pietsch, is an unfinished novel of more than 500 pages about the American IRS. It’s about tax-inspectors, basically — specifically, a dozen or so recruits to the Service who arrive at the same training and induction centre in Peoria, Illinois, on the same day in 1985. Among them is one David Wallace, who, in an author’s foreword that appears 66 pages in, is at pains to assure us that everything in the book is the literal truth, and that it is only for reasons of publisher indemnity that he’s presenting it as fiction.

It’s very hard to know how unfinished this book is. Wallace was never a straight- forward writer, and the notes he left suggest — which is entirely in keeping with his line of attack in this book — that a plot wasn’t intended to manifest itself at all: ‘Central deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.’

It’s also very hard, given the digressive and fragmentary nature of his approach, to have the first idea whether what there is of it is in anything like the right order.