The Pallid King II

Since David Foster Wallace couldn’t promote The Pale King, others decided to read publicly from his posthumous novel on his behalf. In Los Angeles, for instance, actors from various television shows I’ve not seen as well as Henry Rollins (for some reason) signed on to “bring Wallace’s work to life,” according to the LA Times book blog Jacket Copy.

Although I’ve already expressed my dislike for The Pale King in a review for my local paper and in a previous dispatch, I’ll give one more illustration of what irks me about his method and then be done with it. The receptacle of quirks embodying information overload that Wallace names Claude Sylvanshine is declared a “fact psychic,” someone who intuits useless data. The facts that come to him out of nowhere are “ephemeral, useless, undramatic, distracting.”

They’re also, at least sometimes, not facts at all.

Wallace has Sylvanshine unintentionally realize something about “the 1938 featherweight WBA champ.” Yet no such fighter existed. The National Boxing Association, founded in 1921, didn’t become the World Boxing Association until 1962. In addition, the phrasing here suggests that sanctioning bodies (whose initials usually precede weight classes in references to championship titles) award their belts on an annual basis, which they don’t. When Henry Armstrong decided not to defend his crown after knocking out Petey Sarron in 1937, New York’s top 126-pounder, Mike Belloise, faced Joey Archibald for the NBA’s championship in 1938. Archibald won and held the title until 1940, when he lost it to Harry Jaffra, and he then retrieved it from Jaffra the following year.

What bothers me about this is not that Wallace didn’t know boxing history or patois – even though it would not have been hard to look up any of this stuff. Instead, it’s that he tries to have it both ways: facts pop unbidden into Sylvanshine’s skull and yet inaccuracies do not matter. The facts Sylvanshine magically registers are “not incorrect,” Wallace writes, incorrectly, “just irrelevant, pointless.” Wallace says: “The fact psychic lives part-time in the world of fractious, boiling minutiae that no one knows or could be bothered to know even if they had the chance to know.” Perhaps, then, getting things wrong doesn’t matter, since no one knows these kinds of things anyway. Well, except for those who do bother to know them…

One might suggest that Wallace simply made a mistake here, or that he intended the false fact as a small joke for the few readers likely to notice it. Then again, perhaps Wallace fans would simply say of solecisms like this, as the Wallace character in the novel says at one point, “Although, you know, whatever.”

Reading fiction in which the writer’s deliberate decisions might count for little or nothing made me think of a scrupulously careful novelist who did believe conscious choices made all the difference. More specifically, it brought to mind this passage from James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “If a man hacking in fury at a block of wood, Stephen continued, make there an image of a cow, is that image a work of art?” I’m not calling Wallace an indiscriminate hacker, but I can’t call The Pale King a work of art either.

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The Pallid King

Even before I’d read the book, I anticipated critical praise for David Foster Wallace’s posthumously published fragmentary novel The Pale King. His previous books won him ardent admirers, and rumors about The Pale King suggested it would be exactly the kind of thing that would please his fans. I was not wrong in anticipating excitement over Wallace doing again what he’d done before.

Some reviewers did find much to like in the book and its accountant characters and invoke its unfinished status to explain away any weaknesses. Here’s how Richard Rayner concludes his review for The Los Angeles Times: “Much of the The Pale King is … hard work, but it’s welcome rather than the reverse, a shadow of the now lost ‘something long’ that Wallace might or might not have completed but still brilliant, a Spruce Goose of a book that barely achieves takeoff but glimmers and sparkles with sufficient suggestions of the grandeur that might have been.”

The job of a reviewer is to assess actually existing books, not books that might have been. (My review for The Oregonian appears in section O, p. 10, of the April 17, print edition.) If Wallace had lived to finish The Pale King, then it might have been very different. Perhaps it would have been better. Perhaps it would have been worse. I can’t say. Nor can anyone else. If, years in the future, an alternate version appears, with chapters rearranged and additional material added, I would not be surprised. However, as of April 2011, what there is to evaluate is what editor Michael Pietsch assembled.

And that book, in my opinion, is aggravating and tiresome. In a prefatory note, Pietsch recalls thinking that if anyone could make the IRS interesting, Wallace could. But I don’t think Wallace actually tried to be interesting in The Pale King, and, in any case, his isn’t. He repeatedly draws attention to the boringness of the text, as if doing that were clever. Some readers apparently think it is. Judith Shulevitz, for instance, insists that it’s “almost never boring” in an overwhelmingly effusive Slate review. If you’re the kind of person who enjoys listening to people go on and on and on about their drug use in college, then you might dig The Pale King. (Rayner at least notices that there’s plenty of “dead ink” in addition to what he considers “great writing.”)

I suspect Wallace enthusiasts congratulate themselves on their own perceived cleverness for “getting” what he’s up to in his highly self-conscious, digressive, long-winded, inconclusive, footnote-laden fiction. (Unlike Emily Cooke, of The Millions, I never grew to “love” Wallace’s footnotes.) In The Pale King characters praise the fortitude necessary to endure boredom, and a certain brand of reader inevitably stepped forward to announce his heroism for braving Wallace’s wearisome book.

The Pale King has no clothes. Reading it made me remember the anecdote about Kingsley Amis throwing Martin Amis’s Money across the room when he saw that his son put a character named Martin Amis in the novel. Wallace having a David Wallace character alone doesn’t bother me. (And I actually like Money.) But The Pale King reads like an elaborate but painfully unfunny joke. Deliberately tangled prose about boring subjects doesn’t stop being boring because of self-referential commentary about boringness. I imagine the author of Lucky Jim would be annoyed, as I was.

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