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The Pale King
by David Foster Wallace, Michael Pietsch
by David Foster Wallace, Michael Pietsch
As usual, I'll spare you the plot line and general buzz, since I figure if you're reading this, you've read at least some of the endless hype surrounding this unfinished masterpiece.
And it would have been a masterpiece, judging from what exists of it (because it is very incomplete, make no mistake), and the author's own notes--reproduced at the end of the book--toward structure and theme. It takes on Wallace's usual themes of boredom vs. entertainment, normal vs. aberrant, individual vs. group, and above all, the devil of solipsism. It is this one theme that shades the feel of these notes and vignettes toward a novel closer to the dark late DFW of Oblivion than that of the earlier two novels. As in the final collection of short stories, we see here, above all, characters lost in the labyrinths of their own minds, helpless to escape. And although The Pale King has been touted as some sort of paean to the boredom of routine, it is the characters' struggle against their own consciousness that stands out.
Mostly what The Pale King made me feel was sad. Sad and frustrated at the beguiling incompleteness of what could have been a brilliant novel, sad at the damning price in pain that genius so often exacts from its possessors, sad at what could have been...what could have been.
And it would have been a masterpiece, judging from what exists of it (because it is very incomplete, make no mistake), and the author's own notes--reproduced at the end of the book--toward structure and theme. It takes on Wallace's usual themes of boredom vs. entertainment, normal vs. aberrant, individual vs. group, and above all, the devil of solipsism. It is this one theme that shades the feel of these notes and vignettes toward a novel closer to the dark late DFW of Oblivion than that of the earlier two novels. As in the final collection of short stories, we see here, above all, characters lost in the labyrinths of their own minds, helpless to escape. And although The Pale King has been touted as some sort of paean to the boredom of routine, it is the characters' struggle against their own consciousness that stands out.
Mostly what The Pale King made me feel was sad. Sad and frustrated at the beguiling incompleteness of what could have been a brilliant novel, sad at the damning price in pain that genius so often exacts from its possessors, sad at what could have been...what could have been.
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Reading Progress
| 04/15/2011 | page 130 |
|
23.0% | "I'm savoring this novel, slowly. It is painful to think that it will never be finished, because it has such great promise. I will say, though, that it seems to have more in common with the stories in Hideous Men or Oblivion than with Infinite Jest--due to its fragmentary nature, the themes it explores, and some of the conventions (like the interview as a rhetorical device) Wallace used." |
