We're told that death and taxes are life's two certainties. Great novelists have spent hundreds of thousands of pages trying to grasp the mysteries and complexities of mortality. But how many have tried to do the same with taxes?
Now, with the late David Foster Wallace's posthumous (and unfinished) novel, "The Pale King," we have — however fragmentary — the first great literary work about taxation and the odious and deeply misunderstood organization known as the Internal Revenue Service.
As assembled by editor Michael Pietsch, Wallace's unfinished novel unfolds in chapters — some less than a page of a fragmented conversation between two individuals, some more than 50 pages of intimate personal recollections. There's little in the way of plot; intimations of a secret new computer program designed to increase revenue at the IRS and replace the need for manual labor (the novel takes place at a Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill., in 1984) peek up throughout the novel's chapters and end notes.
But to try to piece together a plot from Wallace's final work is to miss out on what the novel's true vision seems to be: an in-depth look at the specific lives of people who spend their days encased in cocoons of near nightmarish concentration and boredom.
There's Chris Fogle, who, when asked what brought him to the IRS, erupts into a long-winded and affecting monologue about college drug use and his father's death. There's Claude Sylvanshine, who has the eerie ability to discern random facts from people he encounters. There's Meredith Rand, whose happy hour recollection of how she met her husband in a mental ward allows for some startling truths about beauty and self-esteem. There's even a character named David Foster Wallace, who finds himself the subject of a technical error that confuses him with another David F. Wallace.
Even though their final representations are incomplete, each of these and the novel's other characters (including sinister babies, wandering ghosts and compulsive sweaters) could probably command an entire book on their own. Having these well-drawn eccentrics — who remain all too human — together in one place makes "The Pale King" all the more uproariously funny and deeply moving. And each of these individuals, in a sense, is their own hero. As one character remarks, "True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk."
Posthumous publications always come with the burden of unanswered questions. Did the author intend for this work to be published? How "unfinished" is it? Despite these distracting issues, it's impossible to ignore that "The Pale King" contains some of the most breathtaking writing in recent memory, profound passages that resonate long after they've been read and that make it all the more upsetting that this literary Wunderkind isn't around to continue showing us that our everyday lives are anything but boring.
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