Tom McCarthy on The Pale King

I hope you haven’t hit your 20-article limit yet, because Tom McCarthy’s review of The Pale King is very good.

I say “perhaps” and “seems” because a good portion of this framework comes in the final “Notes and Asides” section tacked onto the main, patently partial manuscript. Which brings me to the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.

Lost childhood pools, by this reading, would constitute a kind of pastoral mode cached (or trashed) within the postmodern “systems” novel — which, in turn, is what the systems-within-systems I.R.S. really stands for. The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction. The data-psychic character Sylvanshine can glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him, but is “weak or defective in the area of will.” Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in “The Pale King,” nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor (for the novel in general, or this novel in particular) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he’s writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, though, the play’s author hasn’t worked out yet.

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. Is This What The Pale King Should Have Looked Like? Earlier this week, I mentioned that The New Yorker has published a work by David Foster Wallace entitled Backbone, an excerpt from The Pale King....
2. Editing The Pale King A pretty good article by longtime David Foster Wallace editor Michael Pietsch discussing how he put The Pale King together. Other chapters are self‑contained and...
3. Pale King Release Date David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel The Pale King is up on Amazon now with a release date of April 15, 2011. Here’s the descriptive copy:...
4. More Thoughts on The Pale King I readily admit, I'm a Pale King skeptic. In fact, I'm pretty skeptical about all posthumous, incomplete texts. In most cases, if an author didn't...
5. Publishing The Pale King The LA Times has an article about how Little, Brown editor Michael Pietsch is tackling the job of putting Wallace's hundreds of thousands of manuscript...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.