The Pale King

(Reprinted from my Goodreads review.)

I used to be a sandblaster at the company I still currently work at. That mostly consisted of me, sitting at a sandblasting cabinet, cleaning off pieces of bronze artwork, so they could be further worked on, welded together, etc. If that sounds a bit boring....good, you've caught on quick. I sat for hours a day, just cleaning artwork after artwork, and it was not a job for somebody who needed constant stimulation. Bluntly, it got pretty damn boring at times. But, I found my way around that tediousness, mostly through blasting music at obscene levels, making little games at blasting pieces in record time, and sometimes, when I needed it, going to that happy place in my head. I found that you can make some really beautiful and strange movies in your own head when needed. Anyways, there was a welder, let's call him N, and once in a while, when he had no work in his department, he would be sent to my department. Which he (and I) hated. N was loud, and brash, and as soon as he started working, the complaining began. Soon enough, I would feel a tap on my shoulder, see him standing there, and the floodgates of bitching began. "Jesus, Dave, how the ---- do you do this all day? I want to shoot myself everytime I have to go back here. What the ---- are you listening to? Dude, if I had to work here every day, I'd shoot myself. How do you sit there like that...are you even listening? Take your --------- headphones off...." 

You get the idea.

Whenever N was working with me, it was horrible, not just for his continued bitching, but also because I couldn't hide the tedium with him around. All the negative aspects of the job, everything that I had tried to shove into dark corners to be able to get something done, was now under an encompassing spotlight glare, and I realized the impossibility of dealing with malaise when you have an irritated songbird on your shoulder who makes it a point to single out each dull and weary condition in front of you. When N was working next to me, what was once a quiet plodding job became horrifically sluggish and dense, and I wondered what I was doing. Which brings me to Pale King....

Because PK is about boredom, specifically the boredom of being an examiner in the IRS, and more pointedly, what kind of people would work, no, more than that, would thrive and seek out such an environment. All the workers DFW writes of are damaged in some way, be it growing up abandoned in an orphanage, raised by a line of deranged, unpredictable matriarchs, or being the type of person who decides at a young age that your goal is to touch every part of your body with your lips, and then achieve that goal up to the various body parts that would be forbidden to the cause. (like the back of the head. I know what parts you were thinking of first, and those parts were reached.) Wallace seems to present these people to say that they are the chosen, that the people who would immerse themselves in that environment are the ones who have not conceived of serious boredom, and thus dullness becomes the exciting vacation, the 8 hours a day where you can get what life never offers on the outside. 

DFW does not talk about the boredom, so much as dump you into the deep end, sink or swim. Several chapters do nothing but drone on, at first glance with no real point. The points were there, but, man, you had to dig. The worst part was Wallace taking the place of existential trilling songbird, seeming to squawk at you during the thickest sections. "Man, how boring is this? I mean, holy cow, this is sluggish!" Especially during the meta-tinged author forewords, which are mindf--ks meant to present Pale King as a true story, and DFW as an actual character in said story. (For the record, pretty sure that isn't true) Every time Wallace talks to the reader in the book, he lies, in a genius sort of way. For example, the first foreword he proceeds to tell how the IRS learned to get Pro-Revenue Service legislation passed by making it the law so boring and dense that nobody would read it, and find out what the IRS was really trying to do. And he does this by making the foreword so boring and dense that you have to struggle to find the point... Mindf--ker. Those antics make the book unbelievably cerebral, and absolutely difficult to plow through.

Despite this, there are numerous sections that are worth the effort. The two longest chapters are also, not coincidentally, the best in the book. One is a conversation between an attractive woman and man who would best be described as a computer, the other is one employee, during an interview, relaying his life story and how he decided to work at the IRS. Both are excellent, as much for what they don't tell as what they do, and both also give the most character development/backstory in PK. There wasn't much of that in the book, but to be fair, that wasn't at all what DFW was going for. As I said, there are many philosophical points being made in Pale King, floating in stupor to be extracted out by thoughtful examination. PK may be the smartest fiction book I've ever read, certainly one of the hardest, but not one I can sell as extremely enjoyable. I want to read more DFW, in the future, but I'm willing to take some time in between dives towards the deep end.