If you’re already a David Foster Wallace fan we’re guessing that you won’t need our help pointing out that tomorrow marks the publication of his posthumous novel, The Pale King. But if you’ve been following the various reviews, remembrances, and commentary that Wallace has inspired over the past few months with a curiosity and mild puzzlement — sure the guy seems great, but a 600-plus page unformed novel about taxes? — we’ve got your back. Likewise if you once picked up a copy of Infinite Jest but found yourself drifting away after the first 200 pages … well, we’ve been there. Brevity is not one of the man’s many virtues. But an incredible eye for detail, a gut-busting sense of humor, and the ability to tell a story so engrossing that you don’t want it to end? Those DFW has. So for the uninitiated, the intimidated, or the intrepid reader, we’ve compiled a guide to reading Wallace’s work.
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In March of 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced plans to publish an unfinished novel titled The Pale King, which David Foster Wallace worked on sporadically for at least a decade before his death. The novel is based on main character Lane Dean careening into transcendence simply by living a life of utter boredom. In a new excerpt just published by The New Yorker, we catch a glimpse into the troubled childhood of Pale King’s floundering leading man. As a reader, the selection is both comforting and frustrating to devour, much like Lane’s encounters with the voices in his head.
“(…The experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side.) Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands.”
Basically, it’s so good it hurts. More on DFW, the bookworm’s Cobain, after the jump.
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In addition to an excerpt from his final novel, the New Yorker has a long profile of David Foster Wallace online today. D.T. Max delves into the psychopharmacological shifts that preceded Wallace’s suicide in September of last year, and manages to draw an original portrait of his life without presenting the same facts that every other profile has trotted out during the flurry of posthumous hype. Some of us have been reading about Wallace and his work for years — going on a decade now — and it remains a thrill to find a previously undiscovered “chunklet” of info, to use a word coined by the man himself.
The most striking chunklet in Max’s profile, at least for some one whose all-time desert-island novel is Infinite Jest, is that the primary female character, Joelle Van Dyne, is based on the poet and memoirist Mary Karr.
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