The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

Editor’s Note

In 2006, ten years after the publication of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Little, Brown made plans to release an anniversary edition of that glorious novel. Celebrations were set up at bookstores in New York and Los Angeles, but as the events neared, David demurred about attending. I telephoned to try to persuade him. “You know I’ll come if you insist,” he said. “But please don’t. I’m deep into something long, and it’s hard for me to get back into it when I’m pulled away.”

“Something long” and “a long thing” were the terms David used to talk about the novel he’d been writing in the years since Infinite Jest. He published many books in those years — story collections in 1999 and 2004 and gatherings of essays in 1997 and 2005. But the question of a new novel loomed, and David was uncomfortable speaking about it. Once when I pressed him, he described working on the new novel as like wrestling sheets of balsa wood in a high wind. From his literary agent, Bonnie Nadell, I heard occasional reports: David was taking accounting classes as research for the novel. It was set at an IRS tax return processing center. I had had the enormous honor of working with David as his editor on Infinite Jest, and had seen the worlds he’d conjured out of a tennis academy and a rehab center. If anyone could make taxes interesting, I figured, it was him.

At the time of David’s death, in September 2008, I had not seen a word of this novel except for a couple stories he had published in magazines, stories with no apparent connection to accountancy or taxation. In November, Bonnie Nadell joined Karen Green, David’s widow, to go through his office, a garage with one small window at their home in Claremont, California. On David’s desk Bonnie found a neat stack of manuscript, twelve chapters totaling nearly 250 pages. On the label of a disk containing those chapters he had written “For LB advance?” Bonnie had talked with David about pulling together a few chapters of his novel to send to Little, Brown in order to commence negotiations for a new contract and advance against royalties. Here was that partial manuscript, unsent.

Exploring David’s office, Bonnie and Karen found hundreds and hundreds of pages of his novel in progress, designated with the title “The Pale King.” Hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, notes, and more. I flew to California at their invitation and two days later returned home with a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe’s sacks heavy with manuscripts. A box full of books that David had used in his research followed by mail.

Reading this material in the months after returning, I found an astonishingly full novel, created with the superabundant originality and humor that were uniquely David’s. As I read these chapters I felt unexpected joy, because while inside this world that David had made I felt as if I were in his presence, and was able to forget awhile the awful fact of his death. Some pieces were neatly typed and revised through numerous versions. Others were drafts in David’s minuscule handwriting. Some — those chapters from the desk among them — had been recently polished. Others were much older and contained abandoned or superseded plotlines. There were notes and false starts, lists of names, plot ideas, instructions to himself. All these materials were gorgeously alive and charged with observations; reading them was the closest thing to seeing his amazing mind at play upon the world. One leather-bound workbook was still closed around a green felt marker with which David had recently written.

Nowhere in all these pages was there an outline or other indication of what order David intended for these chapters. There were a few broad notes about the novel’s trajectory, and draft chapters were often preceded or followed by David’s directions to himself about where a character came from or where he or she might be headed. But there was no list of scenes, no designated opening or closing point, nothing that could be called a set of directions or instructions for The Pale King. As I read and reread this mass of material, it nevertheless became clear that David had written deep into the novel, creating a vividly complex place — the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, in 1985—and a remarkable set of characters doing battle there against the hulking, terrorizing demons of ordinary life.

Karen Green and Bonnie Nadell asked me to assemble from these pages the best version of The Pale King that I could find. Doing so has been a challenge like none I’ve ever encountered. But having read these draft pages and notes, I wanted those who appreciate David’s work to be able to see what he had created — to be allowed to look once more inside that extraordinary mind. Although not by any measure a finished work, The Pale King seemed to me as deep and brave as anything David had written. Working on it was the best act of loving remembrance I was capable of.

In putting this book together I have followed internal clues from the chapters themselves and from David’s notes. It was not an easy task: even a chapter that appeared to be the novel’s obvious starting point is revealed in a footnote, and even more directly in an earlier version of that chapter, to be intended to arrive well after the novel begins. Another note in the same chapter refers to the novel as being full of “shifting POVs, structural fragmentation, willed incongruities.”

But many of the chapters revealed a central narrative that follows a fairly clear chronology. In this story line, several characters arrive at the Peoria Regional Examination Center on the same day in 1985. They go through orientation and begin working in and learning about the vast world of IRS tax returns processing. These chapters and these recurring characters have an evident sequence that forms the novel’s spine.

Other chapters are self-contained and not part of any chronology. Arranging these freestanding sections has been the most difficult part of editing The Pale King. It became apparent as I read that David planned for the novel to have a structure akin to that of Infinite Jest, with large portions of apparently unconnected information presented to the reader before a main story line begins to make sense. In several notes to himself, David referred to the novel as “tornadic” or having a “tornado feeling”—suggesting pieces of story coming at the reader in a high-speed swirl. Most of the non-chronological chapters have to do with daily life at the Regional Examination Center, with IRS practice and lore, and with ideas about boredom, repetition, and familiarity. Some are stories from various unusual and difficult childhoods, whose significance gradually becomes clear. My aim in sequencing these sections was to place them so that the information they contain arrives in time to support the chronological story line. In some cases placement is essential to the unfolding story; in others it is a matter of pace and mood, as in siting short comic chapters between long serious ones.

The novel’s central story does not have a clear ending, and the question inevitably arises: How unfinished is this novel? How much more might there have been? This is unknowable in the absence of a detailed outline projecting scenes and stories yet to be written. Some notes among David’s manuscript pages suggest that he did not intend for the novel to have a plot substantially beyond the chapters here. One note says the novel is “a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens.” Another points out that there are three “high-end players… but we never see them, only their aides and advance men.” Still another suggests that throughout the novel “something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen.” These lines could support a contention that the novel’s apparent incompleteness is in fact intentional. David ended his first novel in the middle of a line of dialogue and his second with large plot questions addressed only glancingly. One character in The Pale King describes a play he’s written in which a man sits at a desk, working silently, until the audience leaves, at which point the play’s action begins. But, he continues, “I could never decide on the action, if there was any.” In the section titled “Notes and Asides” at the end of the book I have extracted some of David’s notes about characters and story. These notes and lines from the text suggest ideas about the novel’s direction and shape, but none strikes me as definitive. I believe that David was still exploring the world he had made and had not yet given it a final form.

The pages of the manuscript were edited only lightly. One goal was to make characters’ names consistent (David invented new names constantly) and to make place names, job titles, and other factual matters match up throughout the book. Another was to correct obvious grammatical errors and word repetitions. Some chapters of the manuscript were designated “Zero drafts” or “freewriting,” David’s terms for first tries, and included notes such as “Cut by 50 % in next draft.” I made occasional cuts for sense or pace, or to find an end point for a chapter that trailed off unfinished. My overall intent in sequencing and editing was to eliminate unintentional distractions and confusions so as to allow readers to focus on the enormous issues David intended to raise, and to make the story and characters as comprehensible as possible. The complete original drafts of these chapters, and the entire mass of material from which this novel was culled, will ultimately be made available to the public at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center, which houses all of David Foster Wallace’s papers.

David was a perfectionist of the highest order, and there is no question that The Pale King would be vastly different had he survived to finish it. Words and images recur throughout these chapters that I am sure he would have revised: the terms “titty-pinching” and “squeezing his shoes,” for example, would probably not be repeated as often as they are. At least two characters have Doberman hand puppets. These and dozens of other repetitions and draft sloppinesses would have been corrected and honed had David continued writing The Pale King. But he did not. Given the choice between working to make this less-than-final text available as a book and placing it in a library where only scholars would read and comment on it, I didn’t have a second’s hesitation. Even unfinished, it is a brilliant work, an exploration of some of life’s deepest challenges, and an enterprise of extraordinary artistic daring. David set out to write a novel about some of the hardest subjects in the world — sadness and boredom — and to make that exploration nothing less than dramatic, funny, and deeply moving. Everyone who worked with David knows well how he resisted letting the world see work that was not refined to his exacting standard. But an unfinished novel is what we have, and how can we not look? David, alas, isn’t here to stop us from reading, or to forgive us for wanting to.

— Michael Pietsch