We spend the majority of our lives doing things that are quite dull: working at unappreciated jobs, waiting in supermarket lines, sitting in traffic for three hours just to get home. These mind-numbing, tedious routines surely don't make great stories. The real mystery is how any person survives a world so dedicated to grinding its inhabitants down with sheer tedium. In "The Pale King," David Foster Wallace argues that the only way to survive the dull, grey parts of life is to adjust the focus and make an effort to look at what's going on outside of ourselves. The novel's short vignettes about quirky characters trying to survive the quotidian make it a thrilling study of modern existence.
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"The Pale King" is ostensibly about a group of IRS agents brought to work at a regional management office in Peoria, Ill. I say ostensibly, however, because it's hard to really nail down "The Pale King's" main plot line. Employing the same technique he applied so successfully to "Oblivion," Wallace fills the foreground with interesting people and curious events, allowing the real message to unfold in the margins.
The stories in the forefront are interesting in their own right. One character deals with the consequences of being "pathologically grateful"; another attempts to realize his dream "to press his lips to every square inch of his own body." Several chapters of "The Pale King" have been published separately in "The New Yorker" and other magazines, and for good reason: The little stories that form the jumbled narrative are strong enough to stand alone.
Wallace's characters are more then just simple, flat set pieces. As they struggle through their mundane accounting jobs, Wallace explores the nature of attention. The solipsistic boy who wants to kiss himself is unable to notice the way his body is contorting and twisting into something that horrifies his classmates. The coworker who cannot look away from the clock at work not only runs the risk of being fired, but also stops time by his lack of focus. The man who constantly notes the faults of others cannot help but turn the same hypercritical eye on himself.
Wallace's posthumous novel is unfinished, though, and it shows; the reader can never fully piece together a complete plot because there isn't one. Unsurprisingly, these sketches and anecdotes never form a coherent whole. But there is enough of an overarching plot to reinforce Wallace's concerns about concentration. If the reader is not willing to invest time and energy into figuring out the novel, then there is almost no point; the cool set pieces and long, divergent story lines prove fatally distracting, and the reader will be lost. But for those willing to commit their energy and to broaden their focus, there is some degree of order within the chaos. The only way to make something meaningful out of the mundane is to look at what is going on in the margins.
