David Foster Wallace and Roberto Silvio Wissai

Foreword:

You might have heard about David Foster Wallace. Three odd things about him.

First, he identified himself by full names---first, middle, and last, an uncommon practice.

Second, he was considered a genius. He got many awards and grants, including the MacArthur Foundation Grant which annually gives out hundreds of thousands to each recipient (supposed genius) with no string attached.

Third, he killed himself a few years ago by. Novelists don't kill themselves as often as poets do. Many literate people instinctively turn to words as self-therapy, and those who do usually write verses instead of prose because somehow verses are a better vehicle to deal with problems. When words failed them, some of them killed themselves. Famous cases were Sylvia Plath and John Berryman. Hemingway, that macho writer of masculine themes, shot himself with a shotgun or a rifle (I don't quite remember which). His father, a doctor, also took his own life. Again, it may be useful to reflect on the assertion by Albert Camus that suicide is the only true philosophical question.

I have a feeling, a half-baked, unsubstantiated notion that most people don't just decide at an early age in childhood that they will become creative writers when they grow up. Instead, they turn to writing as a way to work out their own problems. Some writers leave other careers, especially law, and turn to writing. It has been said that a doctor saves lives probably of no more than 1,000 people during his entire career. A politician can save or kill millions of lives. A writer, if he is good, can save hundreds of millions of lives from boredom and ignorance.

All creative writers have a very strong sense of self, sometimes bordering on arrogance. They can't help but hold those pseudo-writers who maim, mangle, and even murder language with sputtering and stuttering prose, in contempt. You are what and how you write. A man's essence is laid bare by the way he handles words, in how he argues his case. He stands naked in the glittering sunlight for all to see.

So, you see, a man who thinks and writes too much about the meanings of life, as Wallace did, tends to end up taking his own life, despite the availability of all modern mood-regulating medicines. Man is an animal that feels and thinks too much. Moderation is the key to survival. There are times when you just have to let all feelings and thoughts go. You lie empty and naked, surrounded and shielded from the elements by your family, wailing then immediately pacified by the warmth of your mom's skin and your mouth is pressed to her teat. You take in your first suck of sustenance, your first drink of life. And your journey through a brief or stultifyingly long existence called life just begins.

Yesterday, a Laotian woman whom your friend Joe has taken a liking called you up and wanted to treat you to a Laotian lunch. She said she wanted to ask you some questions about Joe. You were curious and surprised, so you said yes.

She was already at the restaurant when you showed up. She greeted you warmly. Her eyes sparkled and she was resplendent in a Lao shirt . Her face was adorned with a tasteful make-up. She ordered food in rapid-fired Lao language.

-So, what do you want to ask me about?
-Roberto, that's what both delights and exasperates me about you. So direct, so disarming. No subtlety. No patience. Yet moody, neurotic, vulnerable, elegiac, and strangely romantic at the same rime.
-Wow! What a minute. What's going on here? What's happening between you and Joe?
-Plenty.
-Plenty? Are you saying, forgive me if I sound crass, Joe has hit a home run as he told me he would?
-Home run, huh? That was what he told you, that I am a game to him?
-No, no, pardon me. He just bragged to me that he was going to score, that I would just wait and see. He also told me to stay away from you. I told him, "no problem. I am not competing. That's not my style."
-So noble of you.
-Not noble at all. That's just the way I operate. Joe is my friend.
-How close are you with him?
-Close enough. We are friends. We like each other. I respect his intelligence, his smooth way around women.
-Wait a minute. Smooth way around women! Is Joe seeing anybody, besides me?
-What's going on here? You need to be straight with me. Why the last minute lunch invitation? Why all these questions?
-Joe's been telling me he's lonely and he's not been with a woman for over two years, and yes, he's been pressuring me to have sex with him.
-Have you?
-Am not gonna say anything.
-Suit yourself.
-Are you going to tell me or not?
-Tell you what?
-That Joe's seeing somebody besides me.
-I am not going to say anything either. Ask him yourself.
-I already did!
-Ask him again!
-Listen, Roberto, I need you to tell me please, a simple yes or no answer.
-Laura, why ask me?
-Because you're the only friend of Joe that I know. I thought you were my friend also.
-I am your friend.
-So, tell me.
-How serious are you with Joe?
-It's getting there.
-Jesus!
-Jesus what?
-Listen, what's going on between you and Joe is none of my business. I like you both.
-Stop beating around the fucking bush, tell me the truth!
- About what?
-Is Joe seeing somebody? Tell me!
-Okay, I know Joe likes women, Asian women especially. I complimented him on his smooth talks with women. I've seen him in actions. He's proud of himself. I told him, " please, especially with Asian women, don't make them fall in love with you, because that's not right". He assured me that he would not let them fall in love with him. But I said, "Joe, sometimes people couldn't help themselves. Love is an involuntary reflex. People fall victims to it. You don't want complications, love and marriage and all that shit, but most women do."
-You still haven't told me what I want to know. Is he seeing somebody, besides me?
-I already just told you.
-I want to hear again. Clear, simple, not beating around the bush.
-Yes, at least two others, as far as I know.
-I thought so. It was not so hard, was it? To tell me the truth.
-I feel terrible. Please don't tell Joe that you heard from me. Joe is my friend.
-No, I won't. Let's eat.
-I don't think I can, after what you just put me through.
-Don't be silly. Now tell me another thing.
-Now what?
-Don't look so scared and miserable. Do you like me?
-What kind of a question is that? Of course, I am your friend.
-More than a friend?
-I would rather not say
-A wimp!

Book Review
By MICHIKO KAKUTANI in New York Times March 31, 2011

David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” depicted an America so distracted and obsessed with entertainment that a mesmerizing movie becomes a potential terrorist weapon — capable of making viewers die of pleasure.
His posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend to “Infinite Jest,” so it demonstrates that being amused to death and bored to death are, in Wallace’s view, flip sides of the same coin. Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”

Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”

Although “The Pale King” was pieced together by Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, it feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished his work from the beginning. After all, Wallace always disdained closure, and this volume showcases his embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America’s obsession with self-gratification and entertainment.

“The Pale King” is less inventive and exuberantly imagined than Wallace’s previous novels: no herds of feral hamsters roaming the land, no artificially created deserts in Ohio, no ad-bearing Statue of Liberty. But like “Infinite Jest” it depicts an America in thrall to myopic consumerism, and like his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” it grapples with corrugated questions of identity and the difficulties of communication.

By turns breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull — funny, maddening and elegiac — “The Pale King” will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life. But it may also snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window — albeit a flawed window — into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America, toward the end of the 20th century, by worker bees employed as number crunchers for the federal government, worried that they are going to be replaced by computers.

Told in fragmented, strobe-lighted chapters that depict an assortment of misfits, outsiders and eccentrics, the novel sometimes feels like the TV show “The Office” as rewritten with a magnifying glass by Nicholson Baker. Sometimes it feels like a hallucinatory variation on Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” giving the reader a choral portrait of a Midwestern community — though in this case, that community is not a town, but the I.R.S. Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill., in 1985.

Little happens dramatically in real time in this novel; rather, the graphic deaths and accidents chronicled in its pages are almost always part of its characters’ back stories. In fact “The Pale King” is in some ways an ode to stasis and perseverance, to the human ability to endure all the slings and arrows of monotony and everyday misfortune.

Among those characters is a fictional version of the author himself — he claims that this novel is really a memoir — who says he took a year off from college to work at the I.R.S., “in exile from anything I even remotely cared about or was interested in” and who is mistaken there for a higher ranking employee also named David Wallace.

This narrator named David Wallace says he “dreamed of becoming an ‘artist,’ i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike,” and at times this narrator feels like a might-have-been version of the real author had he not become a writer — much the way that Harry Rabbit Angstrom feels like a might-have-been version of John Updike.

The other characters include a sad sack named Sylvanshine, who regards himself as “a dithering ninny”; a colleague by the name of Cusk, who is embarrassed by his own heavy sweating; an executive named Stecyk, who was an “insufferable do-gooder” as a child; a beautiful woman named Meredith, who did a stint in a psych hospital; and a young man named Lane A. Dean Jr., who married his pregnant girlfriend even though he didn’t love her and now needs to support his new family.
THE PALE KING
By David Foster Wallace
548 pages. Little, Brown & Company. $27.99.
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Wallace is focused on how various characters came to work at the I.R.S. — what combination of psychological tics, childhood trauma, financial circumstance and random luck propelled them into the rat race and tossed them onto the hamster wheel that is life as accountants there, pushing paper and numbers in a deadeningly generic office fitted with fluorescent lights, modular shelving and the ceaseless “whisper of sourceless ventilation.”

Though at least one character argues that being an accountant is heroic — providing order in a chaotic world, corralling and organizing a torrential flow of information — Lane Dean, for one, feels that the work is “boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt,” and he begins thinking suicidal thoughts.

“He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices.”

Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers, who come to remind us of the unhappy hero of Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” or some of Beckett’s bone-weary characters, stuck in a limbo of never-ending waiting and routine.

The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.

Yet at the same time there are some wonderfully evocative sections here that capture the exhausting annoyances of everyday life with digital precision. The sticky, nauseating feeling of traveling on a small, crowded commuter plane, crammed up against “paunched and blotchy men in double-knit brown suits and tan suits with attaché cases ordered from in-flight catalogs.” Or the suffocating feeling of being stuck on a filthy bus, with ashtrays spilling over with gum and cigarette butts, the air-conditioning “more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning” than the real thing.

In this, his most emotionally immediate work, Wallace is on intimate terms with the difficulty of navigating daily life, and he conjures states of mind with the same sorcery he brings to pictorial description. He conveys the gut deep sadness people experience when “the wing of despair” passes over their lives, and the panic of being a fish “thrashing in the nets” of one’s own obligations, stuck in a miserable job and needing to “cover the monthly nut.”

Along the way he gives us chilling, Grand Guignol scenes involving a ghastly subway accident and a grotesque industrial-arts class accident. And he makes us see, with gorgeous sleight of hand, the “very old land” in a Middle America that exists somewhere between Grandma Moses and “Blue Velvet”: the “flannel plains” and “the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight,” an “arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch,” a “sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding.”

This novel reminds us what a remarkable observer Wallace was — a first-class “noticer,” to use a Saul Bellow term, of the muchness of the world around him, chronicling the overwhelming data and demands that we are pelted with, second by second, minute by minute, and the protean, overstuffed landscape we dwell in.

It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.