I Love The Pale King Already

I have not finished David Foster Wallace’s new (unfinished) novel The Pale King. In fact, I am not yet even 100 pages into it. And yet I have decided that it will always have a place in my heart. Foster Wallace tackles a subject most other novelists only dream of tackling: boredom. He is out to get to the bottom of boredom and what role it plays in our lives. At points, the novel is part fiction and part modern philosophy. I’m not sure if this is yet appropriate (having not finished the book), but Dave Eggers offered an insightful perspective regarding Foster Wallace’s previous novel, the monumental Infinite Jest, that may eventually apply to The Pale King as well. Eggers described Infinite Jest as

“a spaceship with no recognizable components, no rivets or bolts, no entry points, no way to take it apart. It is very shiny and has no discernable flaws. If you could somehow smash it into smaller pieces, there would certainly be no way to put it back together again. It simply is.” (original emphasis; introduction to the 10^th anniversary ed. of Infinite Jest)

Again, I’m not able to say whether or not The Pale King will live up to Egger’s profound view of Infinite Jest, but I offer you this excerpt about boredom and dullness as an example of the immense humanity and thought that Foster Wallace  put into the work (I can't help but share this with everyone):

“Maybe 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, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it’s about something else, way down.” (Foster Wallace, The Pale King, p. 85)