• Complain

David Wallace - The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

Here you can read online David Wallace - The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. year: 2011, publisher: Little, Brown & Company, genre: Prose. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:

Romance novel Science fiction Adventure Detective Science History Home and family Prose Art Politics Computer Non-fiction Religion Business Children Humor

Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.

David Wallace The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
  • Book:
    The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
  • Author:
  • Publisher:
    Little, Brown & Company
  • Genre:
  • Year:
    2011
  • Rating:
    3 / 5
  • Favourites:
    Add to favourites
  • Your mark:
    • 60
    • 1
    • 2
    • 3
    • 4
    • 5

The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel: summary, description and annotation

We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.

The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King

David Wallace: author's other books


Who wrote The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.

The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work

Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.

Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

David Foster Wallace

The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel

Editors Note

In 2006, ten years after the publication of David Foster Wallaces 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 Ill come if you insist, he said. But please dont. Im deep into something long, and its hard for me to get back into it when Im pulled away.

Something long and a long thing were the terms David used to talk about the novel hed 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 hed 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 Davids 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, Davids widow, to go through his office, a garage with one small window at their home in Claremont, California. On Davids 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 Davids 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 Joes 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 Davids. 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 Davids 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 novels trajectory, and draft chapters were often preceded or followed by Davids 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 1985and 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 Ive ever encountered. But having read these draft pages and notes, I wanted those who appreciate Davids 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 Davids notes. It was not an easy task: even a chapter that appeared to be the novels 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 novels 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 feelingsuggesting 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 novels 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 Davids 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

Next page
Light

Font size:

Reset

Interval:

Bookmark:

Make

Similar books «The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel»

Look at similar books to The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.


Reviews about «The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel»

Discussion, reviews of the book The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.