Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace’s desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called The Pale King.
His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he’d been working on it. A lot of people did: a significant fraction of the American reading public had been waiting for a new novel from Wallace ever since 1996, when his monumental Infinite Jest reshaped the skyline of American literature. But she hadn’t read it, and she had no idea how much of it he’d managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill.
Nadell called Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown & Co. and Wallace’s longtime editor. He flew out in January and started reading. As it turned out, there was a lot more than just that neat stack. “They brought me literally bins and drawers and wire baskets,” Pietsch says. “Just heaps of pages. There was no order to them.” He went back to New York City with a duffel bag full of them.
Pietsch spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15. If The Pale King isn’t a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace’s posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace’s finest work as a novelist.
David Wallace — his middle name was just for book jackets — was born in 1962 and grew up in Champaign, Ill. He was the son of two college professors: his father taught philosophy, his mother English
