I finished The Pale King a few days ago. I'm pleased to report that the book is, though noticeably unfinished, definitively good enough to merit inclusion in DFW's published canon. Here are some first impressions.
Does TPK work? Yes and no. Even though a lot of the chapters are among DFW's finest writing, the book's real point comes across only partially. TPK's "thesis" as such is buried in DFW's own Notes To Self after the end of the book proper; he writes there that
It turns out that bliss - a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious - lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.
As plenty of other folks have already pointed out, it's a reiteration of (one of) his Kenyon College theme(s). He wrote - said - in the Kenyon College Address that
If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is, and you are operating on your default setting, then you, like me, probably won't consider possibilities that aren't annoying and miserable. But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.
So The Pale King was going to articulate this process in greater detail, we suppose. In the end, though, the point comes across only partially. We see plenty of characters who do possess the kind of mindfulness that DFW wants to evoke, but they are often literally supernatural beings: Drinion levitates a centimeter above his chair when he is immersed in whatever it is he's doing, Sylvanshine receives totally random secret information about the people's he's around, two benevolent ghosts materialize to "be with" IRS workers and improve their concentration. Only "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle is fully explicit about his own mindfulness; he affirms that
...I think that deep down I knew that there was more to my life and to myself than just the ordinary psychological impulses for pleasure and vanity that I let drive me. That there were depths to me that were not bullshit or childish but profound, and were not abstract but actually much realer than my clothes or self-image, and that blazed in an almost sacred way - I'm being serious; I'm not just trying to make it sound more dramatic than it was - and that these realest, most profound parts of me involved not drives or appetites but simple attention, awareness, if only I could stay awake...
Beautiful though the passage is, we don't get much about how to actually go about learning that kind of focus (short of course of Fogle's method: accounting and the IRS). What technology of the self allows me to pay attention to the world? TPK is somewhat unclear on this. Other books of DFW's have argued very explicit points: consider the massive statement on The American Pursuit Of Happiness that is Infinite Jest,* or the commentary on seduction that Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, "Good Old Neon" and Jest's Orin Incandenza together articulate, or the lapidary precision of DFW's nonfiction. In comparison with those other works, TPK fails to elaborate a really clear statement of how exactly to learn to pay attention to the world.
I like to think that this would be the really major change between TPK's current unfinished state and its hypothetical final form.
"How unfinished is The Pale King?" is, of course, the biggest question hanging over the novel. I submit (and editor M. Pietsch says, w/ much more authority than I, the same thing) that structurally it's actually fairly complete. Although there's no "ending" as such, recall that neither The Broom of the System nor Infinite Jest offered closure; furthermore, DFW's own notes for The Pale King read: "Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens." It's pretty clear, I think, that the hypothetically finished TPK wouldn't have some rising action> climax> closure arc to it. In terms of the language itself, there was a lot of hype surrounding the "new" prose style DFW was aiming for here. The prolix Infinite Jest, with its glittering page-long sentences and hundreds of endnotes, would be the thesis to TPK's antithesis - however, I find DFW's prose style here just as baroque as it's always been. Certain spoken passages adopt much simpler language, of course, but that's been the case from Broom of the System on. I'd like to know to what extent TPK was already reread and revised by its author: TPK's prose style tends to give a "final-draft" feel that, if the book is really at times a first draft or freewrite, is impressive. A few of many memorable passages:
"I'm assuming I haven't talked before about running around with this odd gang of guys at Bradley and the strange thing we got into junior year of breaking into people's dorm rooms and holding them down while Fat Marcus the Moneylender sat on their face."
"I observed the effect of the tea in opened sockets and mass frenzied orgylike copulation and humping under the trees, on the table, under the tossed egg, on both ends of the horseshoe grotto. There were actual buttocks thrusting under my grill. [...] The wieners themselves were writhing, thrusting. Plump, thrusting, shiny, moist, there on the grill, on Mrs. Kagle's aluminum platter, in the air"
"At night from the trailer's part the hills possessed of a dirty orange glow and the sounds of living trees exploding in the fires' heat did carry, and the noise of planes plowing the undulant air above and dropping thick tongues of talc. [...] At sunset then the north and west were the same color. On clear nights she could read by the night sky's emberlight seated on the plastic box that served as stoop. The screen door had no screen but was still a screen door, which fact she thought upon. In incendiary orange to the deepening twilight in the smell of creosote burning in the sharp hills upwind."
A few final thoughts: the overall tone or mood of the book has something of Infinite Jest's final third. It's a cold quality of impending revelation reminiscent too of Broom of the System's conclusion (as such) and, the best example of near-revelation, Lot 49; the post-picnic interview with the hotdog-grilling IRS man, for example, hints that he (in the wake of the implied tea-drugging and mosquito attack) inexplicably sprouted from his forehead a mosquito's proboscis (?). The book's tone is very calmly supernatural. Borges thought that beauty is the nearness of revelation that never reveals itself - in that sense, The Pale King is a sure triumph. But in comparison to Lot 49 or Broom or Jest, The Pale King really doesn't reveal much: where Pynchon would take us to the very brink of revelation, where the younger DFW of Broom and Jest would dance all around the climax w/o stating it outright, TPK reveals nothing. (I repeat, reveals nothing intentionally: "Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.") A few more things: along with the main boredom/focus thrust of TPK, the book's tangential themes are eminently DFWian. Steyck's "pathological" tendency to do good, for instance, goes hand in hand w/ Brief Interviews' discussions - doing good in order to be recognized for doing good, using other people as like moral gymnastics equipment instead of simply "being" with them - ; the many characters in TPK who mix "hideous" interiority with utter banality take part in a theme shared with Brief Interviews, DFW's essay on David Lynch, "Good Old Neon" and much of IJ.
The best way to read The Pale King, I think, is as a sort of huge short story cycle: a series of vignettes that often share a common message but that are not bound by the traditional arc of narrative. Infinite Jest did the same thing but w/ much more cohesion; even when it presented as an extravagant multi-page endnote, you knew that what you were reading was a novel. The Pale King is somewhat flawed as a narrative whole but, as a heterogeneous short story collection, it's often splendid. "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle's 100-page chapter is extraordinary, as is the brief dialogue about the nature of modern democracy that takes place early in the book, the abortion discussion between Lane Dean Jr. and his girlfriend, the scenes from Steyck's youth and the charged tête-à-tête between Rand and Drinion. These are pieces more than strong enough to stand alone and, pace the substantial success of The Pale King as a novel, they transcend the book that they constitute.
I'll wrap this up: does The Pale King justify publication in its unfinished state? Absolutely. Is it the sacred text we've been waiting for, the book that will save us all? Not really; less so than the rest of the DFW canon. Should you read it? Of course you should.
*I see The Pale King as a cousin volume to Infinite Jest: a book about boredom and discipline, where Jest was all about addiction and entertainment.
