The Pale King
First published 2011 · English · 548 pages
- Novels
- Satire and humour
Wallace's unfinished final novel, assembled after his death by his editor from drafts and notes. It is set mainly in an Internal Revenue Service regional examination center in Illinois in the 1980s, where a cast of clerks and examiners go about work that seems tedious beyond measure. Through many characters and scenes, the book explores boredom, concentration, duty and the possibility that deep attention might be a kind of heroism. Because it is fragmentary, it reads as a collection of linked portraits rather than a finished design, but it holds some of his most moving writing.
Quotes
Routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, ephemeracy, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst, ennui—these are the true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.
Every love story is a ghost story.
How odd I can have all this inside me and to you it’s just words.
The assumption that everyone else is like you. That you are the world. The disease of consumer capitalism. The complacent solipsism.