By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ [The Nation] – Now we have The Pale King, not so much the “unfinished novel” its subtitle promises as the odds and scraps of one its prefatory note more candidly describes. [David Foster] Wallace had tugged at the manuscript for eleven years. His editor, Michael Pietsch, writes of finding “hard drives, file folders, three-ring binders, spiral-bound notebooks, and floppy disks” that “contained printed chapters, sheaves of handwritten pages, notes, and more,” and of having returned from California to begin his reconstructive labors with “a green duffel bag and two Trader Joe’s sacks heavy with manuscripts.” The scrum of material—all of which will eventually be deposited with Wallace’s papers at the University of Texas—contained “false starts, lists of names, plot ideas, instructions to himself” but no outline, “no list of scenes, no designated opening or closing point, nothing that could be called a set of directions or instructions.” For a writer like Wallace, whose greatest innovations were architectural—who assaulted chronology; traded in counterpoint, flashback, misdirection and digression; made a creed of concealment and incompletion; played with narrative rhythm like a jazz musician; and habitually betrayed his readers’ expectations—such an absence is fatal. Pietsch edited lightly, he tells us, line by line, but his crucial decisions were structural: what to include, what to leave out and, most important, what order to put it all in.
Continued in The Nation | More Chronicle & Notices.
