On Reading The Pale King

This was a strange experience for me, having recently spent a lot of time thinking about Wallace for a chapter of my dissertation. Somehow reading this unfinished novel brought the sad fact of his death to life unavoidably to mind in a way that my other DFW research never did.

The novel itself is really enjoyable--I could really see Wallace extending himself into the new style that he was struggling to develop. The various chapters are full of life and intelligence, and seemed in a sense less guarded and cerebral than his previous fiction. I found the whole setting of the novel (an IRS center in the 1980s) to be hilarious and was really drawn into the book in a way that this kind of postmodern fiction usually doesn't (though I love it anyway). That quality was particularly surprising because it doesn't really cohere as a novel and clearly was part of something larger that will never be.

At the end of the text, Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, chose to include a collection of notes drawn from the author's working files on characters, potential plot twists and various endings for the book. (Unless, of course, this was also some kind of postmodern DFW gag, but it didn't read that way.) This closing chapter was what really brought Wallace's death home for me. I felt as if I'd been let in behind the curtain and seen the magician preparing his next trick, and he'd seen me see him, and there we both were, feeling upset and depressed and unable to think of a way to correct the situation. With most authors I would find this kind of glimpse into the voyaging writerly mind intriguing. In a different context I would probably enjoy this kind of thing with Wallace, too--I hope to check out his archives at the Ransom Center in Austin one day. But here, at the end of The Pale King, it just made me wish he'd been able to finish the book.

Nearing the Finish Line

I just sent off the last new chapter that I'll be writing for this dissertation to my committee. What remains is an introduction and a lot of revision, but it's very exciting to be approaching the end of a long, lonely road.

The chapter looks at two younger writers, David Foster Wallace and Junot Díaz, and argues that they both have carved out special positions for themselves through style. Each engages with the idea of the "nerd," which is a figure I've had trouble finding a lot of secondary literature on. There's some overlap with fans and media studies work on online communities, but the nerd is different, and it's a word Díaz in particular has used to describe himself and his work. What's interesting is that the two writers started with the same basic objection to the problems of what Wallace calls "Standard Written English" and came up with radically different solutions. Wallace pushed the envelope with footnotes and postmodern stylistic games; Díaz broke new ground in integrating English, Spanish, and many other cultural and genre dialects, making what he calls the bedrock fact of "unintelligibility" a central part of his fiction.