Chaos Reading discussion

2013 Group Read #2: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

GROUP READ DETAILS
Reading starts: As soon as you're able
Discussion Starts: 15 March 31 March 2013 (Since this is a longer book than usual)
*On the day, I'll add a note to the title of this thread to let people know the discussion's started. In the meantime, people can stop by this thread to chat, and I might post some bonus material about the book- but no spoilers until discussion opens please.

FACTS & TRIVIA
*Length: Approx. 550 - 720 pages depending on the edition.
*First published: 2011, posthumously, unfinished.
*Author: David Foster Wallace (US)
*The novel was published posthumously on April 15 2011. After Wallace's suicide on September 12 2008, a manuscript and associated computer files were found by his widow, Karen Green, and his agent, Bonnie Nadell. That material was compiled by his friend and editor Michael Pietsch into the form that was eventually published. Wallace had been working on the novel for over a decade. *Even incomplete, The Pale King is a long work, with 50 chapters of varying length totaling over 500 pages.
*The cover art for the US edition was designed by his widow, Karen Green.
*The novel was one of the three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; no award was given that year.

Now, my question for the DFW fans - Is this a good place to start if you've never read any of his novels before?

Woohoo! I was going to start reading Brief Interviews With Hideous Men today, but if TPK is the choice of this group, TPK it is :-)

Ruby wrote: "Now, my question for the DFW fans - Is this a good place to start if you've never read any of his novels before?"

Yes, most likely. You get a good feel for DFW, and is a more accessible read than Brief Interviews With Hideous Men and a lot shorter (although probably only since it was unfinished) than Infinite Jest.

The novel is unfinished but it is fantastic, and most of DFW's work does not provide the reader with a neat wrapped up conclusion anyway.

Thanks guys. I was a little disappointed, as I was planning on starting DFW with Infinite Jest, but I feel a little better about starting with Pale King now :)

Well my copy hasn't shown up yet. To add to my challenges, I'm getting migraines and can't seem to read for more than 20 minutes at a time. The fact that I clearly need glasses at this point isn't helping! I'm hoping to participate still, but I seriously doubt I'll be finished by the 15th :(

Okay. I'm definitely not going to make this by March 15. New kitten says no. How is everyone else going?

Ruby wrote: "Okay. I'm definitely not going to make this by March 15. New kitten says no. How is everyone else going?"

Kittens are never conducive to reading, also its impossible to ignore the cuteness of a kitten to read anyway.

I just finished, however it was my second read of The Pale King so it went fairly quick.

I most likely will not be done by March 15, either.

I won't be done by the 15th. One of my senior cats required emergency surgery and that caused a lot of nail chewing on my part, poor little guy. He seems to be doing well but he has a fourteen day recoperation ahead and he is twelve so kind of watching out for him.

Karen wrote: "I won't be done by the 15th. One of my senior cats required emergency surgery and that caused a lot of nail chewing on my part, poor little guy. He seems to be doing well but he has a fourteen day..."

I will keep my paws crossed for your cats recovery, Karen!

Whitney wrote: "Karen wrote: "I won't be done by the 15th. One of my senior cats required emergency surgery and that caused a lot of nail chewing on my part, poor little guy. He seems to be doing well but he has ..."Thanks Whitney. So far, he is better every day..:-)

Karen wrote: "I won't be done by the 15th. One of my senior cats required emergency surgery and that caused a lot of nail chewing on my part, poor little guy. He seems to be doing well but he has a fourteen day..."

I hope your little guy is still doing will. I probably won't be done by the 15th either. It's coming along a lot faster than I thought and I'm only about 100 pgs in. Lots of work and a short hockey trip kind of got in the way. This book has been a tough read for me so far.

Okay, so should we go for 31 March or a little longer?

Karen - I do hope your cat's doing better now. Sending purry thoughts his way :)

I think 31 March would work for me.

Karina wrote: "Karen wrote: "I won't be done by the 15th. One of my senior cats required emergency surgery and that caused a lot of nail chewing on my part, poor little guy. He seems to be doing well but he has ..." Thanks, he is doing bettter every day.

Ruby wrote: "Okay, so should we go for 31 March or a little longer?

Karen - I do hope your cat's doing better now. Sending purry thoughts his way :)" Thanks, March 31 sounds good to me.

Okay - March 31 is the new start date. I'm only 10% in, but starting to really get into it.

Just found this group and I love DFW so I am certainly looking forward to this discussion! Hope that everyones' reading is progressing well :)

I'm only just over halfway through. And those footnotes are killing my eyes!

I MADE IT! With a whole day and a half to spare! Yay - I finished in time!

How's everyone else going? Are we going to have enough people for a discussion?

Discussion Is Open!

Whew! Well, I don't know about anyone else, but I really found that a hard slog! I vacillated between loving and hating this book, and it was incredibly hard to form an opinion, being an unfinished novel.

I have a few questions to kick us off, though:

- Did people find that the endnotes, (which give an indication of the book DFW intended to write) reflected what actually came through in the text? In other words, do we think this was the book that DFW meant to write? I feel like a fair few of those plot points were missing - either decided against or just never finished.

- I saw in a discussion guide preview a comment that the female characters were seen as relatively minor. I found the two female characters, Toni Ware and Meredith Rand, to be the two most compelling characters in the book (with the possible exception of the young Leonard Steckyk). What does everyone else think?

- WTF do we think was happening in Section 48?! I feel like I've pieced together most of it, but I'm a little hazy on what actually happened at the picnic (If anything - Glendenning could have been hypnotised by Toni Ware, I suppose) and exactly who was involved. Oh, and of course, why.

Ruby wrote: "
Discussion Is Open!

I nominated this novel orginally, because I always felt it would lead to quite a bit of discussion. That being said I don't know where to start so I guess I will attempt to respond to the kick off questions first:

-After reading the endnotes I felt that this novel was probably going to be massive in scope. If those notes are accurate it looked like we were only getting about half of the overall story. I liked that they were presented to us and we get a glimpse inside DFW's writing process throughout the novel. From my understanding he began working on this novel back in the late 1990s, and shelved it for a while, then came back to it at the time he committed suicide.

Brief Interviews With Hideous Men (1999) has a similar style to some sections of the Pale King, and it is rumored that two short stories from Oblivion (Incarnations of Burned Children and The Soul is Not a Smithy )were originally part of the Pale King. It makes me wonder if at some point he was planning to scrap the whole novel and just use sections elsewhere.

-I think its hard to tell where he was going with female characters, but in the unfinished novel I think Toni Ware specifically is an important character. We also get that very long conversation including Meredith Rand. As an unfinished novel it may be hard to really determine where he was going with the women characters, or if there were more.

-I always thought that Glendenning was drugged and may have stabbed somebody (?), but I never was positive on that. It sounds like Glendenning had a psycotic episode and was in restraints at the time of the interview, and the interviewers are just messing with him (speaking pig latin, threatening him with a knife, talking about his wife).

The placement of this section is strange however. DFW used these strange ambiguous sections early in other works (like Infinite Jest) and it is not until later on that we get the other pieces to complete the puzzle of what is really going on. So since it is unfinished, we may not know for sure.

What did everyone think about the "Author's Forward" section, and its placement several chapters into the novel? Did it add to the novel, or was it just a postmodern gimmick?

The main themes appear to be boredom and ways of coping with boredom, as well as dealing with masses of data. The Pale King uses the context of IRS employees finding ways to cope with the mass of data they receive.

DFW is outspoken on his disdain about our television/commercial culture and they way we are constantly bombarded by useless data, and that theme is everpresent in this novel.

I also just want to note that Leornard Stecyk's backstory is one of the funniest things I have read.

Ben wrote: "-I always thought that Glendenning was drugged and may have stabbed somebody (?), but I never was positive on that. It sounds like Glendenning had a psycotic episode and was in restraints at the time of the interview, and the interviewers are just messing with him (speaking pig latin, threatening him with a knife, talking about his wife). ..."
It does seems as if he was drugged and stabbed someone with a BBQ fork. The thing is, who were the agents talking to him? One of them had to be Toni Ware, I think. There's definitely a female in the room, and we do find out at a few points that she becomes a departmental psychiatrist (she's involved with the video experiment for starters, and that's probably her hypnotising us at the end). I had thought it must have been Reynolds & Sylvanshine otherwise. Unless all three were in the room with Glendenning?
So why was he drugged? Who did he stab?
That chapter also had some great little one-liners: "Who is this man to your right and left?", made me laugh.

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Ben wrote: "What did everyone think about the "Author's Forward" section, and its placement several chapters into the novel? Did it add to the novel, or was it just a postmodern gimmick?..."
I thought it was pretty much a post-modern gimmick. And I thought the same for many of the footnotes. They only made sense when they were placed in the sections mirroring tax documents. In the other sections, they could just have easily have been main body text.

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Ben wrote: "The main themes appear to be boredom and ways of coping with boredom, as well as dealing with masses of data. The Pale King uses the context of IRS employees finding ways to cope with the mass of data they receive. ..."
This is the part I had the biggest problem with. This notion that the work is inherently boring. As a former federal public servant who has worked on social security law, I resent that! If you know what it is you're looking at, fully understand the context politically and socially for the people in society who stand to be affected by it - it's anything but boring!

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I also felt that he really took the piss out of public servants, portraying them all as deeply, deeply crazy. There is reference to this in the endnotes though, where DFW says he either portrayed them as having psychological issues, being career bureaucrats or having a strong sense of civic duty - and I don't think that's too far from reality.

Yeah I thought the Author's Forward was gimmicky, and the whole story was a bit cliched too- the story could have done without it!

I imagine that DFW has a similar writing process to Zadie Smith- I know he inspired her and can see a lot of similarities in the storytelling method. They just kind of start writing from page one with a rough set up and without knowing where the ending is going to be. Works fine for Zadie and she appears to cap it around 400 pages, but for someone as verbacious as DFW I think it seems to spiral out of control.

If there was a lot more still to be written, I imagine a lot more would have been cut out, too, although I can see how his work would fall victim to J.K. Rowling editor fear, where they just sit back and let the books expand, especially given how popular and huge Infinite Jest was. If I'm right about the writing process, then I just found the plot too aimless, and if he'd managed to figure out where it was going and edited a lot of it with a goal in mind I would have enjoyed it a lot more :-)

I think you're spot-on there. I liked some of the ideas in the endnotes, but he was so far away from fleshing out those ideas still, and after what, 150 chapters written in total?

I'm just looking through the notes I jotted while reading, and there are a couple of other points I wanted to talk about too:

*Chapter 8 (Toni Ware's backstory) I thought was one of the most beautiful pieces of fiction I've ever read, and worked really well as a standalone piece. I loved the imagery of the headless doll. The body was what the men took and used, but the head was what they cherished. I loved the use of the terms "the mother" and "the daughter" throughout, (rather than using proper nouns or pronouns).

*I loved the idea that we need to be distracted from being bored, or else we'll experience some greater, darker psychic pain. I just wish he had fully explored or illustrated that concept, rather than tap-dancing around it.

Ruby wrote: "This is the part I had the biggest problem with. This notion that the work is inherently boring. As a former federal public servant who has worked on social security law, I resent that! If you know what it is you're looking at, fully understand the context politically and socially for the people in society who stand to be affected by it - it's anything but boring!"

I may have mispoke by using the word "boring". Maybe what I was looking for was more along the lines of tedious. I think his main point was to show ways of keeping focus on a repetitive task and working your way through the dullness. A job that requires enough thought to need close attention, but is tedious and easy for the mind to stray. One of my favorite quotes is
"To be, in a word, unborable.... It is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish".

Ruby wrote: *I loved the idea that we need to be distracted from being bored, or else we'll experience some greater, darker psychic pain. I just wish he had fully explored or illustrated that concept, rather than tap-dancing around it.

Here is a very interesting essay that expands on this (and uses the Pale King as one of the examples).

Leo wrote: "Yeah I thought the Author's Forward was gimmicky, and the whole story was a bit cliched too- the story could have done without it!

I think DFW has at least an idea or theme he working with in his novels, but he does stray and allow the work to come of its own. So it is a very loose framing of where he is going.

Boredom is in his own words exactly what the Pale King is about (as usua, among other things). I think that DFW himself struggled a lot with the pessimistic fact that life itself is all about keeping yourself occuppied - as the article E Unibus Pluram, which focused on media and addiction (and which is also a good read before Infinite Jest) indicated. I seem to have forgotten quite a bit and will have to freshen up my memory as soon as I get home so that I can relate to what you are saying, but there is one part that I remember really well as a good indicator for this train of thought. It is when one of the main characters is stuck, tired, in a room and has to utilize the anti-boredom techniques in order to be able to continue (and does a few quickly, stops, breathers, thinks about something else, does a few more in succession, yawns, stretches, and so on) and how he visions his work in relation to his spare time. It is always something that has to be done in many kind of situations. There are usually places you'd rather be or things that you'd rather do than where you currently are or what you are engaged in. This also leads to a paradox since you know that you shouldn't be thinking this way and have to occupy yourself with some numbing task, but that task might make you think of that which you shouldn't and so on.

Will take a look at the boo and see if I have any notes in a bit.

Jonas wrote: "Boredom is in his own words exactly what the Pale King is about (as usua, among other things). I think that DFW himself struggled a lot with the pessimistic fact that life itself is all about keepi..."

Yeah, I think there's a distinction to be made between the "boring" repetitive tasks (like rote assessments) and the broader "dry, boring" subject area of tax in general. In my eyes, DFW didn't distinguish between the two, and made some pretty sweeping assumptions.

That said, I've done some really repetitive assessment work before (funding submission assessment for example), and it's remembering what it is all about that prevents even that from becoming boring, at least to me. If you remember that each document is about someone's life and livelihood, and that the numbers and words represent something very real, it doesn't have to be boring.

This book definitely awakened my inner public servant! There were times where I really felt he was disrespectful of the profession.

This was me, reading the parts that came off anti-public servant...

Ruby wrote: "This was me, reading the parts that came off anti-public servant..."

Hahaha!

I think DFW also tried to express the tedium/boredom of the job to draw out the quirky focus techniques of the employees: Fogle's concentration sequence, Mr. Excitement's levitation, etc. Did this work in the end to accurately portray boredom? I think it may have been a bit heavy handed. Although I thought §25 was great.

I don't think he was being anti-public servant as much as a kafkaesque anti-bureaucracy. This comes through especially in the Author's Forward section.

Most of the characters had some out there, strange characteristic, but that could just be for compelling different characters. I thought Lane Dean, Jr. was a very believable person. Somebody doing this just for a paycheck and trapped in a job they find mindnumbing. I've been there myself and can totally relate.

All in all though I am a huge DFW fan, so I may just be pumping up my chest to defend him.

Ben wrote: "I think DFW also tried to express the tedium/boredom of the job to draw out the quirky focus techniques of the employees: Fogle's concentration sequence, Mr. Excitement's levitation, etc. Did this..."

I hadn't looked at it that way. In the endnotes, it says that an HR specialist, of sorts, was assembling agents that had special powers in order to put together a team of awesome assessors to test against a new computerised model, (although this storyline hadn't been completed). I'm not sure the special abilities themselves had anything to do with focussing despite boredom - that was just a side benefit that the HR Person was exploiting. Toni Ware's ability was to be able to not blink for a long time, for example.

I saw the boredom stuff as a separate point, mostly brought out through that interminable 100 page chapter, and the tedious footnotes etc. By doing this, DFW gives us a taste of tedium and of how the assessors need to maintain concentration or else miss important information that was hidden in unexpected places. It was a successful technique I thought - but not necessarily a fun one for the reader!

I see your point about it being a somewhat kafkaesque portrayal of bureaucracy, and it was certainly satirical, and I'm sure I'm being overly sensitive to this, but..... I did find it was very much an outsiders view of public servants, despite the intricate detail. It really wouldn't be an issue for anyone else except the people being satirised!

Re - The Author's Foreword (I couldn't go any longer without correcting the spelling - sorry guys, pet peeve) - I'm curious as to what purpose people thought it served? And why do we think it was placed 9 chapters in?

Ruby wrote: "The Author's Foreword (I couldn't go any longer without correcting the spelling - sorry guys, pet peeve) - I'm curious as to what purpose people thought it served? And why do we think it was placed 9 chapters in? "

Is it lame that I wanted to edit the spelling mistake out of my past posts?

(Yes, it is haha! I didn't realise what we were talking about :S say what you see!)

He mentioned the recent popularity of memoirs, the first time he appeared I think. As mentioned before I found his story a bit cliched, and in some interviews he mentions the stereotypical nature of the 'out of rehab' story, I assumed that the discussion of drug use in his youth was a(n unnecessary) dig at the blandness of bestselling memoirs?

Ruby wrote: Re - The Author's Foreword (I couldn't go any longer without correcting the spelling - sorry guys, pet peeve) - I'm curious as to what purpose people thought it served? And why do we think it was placed 9 chapters in?

Wow, that is embarrasing..... thanks for the correction. I'd blame it on posting before my coffee, but it appears I did it twice. /shrug.

Sorry, guys. I let it go a few times, but I.. just.... can't.... help..... myself. ;)

Everything posted so far is fascinating. I have finished this book but need some time with my thoughts. I never thought I would use the note function on my Kindle but I was wrong. More soon.

OK. First I must apologize for coming so late to the party. Events conspired with the difficulty of reading this book but I am finally done. I am not overly fond of the modernist style per Burroughs and Franzen so I was not sure what I would find here. As most of you have already noted, what I found was very hard to define. It has taken me a while to do the review and since you have all worked over most of the points, I am going to let my reivew speak for me here.

Can a book have a personality? If so, this book is Bi-Polar. There are sections so well executed that I felt like I was reading for the first time, experiencing another’s thoughts as my own. His descriptions of the Midwest, and the culture of the early 70’s are terrific. There are sections of this book that are mind numbing. Boring does not begin to describe the quagmire of nothingness that doesn’t connect, doesn’t inform and instead allows you to experience DFW’s descriptive state where you cannot focus or move ahead because you are stuck.
I have read that David Foster Wallace suffered from severe depression most of his life and I have read that ‘The Pale King’ is about boredom so I wonder, what was boredom to DFW? I experience boredom as temporary disconnect where nothing interests me. I wonder though, if I were extremely talented, obviously constantly at odds with my surroundings, if I were also suffering from depression so severe that I was treated with Electric Shock Therapy more than once and on psycho tropic drugs, what would boredom be to me and I think the answer is this. Boredom would be a state of hopeless inertia and a state that I would fear like a claustrophobic fears a closet. This said, I wonder if writing this was DFW’s way of dealing with his depression and he decided to give us a taste of how it feels to feel so good one day and dead the next day. I read he never wrote about his depression, maybe he was trying to work it out in this book with its multiple plot lines and large cast of characters.
Since the book is not finished, everyone draws different conclusions as to its meaning, purpose and structure. I have a few thoughts on this.
1) The Forward appears well into the book and both negates and supports the book as actually, more or less a memoir of DFW’s experiences but not necessarily as they happened. I think ‘The Pale King” is both fiction and memoir with a lot weird pseudo fantastical stuff thrown in to keep everyone guessing.
2) The footnotes. I have no opinion here because I quit reading them early on. They appeared to contain information that I didn’t need and sometimes were not associated with the passage I was reading. I think DFW put them there for his own amusement, kind of like background music.
3) The structure as envisioned by the editor. This book is so episodic that you could probably read any chapter in any order and still come away with enough thought bullets to keep you occupied for quite some time.
As far as the story told, the best passages are unsurpassed by anything I have ever read and I have been reading for a long, long time. If it was DFW’s intent to pull me out of myself and send me on a difficult but rewarding journey, he succeeded. I am glad I read this book.

I think those are all good points. I hadn't thought of the book in terms of being a reflection of DFW's manic depression. It did remind me a little of Cory Doctorow's work though, in the sense that there are a lot of unique ideas there, but they're never fully fleshed out or explored before he seems to dash off on the next tangent. Obviously, DFW was a more accomplished writer, but I can see the possible mania you're referring to.