[This is one of the finalists in the 2024 book review contest, written by an ACX reader who will remain anonymous until after voting is done. I’ll be posting about one of these a week for several months. When you’ve read them all, I’ll ask you to vote for a favorite, so remember which ones you liked]

For the longest time, I avoided reading The Pale King. It wasn’t the style—in places thick with the author’s characteristic footnotes,¹ sentences that run for pages, and spasms of dense technical language. Nor was it the subject matter—the book is set at an IRS Center and tussles with postmodernism. Nor the themes, one of which concerns the existential importance of boredom, which the book, at times, takes pains to exemplify.

No—I couldn’t read The Pale King because it was the book that killed him.

Prelude: First Encounter

David Foster Wallace died in 2008, a year before I encountered his work; but I didn’t know it at the time. I was nineteen, with a broken wrist that forced me to drop all of my courses and left me homebound and bored. I decided to revenge myself on these irritating circumstances by spending four months lying in bed, stoned, reading fiction and eating snacks.² And I happened to have a copy of Infinite Jest.

What to say about Infinite Jest? It remains Wallace’s masterpiece, widely considered the greatest novel of Generation X. It takes place in a near future where the US, Canada and Mexico have been merged into a single state. Each year is corporately branded, with most of the action taking place in “The Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment.” It’s set in three locales: a drug rehabilitation center, an elite tennis academy, and a Quebecois terrorist cell.³ The novel clocks in at over a thousand pages, two hundred of which are footnotes. It includes sentences of absurd length, with some descending into multi-page molecular descriptions of various drugs. The book pulls the kind of stunts that shouldn’t work, but in Infinite Jest they do, because the book is that good, the characters that deep, the subject matter that prescient. Infinite Jest is often considered the “first internet novel,” predicting in particular its addictive allure.

By all rights, I should have hated it. Long, ostentatious, packed with dozens of characters, 90% of whom happened to be straight white males. As I read, I tallied the number of named female characters (three), imagining the tirades I would go on with my similarly politically-inclined friends.

No such tirades materialized. Infinite Jest overcame my ideological fervor, a rare feat at the time. I cared too much about the characters, many of whom spoke to internal experiences I recognized but had never put into words. The themes gestured at a worldview beyond my radical leftist ideology, one I wouldn’t fully articulate for many more years. Reading David Foster Wallace felt itchy, somehow, like his message was sideways to everyone else’s, like he was missing some important point, or else I was.

The Project of David Foster Wallace

Infinite Jest made Wallace a star. The book was both a literary sensation and cultural phenomenon, described by one commentator as “the central American novel of the past thirty years, a dense star for lesser work to orbit." Nonetheless, Wallace wasn’t totally satisfied. “I don’t think it’s very good,” he wrote, “some clipping called a published excerpt feverish and not entirely satisfying, which goes a long way toward describing the experience of writing the thing.” He grew determined to surpass Infinite Jest with something new.

Wallace aimed to write fiction that was “morally passionate, passionately moral.” He believed that “Fiction's about what it is to be a fucking human being.” His active period spanned the late 80s to the 00’s, cresting during the cynical 90s, the age of the neoliberal shrug, when on one hand,“Postmodern irony and cynicism's become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy,” and on the other, the average American parked himself in front of the television for six hours a day.

His major concerns were:

1) How to transcend postmodernism

2) The deforming effects of entertainment culture

Postmodernism can be understood as the idea that we’re so trapped within language that reality remains remote. At its most extreme, postmodernism seems to suggest that language is all that exists. In politics, this manifests as movements that focus on how people speak, much more than movements of the past; and in literature, as writing that aims not to immerse the reader in a plausible world, but to keep the reader hyper-focused on the fact that they’re reading a work of fiction. Wallace began his literary career as a postmodernist,⁴ before swerving away mid-career, most dramatically with Infinite Jest.

He wasn’t some simple reactionary. His work wove in postmodern self-awareness, metacommentary and irony, all while arguing that we had to transcend it. And to do so, we need the very principles postmodernism had spent the past half-century deconstructing: decency, sincerity, responsibility, neighborliness, sacrifice. As he said in his famous Kenyon commencement address, This is Water, “The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

He believed contemporary fiction was stuck in two modes: cheap entertainment, or grim jeremiad. “Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?” He aimed to inspire a vision of another way of living, both with others and within our own minds. His third novel, the “Long Thing,” which eventually came to be titled The Pale King, was meant to be an articulation of that vision.

Post-postmodernism

After I left the radical left, it was hard to find anything to believe in. The rightists were refreshingly frank, but dealt with postmodernism mainly by strawmanning it, ignoring its strongest points and asserting the naivest of realisms. Besides, their ideas were ugly and brutal. Religion offered another path, but again, it felt like mere reaction—giving up on synthesis and bowing out of the intellectual conversation altogether.

Wallace was one of the few suggesting something new. In Wallace’s world, postmodernism and consumer culture form a wicked duo, the former reducing reality to discourse, and the latter papering over the resulting emptiness with a carnival of glittering distractions. His work uses the techniques of postmodernism to depict the frenetic, saturated tempo of modern life, but through it all unearthed the perennially human—like he was saying look, we haven’t seen it in awhile, but it’s still here! The project of writing sincere fiction striving for moral depth was so out of vogue, it’s almost shocking at times to read; while his style is arch-modern, he considered 19^th-century novelists his spiritual inspiration. Wallace offered a worldview which was old fashioned but not right-wing, beautiful and true, but also sophisticated.⁵

In short, I became a huge Wallace stan. I began devouring his essays and short stories, name-dropping him constantly, even pinned a David Foster Wallace button to my backpack. I was a little discomfited by talk of the supposed obnoxiousness of his fans: “David Foster Wallace lit-bros,” who “played ultimate frisbee, rallied against multinational beverage corporations, listened to The Mountain Goats, and told me to read Infinite Jest.”

But this was easy to dismiss. Wallace was brilliant and sensitive, our best hope for overcoming postmodernism. No doubt his critics were intimidated by the length and difficulty of his prose; or else trapped in the glass fortress of postmodernism, fulfilling the twin imperatives of defending the keep and tearing down the beautiful and the excellent.

Besides, Wallace’s fans were supposedly dudes. My femaleness was counterargument enough.

His Sickness

In his youth, Wallace was beset by mental breakdowns. He dropped out of school multiple times, underwent electroshock therapy, and contemplated suicide. When in grad school, he was put on Nardil, an MAOI. MAOIs work by inhibiting Monoamine Oxidase, which in turn hoovers up monoamine neurotransmitters like serotonin, dopamine and norepinephrine. This double negative leaves the user with a more motivated, peaceful and energized brain chemistry.⁶

This was the neuropharmacological lot in which Wallace was parked in 1985.⁷ He remained on Nardil through the writing of Infinite Jest, two collections of essays, two books of short stories, and the rough draft of The Pale King. Through it all, Wallace would’ve been on the Tyramine Diet, avoiding cheese, hot dogs and fermented foods. He was never entirely satisfied with being on antidepressants. In the words of his friend, Jonathan Franzen, he was a “perfectionist” with an “aversion to seeing himself as permanently mentally ill.” He tried going off Nardil in 1988, but fell into a profound depression, and was only able to get Nardil to work again by combining it with electroshock therapy.

Writing The Pale King

The novel that would eventually be titled The Pale King went through many stages, starting with an early draft focused on an IRS agent so obsessed with viewing himself from a third person perspective that he stars in his own porno. This plotline receded, with the book converging on its eventual focus: a group of IRS agents travel to an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, 1985, where a battle takes place over the philosophical and technological future of the agency.

As the years went by, Wallace got lost in the project. He described the writing process as “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm,” and said, “The whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t.” He worried he’d need to write “a 5,000 page manuscript and then winnow it by 90%, the very idea of which makes something in me wither and get really interested in my cuticle, or the angle of the light outside.”

By 2007, a decade in, he’d made progress, but the book was still far from any kind of final form, and he felt stuck. In the Spring of that year, he went to a Persian restaurant and was left with severe stomach pains. The culprit, of course, was Nardil.

His doctor advised him to switch to an SSRI. Nardil was, after all, a “dirty drug,” from another time. Wallace decided to go for it: after 22 years, he went off Nardil. According to Jonathan Franzen, the lack of progress on The Pale King wasn’t incidental to this decision: “That he was blocked with his work when he decided to quit Nardil—was bored with his old tricks and unable to muster enough excitement about his new novel to find a way forward with it—is not inconsequential.”

For the first couple weeks Wallace felt alright, but as Nardil receded from his system, so did his stability. He lost thirty pounds, stopped writing, and was hospitalized for major depressive disorder. He grew desperate: tried an array of antidepressants, underwent electroshock once again. He tried going back on Nardil, but the drug that had stabilized him for two decades no longer worked—it closed its doors, as often happens when a patient goes off a stable regimen and tries to come back.

It was 2008 and Wallace was down 70 pounds from the previous year. Franzen believed Wallace became obsessed with the idea of suicide, returning to compulsively, like an addict. Wrote Franzen:

[O]ne of his own favored tropes, articulated especially clearly in his story “Good Old Neon” and in his treatise on Georg Cantor, was the infinite divisibility of a single instant in time. However continually he was suffering in his last summer, there was still plenty of room, in the interstices between his identically painful thoughts, to entertain the idea of suicide, to flash forward through its logic, and to set in motion the practical plans (of which he eventually made at least four) for effectuating it.

On September 12^th, 2008, Wallace wrote a letter to his wife, arranged the unfinished manuscript of The Pale King on his desk, and hanged himself. He was 46 years old.

The Pale King: Central Concerns

After Wallace’s death, his editor Michael Pietsch assembled the manuscript, winnowing it down to a set of consistent characters and generally forward-moving narrative. Infinite Jest famously ends before the climax, major plot threads dangling, and so does The Pale King—but while the former is cruelly deliberate, The Pale King remains unfinished through tragic happenstance, major themes underdeveloped, story nascent.

The plot: a group of IRS hires converge on an examination center in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. There’s the sense that once they’re there, things will start happening, but nothing really does. The chapters alternate between the 1985 story, character background, debate/discussion of the deeper philosophical meaning of the IRS, metanarrative written in the voice of 2005 David Foster Wallace, scraps of trivia/world building/slices-of-life.

To give a sense of the disparate voices in the book:

- We witness the messy mind of literature’s worst psychic, who channels random irrelevancies like “The middle name of the childhood friend of a stranger they pass in a hallway,” or “someone they sit near in a movie was once sixteen cars behind them on an I-5 near McKitterick CA on a warm, rainy October day in 1971.”

- One chapter is focused on a young boy whose “particular [ ] goal was to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.” This was meant to be the backstory for one of the characters, but Wallace never settled on which.

- A chapter where everyone turns pages: “Ken Wax turns a page. Matt Redgate turns a page. ‘Groovy’ Bruce Channing turns a page. Ann Williams turns a page. Anand Singh turns two pages at once by mistake and turns one back which makes a slightly different sound. David Cusk turns a page.”

- A ‘prologue’ Wallace inserted 70 pages into the book, written in the 2005 authorial voice, launches into a diatribe about how the book is really a memoir of his time working for the IRS, but for legal reasons the publishers insist on classifying it as a work of fiction. “This might appears to set up an irksome paradox. The book’s legal disclaimer defines everything that follows it as fiction, including this Forward, but now, here in this Forward I’m saying that the whole thing really is nonfiction; so if you believe one you can’t believe the other, & c., & c.”⁸

The characters are monumentally well-developed. We follow IRS bureaucrats as they suffer childhood abuse in dusty trailer parks, struggle with “attacks” of copious sweating, watch a father die in a subway accident. And these lives—which feel so human and so real—are juxtaposed with the tedium of their work at the IRS. 

We can’t help but be reminded that faceless bureaucrats are real people, as real as us. But there’s a feeling, while reading (I was feeling it, at least), that I wanted these characters to become more than IRS agents. To be artists or firemen or—something. Something more interesting.

But Wallace suggests this impulse is wrong. He’s not trying to depict these IRS examiners as being in any way exceptional, despite our identification with them—rather, he’s trying to show that every human being is that deep, and that interesting, if we take the time to know them. He enjoins us to avoid relating to others as “the great gray abstract mass,” even if they form part of some tedious and unappealing bureaucracy. To take on the burden of always, in every moment, relating to others as fully human.

This injunction is central to Wallace’s approach to transcending postmodernism. His great innovation was to use the tools of postmodern writing (meant to remind the reader that they’re reading words, not experiencing reality) to create work that loops back around and becomes as immersive and convincing as the finest of realist prose. His writing embodies the nerve-fraying and frenetic pace of modern life, with the technical jargon and long sentences and footnotes capturing something of the feel of the internet. And through it all, his characters shine through, heartbreakingly human, capable not only of cruelty⁹, but of goodness that surprises even themselves.

Wallace’s writing is maximalist in that he forces you to deal with all of it: the difficulty in escaping the web of discourse, the fact that you’re reading a novel, the fragmented nature of modern life, the fact that the IRS asshole auditing you has as rich and deeply felt a human experience as your own.

Pale King: Themes

The plot builds towards a war over the future of the IRS: with one side wanting the IRS to remain committed to civic virtue, its tax examinations carried out by humans; and the other wanting the IRS focused on maximizing profits, its examiners to be replaced by computers. The IRS here is standing in for all institutions where people operate both as individuals and as part of a larger collective: the conflict between the IRS as civic organization and the IRS as corporation reflects a general conflict taking place in the 80s¹⁰, and arguably still today.

Wallace is, of course, on team human. His criticism of the profit motive parallels his rejection of minimalism, the aesthetic of postmodernism: when we reduce reality to a thin, abstract variable, whether that be profit or discourse, we mutilate it. And once we’re there , all that’s left is our role as solipsistic consumers.

One of the most moving sections of the book is a 100-page novella smack in the middle, written from the perspective of wastoid¹¹-turned-accountant Chris Fogel. Chris’ 1970s youth was spent in partying and shallow rebellion, once again, papering over a deep emptiness: “I think the truth is that I was the worst kind of nihilist—the kind who isn’t even aware he’s a nihilist. I was like a piece of paper on the street in the wind, thinking, ‘Now I think I’ll blow this way, now I think I’ll blow that way.’ My essential response to everything was ‘Whatever.’”¹²

The emotional core of the story is Chris’ relationship with his father, who’s sardonic, dutiful, and old-fashioned: “His attitude towards life was that there are certain things that have to be done and you simply have to do them—such as, for instance, going to work every day.” Chris resents his father’s conformity, while blind to his own: “I was just as much a conformist as he was, plus a hypocrite, a ‘rebel’ who really just sponged off of society in the form of his parents.”

Chris’ story is located close in the book to a philosophical dialogue concerning the nature of the IRS and the moral crisis in society. As one character expounds (emphasis mine):

‘It’ll all be played out in the world of images. There’ll be this incredible political consensus that we need to escape the confinement and rigidity of conforming, of the dead fluorescent world of the office and the balance sheet, of having to wear a tie and listen to Muzak, but the corporations will be able to represent consumption-patterns as the way to break out—use this type of calculator, listen to this type of music, wear this type of shoe because everyone else is wearing conformist shoes. It’ll be this era of incredible prosperity and conformity and mass-demographics in which all the symbols and rhetoric will involve revolution and crisis and bold forward-looking individuals who dare to march to their own drummer by allying themselves with brands that invest heavily in the image of rebellion. This mass PR campaign extolling the individual will solidify enormous markets of people whose innate conviction that they are solitary, peerless, non-communal, will be massaged at every turn.’

This speech is set in the 80s, but was written in the 00s, when the internet was nascent and social media hadn’t yet taken off. Wallace’s diagnosis is prescient: between Quiet Quitting and Live to Work, young people are rejecting the tedium of office life and embracing the life of the influencer, which does indeed involve both the trappings of rebellion and conspicuous consumption.

It hasn’t gone down exactly as Wallace predicted. He was concerned about the withering effects of hedonism (which true to his predictions have persisted), but he underestimated the resurgence of doctrinaire political ideology. 

The Pale King is in many ways revanchist, arguing for reclamation of territory lost to hedonism in the name of old-fashioned ideals like civic responsibility, neighborliness, and going to work every day. And revanchism has certainly made a comeback: today we face a proliferation of conservative/Trad movements, but very few seem interested in rehabilitating old fashioned civic virtue.¹³ Cynicism in societal institutions is endemic on both the right and the left, perhaps with good reason: while a bureaucrat in the 80s could expect to own a home and support a family, these days an ‘ordinary’ job doesn’t cut it. The IRS’s of the world have taken the path that Wallace warned against, embracing automation and the bottom line, and neglecting the real, human realities of the people they’re meant to serve.

The Millennial/Gen Z complaint is real: the economic conditions are harder than they were in the 50s/70s/90s; the world of our parents no longer exists; starting a family is exorbitant. So why should we subject ourselves to bureaucratic tedium and keep society running, when society doesn’t seem to care much about us?

The basic argument is that it’s our parents’ fault. Our literal parents, their generational fellows, and the government-as-parent. Wallace-speaking-through-character goes on, “‘I don’t think the American nation today is infantile so much as adolescent—that is, ambivalent in its twin desire for both authoritarian structure and the end of parental hegemony.’”

There’s a kind of double-dialogue happening. On one hand, this character is speaking in the 80s and quite literally referring to the ‘wastoid’ generation, menacing America’s future with their nihilistic hedonism and dubious work ethic. This same generation would grow up to steer the ship straight into ballooning corporatism, debt-slavery for the young, runaway home prices and their now routine boom-bust economic style. But like I said, this was written in the 00s and was undoubtedly meant as a more contemporary commentary too.

It can be satisfying to blame the Boomers and catalog their failures. But there’s no denying that every flaw we can pin on them has only been amplified in us, the younger generations. Poor work ethic, lack of civic virtue, cynicism, self-absorption, susceptibility to media/celebrity/spectacle—even the oh-so-common move of blaming the Boomers smacks of adolescent petulance, a child refusing to play instead of an adult stepping up and trying to make the game better.

But Wallace does more than diagnose the illness—he’s trying, his perennial crucible, to articulate a cure.

The Path Forward

Wallace suggests that boredom, far from being something to avoid, might point the way to deeper self-knowledge. “Maybe dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention.” Boredom might even gesture towards enlightenment: “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.”¹⁴

In Wallace’s conception, boredom isn’t only personally enlightening—it can also be a heroic sacrifice for the collective good. At one point Chris Fogel wanders into the wrong classroom and ends up in the exam review for Advanced Tax, taught by a capable and dignified Jesuit (possibly the eponymous “pale king”). The Jesuit makes a speech which sparks an epiphany in Chris, where he declares the profession of accounting a heroic one: “True heroism is you, alone, in a designated work space. True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care—with no one there to see or cheer.’”

There it is: the vision, the cure, the path forward. We accept the burden of adult responsibility, go to work every day and engage in the important but unglamorous work that keeps society running. We orient our institutions not towards money but principle. We refuse to treat people like numbers or cogs or some great undifferentiated mass—we treat them as fully human, always, even and especially when they’ve chosen to subsume some part of their individuality to a soul-killing institution, because we recognize this as a heroic sacrifice they’re making for the good of the collective. And we withstand our negative emotions, embrace them fully, travel through their every texture until we transform and open to a deeper and richer experience.

The problem with all this, of course, is that in the middle of writing the book, Wallace killed himself.

Disillusionment

For a long time I, like so many others, romanticized David Foster Wallace’s suicide. It crystallized him as a tragic figure, eternally 46, handsome, at the height of his powers—we never saw him go gray and saggy, grow uncool, post cringey takes on Twitter. His death preserved him in his youth, and elevated him to the almost angelic.

I was too self-aware to utter the cliché “too beautiful for this world,” but I might as well have. In a sense, there’s truth to it:¹⁵ both Wallace’s brilliance and his depression were intertwined with his sensitivity. The world impinged on his nervous system more harshly than it did on others, furnishing a world of details and intricacies and interconnections that allowed him to experience modernity differently and perhaps more deeply than anyone else—but also left him overwhelmed, spending much of his life in the quiet Midwest, and at times totally short-circuited.

Of course I wished he wasn’t dead.¹⁶ I researched the technical details of MAOIs, trawling for clues in the beautiful mystery of his absence. I burned through his essays, until there were none left, and there never would be again.

Franzen, in a posthumous essay, seems disgruntled with Wallace fans romanticizing his old friend. “Flickering beneath his beautiful moral intelligence and his lovable human weakness was the old addict’s consciousness, the secret self, which, after decades of suppression by the Nardil, finally glimpsed its chance to break free and have its suicidal way.” He seems particularly disappointed in Wallace’s decision to hang himself on his back porch, where he would’ve known his wife would find his body.

Franzen suggests that Wallace’s writing style, the “footnotes-within-footnotes self-consciousness,” might mirror his sickness—the dense technical jargon, hyper-multi-clause sentences, nested footnotes—that the whole beautiful mess could become self-annihilating. I’ve heard people call his style called both maximalist and masturbatory—and while I lean, always, towards the charitable interpretations of Wallace, I do have to admit that it’s impossible to remain consistently absorbed in his work: one minute he’ll rearrange your mind into new shapes, making you feel things it never would’ve occurred to you to feel—and the next you’ll catch yourself reading the same 200-word sentence over and over.

It’s possible that Wallace’s style, innovative though it was, became something of a trap, a writing tic that mirrored a mental one, to the point that it was no longer intentional, but compulsive. This possibility worried Wallace: “I am tired of myself, it seems: tired of my thoughts, associations, syntax, various verbal habits that have gone from discovery to technique to tic.”¹⁷

I knew that Wallace had been posthumously #MeToo’ed. Having felt the sting of being judged by the left for what felt like trivial indiscretions, it was easy at first to pattern-match onto Wallace. Surely the allegations weren’t so serious, not that I knew since I wasn’t looking too closely, but no one’s perfect, and besides, wasn’t there something ugly about kicking someone who couldn’t defend themselves? The truth was simpler: I’d been through so many disillusionments that I didn’t want to face another.

But the allegations weren’t great. And actually they weren’t even allegations, but confirmed facts about his life: that his relationship with Mary Karr became abusive to the point where he tried to push her out of a moving car, threw a coffee table at her, and tried to buy a gun to kill her husband.

I finally had to face it. How is it that someone who so stressed decency was capable of treating someone in his life so poorly?

Postmodernism, of all things, offers a way out: the Death of the Author. Sure, Wallace was a flawed person, but that doesn’t need to mean anything for his work. His work exists separately, an discursive experience on the reader’s end, etc, etc. But Wallace himself rejected the Death of the Author,¹⁸ and treating his work in this way would totally undermine his project. You can’t cut away the messy human bits to preserve your clean, linguistic sanctum.

I’ve been reading D. T Max’s biography of Wallace, and, in spite of his at-times-not-great actions, the picture that emerges isn’t of a wicked man—it’s of a desperate one. I wondered if this is what went wrong: he was a convert to his old-fashioned moral style, and perhaps he embraced it with something of a convert’s fervor. Maybe the reason he failed to predict the popularity of 21^st century political dogmatism is because he was himself, on some level, a dogmatist, embracing morality with a tightness that sometimes feels rigid. 

Maybe his fervor for the moral outstripped his lifting power. Maybe he was never a true moralist, and the nihilistic cynicism of his youth persisted on some level; the Nardil only keeping it at bay.

Wallace often seemed quite alone. By the time of his death he was married, had a community and intellectual correspondents. But he remained alone in his work, with no one to turn to when he got lost.

There were parts of himself he hated, and they twisted painfully upon themselves: “I go through a loop in which I notice all the ways I am... self-centered and careerist and not true to standards and values that transcend my own petty interests...but then I countenance the fact here at least here I am worrying about it; so then I feel better about myself... but this soon becomes a vehicle for feeling superior to imagined Others... I think I'm very honest and candid, but I'm also proud of how honest and candid I am—so where does that put me.”

Perhaps the Nardil brought these ugly parts—the careerist, the narcissist, the old nihilist—to the surface, and Wallace was unable to face them. Perhaps he wasn’t a true maximalist: maybe there were aspects he avoided contending with, so he emphasized others, and grew imbalanced. His work is undeniably, uniquely valuable, but perhaps it’s also limited.

But is it even possible to articulate what went wrong? As he states in his short story ‘Good Old Neon:’ “What goes on inside is just too fast and huge and all interconnected for words to do more than barely sketch the outlines of at most one tiny little part of it at any given instant.”

There’s a temptation to identify the flaws in Wallace’s psychology and map them onto his work so as to discard the chaff. But doesn’t this reduce, in a way, to the Death of the Author? We can’t cut out the ugly Wallace so as to canonize the perfect one. Maximalism again, we need to face all of it: the thousand dense pages and the gun meant for Mary Karr’s husband and the unfinished novel and the moments his characters feel realer than anyone you know and the other writers trying to figure out what we’re doing here and what it means.

If Wallace had lived, his vision wouldn’t have reached any ultimate closure, but it would have grown and deepened. Instead, we’re left with something beautiful but 

Footnotes