The shadow over The Pale King

Many mainstream critics misunderstood Foster Wallace while he was alive – will publication of his final novel just see them trying to work out its relation to his life story? David Foster Wallace killed himself in September 2008 , and his unfinished novel, The Pale King, which will be published posthumously on 16 April, is on top of all the buzz lists for spring. Wallace was one of my favourites, but I’m wary of reading this one. I can tell you exactly when and why I came to love his work: Octet, in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men . I was reading on the shag-carpeted floor of someone else’s house, halfway into a book that had been annoying me, but amusing and thrilling me just enough to keep me pushing ahead (this after a failed first attempt at reading Infinite Jest), and I came to the midpoint of Octet. The story is a pretty cheap post-modernist game: half-way in, it bitterly acknowledges itself as such, and then goes on for pages and pages, pleading for the reader’s love (writer to self: “you’re going to have to eat the rat and go ahead and use terms like be with and relationship, and use them sincerely”), and citing Milan Kundera. And somehow Wallace managed to suck me into this self-conscious whorl, as the story went on in tiny printed footnotes, raging at itself (“like if you just bought a fancy expensive take-out dinner from a restaurant and brought it home and were just sitting down to try to enjoy it when the phone rings and it’s the chef or restaurateur or whoever you just bought the food from now calling and bothering you in the middle of trying to eat the dinner to ask how the dinner is and whether you’re enjoying it and whether it ‘works’ as a dinner. Imagine how you’d feel about a restaurateur who did this to you”). Well, I guess 99.9% or so of the customers would hang up and stay away. But maybe 0.1% of them would recognise themselves in the restaurateur, stay on the phone to reassure and maybe befriend him, and never order from anywhere else again. That’s what I thought: here was a smarter, funnier version of my neurotic self. That’s how I felt as I read on in his work, through novels and stories, accepting the occasional ungainliness and unpleasantness because he gave me something consoling and amusing and even ecstatic. Then came the news that Wallace had hanged himself , on the patio behind his house, and the news that before hanging himself he had voluntarily submitted to electroshock therapy, and before the electroshock therapy he had been in and out of drug-rehabilitation halfway houses, and my god, all that stuff in Infinite Jest about the mental hospital and the hole of depression opening up in the floor – he had lived it! In an age when lesser writers made millions pretending to have either drug addictions or depressions half as bad as his, Wallace had made comedy of it. He had made art. And many mainstream critics reacted badly. Wallace was, if nothing else, a serious craftsman, yet Michiko Kakutani called his last book of stories, Oblivion, “crude,” “cheap,” and “self indulgent prattling” . James Wood took the book’s final story, a kind of jokey parable about an artist whose art comes out each time he sits to “poo”, and suggested that that was what Wallace was doing : crapping out his work. Despite the hint in the title and the repeated suicide motif, neither critic seemed to get that Oblivion was even slightly about depression. I don’t think they knew what it was about at all. I doubt Wallace minded. “Once the first person pronoun creeps into your agenda,” he said in an interview, “you’re dead, artwise.” He wasn’t about to plead for anyone’s pity, and turned nasty when asked if he had firsthand knowledge of drug problems. He kept rigorously to the post-modernist mode but beat against the walls of its prison, screaming loud so that readers would have to come to his work or flee it. Responses like Wood’s and Kakutani’s are in some ways testament to his power. The writing was too much for them. They couldn’t but take it personally. Now the last novel is coming out: the unfinished manuscript that sat in the study while the body swung on the patio. If the book had been going well, would he have done that? Will anyone be able to read The Pale King without thinking of his death? I know I won’t. This is my fear: that all the fun and fireworks of his prose will become pathologised. We’ll all become Woodian gastroenterologists, trying to figure out how the writing related to Wallace personally, how it came out of him. God, would that stink. David Foster Wallace Fiction Gabriel Brownstein guardian.co.uk

Posted by on April 5, 2011. Filed under News, Politics, World News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.