The story lines here never fully converge, but many of them involve the employees of an Internal Revenue Service regional examination center in Peoria, Ill. An editor's note at the beginning of The Pale King describes the challenging process of turning shopping bags full of manuscript pages into a salable book. Apparently, at the time of his death in 2008, Wallace did not leave behind detailed plans or outlines for the project. That said, the lack of a traditional, linear plot works to the advantage of Wallace's inimitable style, which combined a maximalist obsession with the intricacies of arcane topics (such as Reagan-era tax codes, as is the case here) with a microscopic or even pointillist ability to examine the subtlest nuances of our ever-shifting attitudes and inner lives. He was willing - or was compelled - to probe the darkest and remote crevices of the human psyche, where few other authors dare to venture.
The Pale King is sure to delight the zealous fan base that made Infinite Jest into an unlikely cult phenomenon. I mean, you try lugging a 1,104-page book around all day in your messenger bag! Wallace was known for his frequent and manic use of footnotes and endnotes, a device that purposely disrupted linear reading by making us flip back and forth and often injected a kind of absurdist humor. Sixty-six pages in, we get to an Author's Foreword, in which a character named David Wallace insists that he is the real author David Foster Wallace (not to be confused with another David Wallace character here):
