The Banality of Good: The Pale King by David Foster Wallace

David Foster Wallace's last work, the unfinished novel The Pale King, is fractured, disjointed, and incomplete; and so too will this review be fractured, disjointed, and incomplete.  As with many incomplete works, roughness adds to the novel's mystique, and unfinished plot lines stimulate the reader's imaginative faculties in ways polished and completed works of fiction cannot.  It is a rare chance that we readers get to invade the mind of a master so fully as to behold his thoughts frozen in progress.  [NOTE: For totally anal readers, the passages below may contain spoilers, but I don't think knowing some of this stuff really takes anything away.]

David Foster Wallace is a relatively new discovery for me.  When Infinite Jest was published in 1997, I was thirteen years old.  When Wallace's groundbreaking essay on television, e unibus pluram, was published in 1993, I was nine.  Wallace's work was beyond me and still remains beyond me more often than sometimes.  Since becoming an adult and a writer, I had been vaguely following Wallace's work throughout the years, often stumbling across a piece in the New Yorker or Harpers, always making mental notes that I'd have to get around to checking out his catalogue someday.  

Since Wallace's suicide in 2008, I have paid much closer attention to his posthumous publications.  The Pale King is the first full-length work of Wallace's that I have read.  He is, for me, the first writer since Victor Hugo whose works I have immediately wanted to consume in their entirety after reading just one.  (The others are Jorge Luis Borges from my adult life; nothing from college since reading for pleasure is anathema to university curricula; Philip K. Dick and Franz Kafka from high school; and from my childhood: the writers of wild fantasy C.S. Lewis, Susan Cooper, Brian Jacques, Dr. Seuss, and Michael Crichton.) 

The premise of The Pale King as unfinished novel (or what may have been the intended premise - Wallace's last work reads like 500 pages of exposition.) is that it's 1985 and there is a WAR going on within the IRS.  On one side are idealists who believe in enforcement of the tax code as patriotic duty: the IRS is a moral entity, and IRS examiners are the modern equivalent of heroes.  (There is something about the 1980s in particular that elevates the banal to heroic.)  On the other side are pragmatists who believe the IRS should be run like a business: its sole job is to generate revenue as efficiently as possible.  The pragmatists want to replace human examiners with a computer, and they are preparing for a demonstration - a la Garry Kasparov vs. Deep Blue or Ken Jennings vs. Watson - where they pit the most productive human tax examiners (some of whom possess superpowers, such as the ability to maintain total concentration in the face of pure boredom or the ability to keep one's eyes open and unblinking for several minutes) against the computer A/NADA.  (From my reading, I interpret the idealists as protagonists - or, the team we are supposed to route for, but this may just be projection; the pragmatists are, of course, "correct" in the sense that they win and necessarily so, which would make The Pale King a tragedy in the classical sense, albeit without a catharsis.  Although I can perceive the irony of having tax-payers forfeit a percentage of their earnings to a machine vis-a-vis the pragmatist position.)

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Books, The Last Book

The Braintree, Massachusetts Borders is having an everything-must-go-going-out-of-business sale: everything is 40% to 70% off.  I'm a bit disappointed because Borders is a better book store than Barnes & Noble, but after visting several times, I have put together a huge backlog of reading material, so the loss of one Borders is not going to significantly impact my life.

Plus, I can speculate on what book will be the last sold: will it be Arthur Agatston's The South Beach Diet?  Sarah Palin's masterpiece, America by Heart?  Could it be one of the many books remaining in the holocaust section?  Or Bill O'Reilly's porno novel?  And what does the last book say about human nature?  What does it say about Massachusetts?

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Book Reviews Aren't Dying; They've Just Moved Online.

<This guest post was contributed by Kitty Holman, who specializes in writing about nursing colleges.  Questions and comments can be sent to kitty dot holman20 at gmail dot com.>

In recent years, much has been said of newspapers's budget cuts and subscription troubles, but no one industry has had as much to worry about regarding the unhealthy state of print journalism today than the book publishing industry. In the past decade, we have seen a remarkable drop in our newspapers's literature coverage: the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and other major print venues have cut books sections. (The Wall Street Journal's recent launching of a book review section - which has been well-received - is an exception to that trend; we'll have to wait and see how well this section does in the coming years.)

Nevertheless, where newspapers's books coverage has suddenly faltered, there is a new opportunity for other forms of media to take its place, namely the quickly rising in-depth literary coverage and discussion common to online magazines.
 
John Palattella, literary editor of The Nation, disagrees.  In his essay "The Death and Life of the Book Review," Palatella explains the history of journalism and how the many forms of media and coverage have shifted over time with and against readership and audience trends.  From an economic perspective, Palatella argues against the commonly held belief that books and literary coverage in print newspapers is dying because such coverage doesn’t "turn a profit." Instead, he suggests that "cultural forces" - such as what he calls "the anti-intellectual ethos of newspapers" - have harmed book coverage, while other, less intellectual sections remain despite losing money.
 
Palatella hypothesizes that the rise of the Internet and other forms of new media has greatly affected how we consume text, words, language, and other kinds of information.  He suggests that free content has made internet browsers more inclined to bounce around the web.  He also points at our reliance on search engines and hyperlinks as characteristics that hurt forms like book reviews which encourage in-depth and patient critical thinking.

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The Book Store

The last time I went back to the States for Christmas, I paid a visit to my local Barnes and Noble megastore chain.  There was a massive “Young Adult” section, comprising almost a quarter of the store's shelf space, subdivided into smaller sections, like "Young Adult Adventure", "Young Adult Mystery", etc.  My favorite subsection was called “Paranormal Teenage Romance”, and it was full of factory series trying to capitalize on the Twilight fad.  This section probably contained a hundred or so books.  

Across the store, past Biblical and New Age sections (I'll refrain from making an irreverent joke here.) was a section called “Philosophy”, containing a hundred or so books.  “Philosophy” was sandwiched between a section containing a hundred or so books on the impending 2012 volcano-people disaster/redemption and a shady bathroom area with a sign reminding customers not to take merchandise into the toilets.

Upon closer examination, “Philosophy” was full of colorful books like “The Philosophy of Batman Begins”, “Dr. House for Dummies”, and "Dexter and Free Will".  I ultimately purchased Dan Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea for about twenty-five dollars, Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere for a rip-off price of forty dollars, and a Barnes and Noble publications's full-color photo, oversized volume on anatomy and physiology on sale for only eight dollars.  These books are currently decorating my bookshelf until I overcome my crippling blog addiction.

Book Review: Bruce Bartlett - The New American Economy

Bruce Bartlett's conservative economic bona fides are apparent in his resume: he started as a member of Ron Paul and Jack Kemp's Congressional staff, then became Executive Director of the Joint Economic Committee during the Reagan administration and later served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Economic Policy at the Treasury Department under H. W. Bush.  He literally wrote the book on supply-side economics, with Reaganomics: Supply-Side Economics in Action in 1981.  With such unimpeachable conservative economic credentials, Bartlett feels free to slaughter some of the right's sacred cows in his recent book, The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and the New Way Forward.  He rehabilitates John Maynard Keynes as a misunderstood conservative, calls for the victory celebration and subsequent retirement of supply-side economics and defends President Obama's stimulus plan as the only thing to do.

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