Thinking About Boredom: David Foster Wallace's The Pale King

It took me a long time to read The Pale King, not because of the length or the way sometimes life makes you start and stop certain things. I wouldn't read The Pale King for the fact that it was David Foster Wallace's last fictional words on earth after he committed suicide, a suicide that deeply affected me as a fan and admirer. Even though his widow and his editor, a long time friend, reassured fans that the book was approved by Wallace, he having left notes about how to publish the book, I just couldn't do it. I was scared to read something that I felt would let me see into the mind of someone at the end of things, someone who had decided that life was too much, a thought that I, and I am sure others, have had at times in life when things got tough.

So years pass, and every now and then The Pale King creeps up on those various aggregate lists of good reads and in those damn buying algorithms by Amazon and other retailers. Each time I saw it, each time I resisted, opting for other sometimes intentional lighter fare because I just didn't want to think about the "harder" things. As you get older, however, you start thinking about what you believe are the harder, darker things in life.

Recently, my thirty-seventh birthday happened. I am at a weird space in my life where I am stuck in a twilight zone of finishing one thing with my doctorate and trying to transition back to a more socially acceptable normal working life somewhere. For those that might not know, devoting your life full time to higher academics puts you in a bubble that can be very tedious, you subsist on college campuses, classrooms, conferences, and libraries, working on your research and writing, reading repetitive materials looking for nuggets of wisdom, you lose touch with so much of the functional reality of living and working everyday, especially if you were a product of a blue collar background like myself.  For five years I have soldered on in that lifestyle, basically for the bulk of my thirties, what many would consider to be the "prime" of my life. So as it spirals to an end there is a lot of doubt, a lot of thinking about am I good enough, am I too old to get back in the game, what if I can't get a job doing what I love to do? What if I can't ever get my life started again?

When I say you start thinking about the darker things in life it doesn't necessarily mean that you are completely at a loss, some people are and I hope that they seek out others to talk and find support, but even the most mentally strong person finds themselves questioning things about life (as in the previous questions above), about the process of how do we do life after a certain amount of years on this planet? This got me to thinking about Wallace's fictional work again, the way I always enjoyed how his men, women, and children addressed the process of functioning in life. For instance, in Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, the story about the bathroom attendant. That story nails so many aspects of the difficulty of life and what we do to survive, to find meaning, even if there is apparently no meaning at all. So one day, shortly after my birthday I am at a used book store in Homewood, Alabama on an arctic vortex influenced Saturday and there The Pale King set, out front on a shelf of complete shit titles of bad romance and some completely throw away ragged mass market trade paperbacks from the 80s', the kind that have that weird chemical smell that never dissipates no matter the age or the way they were stored. In a way, my time for the book had come and I knew it.

The Pale King is about life, specifically, how do people deal with what can be the boredom and tedium that being alive presents. Wallace frames the story around people from all walks of life going to work for the IRS in the mid 1980's. His characters muse about boredom, often times comically, about how to deal with it, especially in working in accounting, or even just in trying to concentrate in a job generally. For example, take this passage:

"I know quite well how desk work really was. Especially if the task at hand was dry or repetitive, or dense, or if it involved reading something that had no direct relevance to your own life and priorities, or was work that you were doing only because you had to---like for a grade, or part of a freelance assignment for pay for some lout who was off skiing. The way hard desk work really goes is in jagged little fits and starts, brief intervals of concentration alternated with frequent trips to the men's room, the drinking fountain, the vending machine, constant visits to the pencil sharpener, phone calls you suddenly feel are imperative to make, rapt intervals of seeing what kinds of shapes you can bend a paperclip into, & c." (p.293) 

Have we all not thought this way? I know I can admit that I have, and that is the beauty of so much of the book, you want to stop, to look away, but Wallace is so good at talking to you, helping you to think and laugh and cry about the mundane that you are compelled to look, to push on, to see where the next thought is going to go. The book is like a small group therapy in itself, creating a sense of connection with you (me), and maybe that is what Wallace wanted. Maybe writing it was his therapy during dark times till the darkness unfortunately became too much. 

***The quote comes from the Back Bay Books paperback edition of The Pale King***