In 2010, Little, Brown will publish David Foster Wallace’s final novel, an unfinished manuscript the author called the “The Pale King.” The New Yorker published an excerpt this week.
According to D. T. Max’s long feature about Wallace and his final work, the drafts of the manuscript totaled “several hundred thousand words,” recounting the lives of Illinois IRS workers. In 2007, the author said only one-third of the novel was finished. The website also features scanned pages from the novel, including artwork by Wallace’s wife, Karen Green.
Here’s more from the essay:
“Wallace began the research for ‘The Pale King’ shortly after the publication of ‘Infinite Jest.’ He took accounting classes. He studied I.R.S. publications … He enjoyed mastering the technicalities of the I.R.S. bureaucracy–its lore, mind-set, vocabulary. He assembled hundreds of pages of research on boredom, trying to understand it at an almost neurological level.”