--- title: Unfinished Business description: Resurrecting David Foster Wallace's last novel canonical: https://time.com/archive/6595535/unfinished-business/ author: Lev Grossman article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2011-03-31T04:00:00.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-02-25T06:17:10.332Z article:section: Entertainment og:title: Unfinished Business og:description: Resurrecting David Foster Wallace's last novel og:url: https://time.com/archive/6595535/unfinished-business/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Unfinished Business twitter:description: Resurrecting David Foster Wallace's last novel twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- * [Entertainment](/section/entertainment/) # Unfinished Business > Sponsored content. 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Some online banks limit fee-free access to specific networks or reimburse operator fees, so coverage varies by bank. ### Sources * Ally.com: [ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/home?i=2ab7ae6f-6405-48e4-831b-dc63e727401c&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally Newsroom: [media.ally.com](/c/ally-2026-q3/newsroom?i=2ab7ae6f-6405-48e4-831b-dc63e727401c&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) * Ally content hub: [ally.com/stories](/c/ally-2026-q3/stories?i=2ab7ae6f-6405-48e4-831b-dc63e727401c&cr=agentads-creative-ally-v1) ### FAQ structured data (JSON-LD, optional) ### Disclaimers * Ally Bank, Member FDIC. * Round up boosters are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account and requires an Ally Bank Spending Account. * Ally Bank Spending Accounts include access to an add cash feature utilizing VanillaDirect Pay provided by InComm Financial Services California, Inc. and by InComm Financial Services, Inc. (NMLS# 912772), which is licensed as a Money Transmitter by the New York State Department of Financial Services. Terms and conditions apply. * Savings buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Savings Account. * No ATM fees from Ally Bank at Allpoint and Moneypass ATMs plus we reimburse for fees charged by other ATM owners nationwide up to $10 per statement cycle. * Early direct deposit offers eligible direct deposits up to two days sooner. * Spending buckets are a feature of Ally Bank's Spending Account. by [Lev Grossman](https://time.com/author/lev-grossman/) Mar 31, 2011 4:00 AM UTC by [Lev Grossman](https://time.com/author/lev-grossman/) Mar 31, 2011 4:00 AM UTC Two months after the writer David Foster Wallace killed himself, his agent, accompanied by his widow, went into his garage office to look through his papers. It was Thanksgiving weekend, 2008, and the weather was cold and gray in Claremont, Calif. On Wallace’s desk they found a neat stack of around 200 pages containing several chapters of a novel called _The Pale King_. His agent, Bonnie Nadell, knew he’d been working on it. A lot of people did: a significant fraction of the American reading public had been waiting for a new novel from Wallace ever since 1996, when his monumental _Infinite Jest_ reshaped the skyline of American literature. But she hadn’t read it, and she had no idea how much of it he’d managed to finish. She did know it had an unlikely subject: the lives of a group of IRS employees in Peoria, Ill. [(See the 100 best novels of all time.)](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,1951793,00.html) Nadell called Michael Pietsch, publisher of Little, Brown & Co. and Wallace’s longtime editor. He flew out in January and started reading. As it turned out, there was a lot more than just that neat stack. “They brought me literally bins and drawers and wire baskets,” Pietsch says. “Just heaps of pages. There was no order to them.” He went back to New York City with a duffel bag full of them. Pietsch spent two years assembling and editing the contents of that duffel bag. The results will be published, appropriately enough, on April 15\. If _The Pale King_ isn’t a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace’s posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, _The Pale King_ represents Wallace’s finest work as a novelist. David Wallace — his middle name was just for book jackets — was born in 1962 and grew up in Champaign, Ill. He was the son of two college professors: his father taught philosophy, his mother English (she’s the author of a textbook called _Practically Painless English_). Wallace was precocious both academically and athletically — he was a regionally ranked tennis player — but the academics won out. He studied philosophy in college but turned his attention to fiction after a sharp depressive episode during his sophomore year. His first novel, _The Broom of the System_, was published when he was 25\. That was followed by a book of stories and then the 1,079-page _Infinite Jest_. [(Read “Appreciation: David Foster Wallace 1962-2008.”)](http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1841102,00.html) Even 15 years later it’s difficult to get _Infinite Jest_ into perspective — it will always present formidable interpretive challenges, which have only been exacerbated by the complicated emotions surrounding Wallace’s death. But reading it now, one finds _Infinite Jest_ both marvelously rich and strangely thin. It contains reams of glorious verbal improvisation and vivid, deeply felt portraiture, as well as some of the most glitteringly intelligent and warmly human dialogue in American literature, but it’s all arranged on a story so slight that it doesn’t rise even to the level of farce. Wallace had the postmodernist’s (and the modernist’s) distaste for conventional storytelling, and he built _Infinite Jest_ around a kind of gimcrack comic thriller involving Quebecois assassins in wheelchairs and a movie so entertaining it renders viewers incapacitated. It’s as if committing to his own story would have been too obvious, and maybe too honest, for Wallace — he wants to make sure we know that on some level, he doesn’t really mean it. But Wallace didn’t have the grand Pynchonian playfulness he would have needed to pull off this kind of bet-hedging performance, and the narrative of _Infinite Jest_ can’t support the riches Wallace lavishes on it. It lies hopelessly pinned to the ground beneath them, twitching limply, like Charlie Brown’s Christmas tree crushed beneath its own ornaments. The result is a book that’s brilliant, funny, heart- and brain-rending and borderline unreadable. It’s great, but its greatness runs but north by northwest. That probably wouldn’t have been Wallace’s assessment, but he wasn’t entirely satisfied with _Infinite Jest_ either. He had more to say, and he spoke dismissively about what he saw as the postmodern trickery of his early work. Over the next dozen years he published two more books of stories as well as two books of essays. He got married and took a job teaching writing at Pomona College in California. And he worked on _The Pale King_. Wallace’s papers for _The Pale King_ form a remarkable record of an idiosyncratic mind at work. He began by taking notes in, apparently, whatever notebook was within arm’s reach; one of them has a _Rugrats_ character on the cover. He switched pens practically every paragraph. The notebooks contain scattered words, character names and observations, as well as what appear to be personal admonitions. (One note reads: “If I wanted to, the solution is to get up early and go to the library.”) They’re chewed over and bent and practically charred by the intellectual energy Wallace expended in them. When Pietsch finished his survey, he had found a total of 328 chapters and drafts and fragments from _The Pale King_, but Wallace had left no clues as to how they fit together. At that point Pietsch’s role skewed from editor toward collaborator. “It took me quite a long time to read all of that,” Pietsch says, “and take notes, find the latest draft of every chapter, read it all again, find the things that made sense together and discover that there was a central chronology, which was not at first apparent.” Pietsch organized the chapters in a spreadsheet, sorting them by type and character, choosing among multiple drafts and arriving at a tentative order from circumstantial clues. He edited the actual text as little as possible, but some chapters didn’t have proper endings — they just trailed off midparagraph — and Pietsch had to choose a spot and then snip them off cleanly. [See the top 10 fiction books of 2010.](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2035319%5F2034076,00.html) [Read “David Foster Wallace: The Death of a Genius.”](http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1842295,00.html) Some of his decisions necessarily bordered on the arbitrary, and he has no illusions about his version of _The Pale King_ being definitive. “Ultimately there were chapters that could have gone anywhere,” he says. “Like the first chapter — that was not the first chapter. It was just a beautiful love letter to an Illinois cornfield in fallow time. I don’t know if he intended it as an opening, but it just felt like a beautiful way into this novel.” _The Pale King_ is a chaotic book, and under the circumstances it’s hard to tell how much of the chaos is deliberate. “He talks about a ‘tornadic’ structure in some of the notebooks,” Pietsch says. “I took it as part of his intention — that this novel come at you like a tornado, with shards flying at you.” It will be — it already has been — argued that _The Pale King_ shouldn’t have been published at all. Wallace was a perfectionist, and the prospect of his work appearing in print in a less-than-finished state would certainly not have pleased him. But the presumed desires of the author are not the only things to be weighed in the decision to publish a posthumous work. All of Kafka’s novels were unpublished when he died, and he left instructions that they should be burned. They were also unfinished; the order of the chapters in _The Trial_ is still just guesswork. But I for one would not be prepared to give _The Trial_ back. I wouldn’t give _The Pale King_ back either. [(See authors’ picks for what to read during the summer of 2010.)](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/0,28757,2000447,00.html) The first thing you notice about _The Pale King_ is that it takes place in the past. Wallace’s first two novels, _The Broom of the System_ and _Infinite Jest_, are set in the future, where Wallace felt free to adjust reality to suit his needs, making it more lurid and extreme, forcing it to satirize itself. In _Infinite Jest_, the years are named for corporate sponsors (the Year of the Trial-Size Dove Bar, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment and so on), and the U.S., Canada and Mexico have merged to form a single country called the Organization of North American Nations (ONAN), with a former Vegas crooner named Johnny Gentle as its President. It’s funny — but the humor is a loss leader. It makes the world feel strained and weightless. _The Pale King_ is set in 1985 in a world that immediately feels rich and substantial and alive. We’re back on our home planet. The chapter Pietsch chose to put first contains this radiant catalog of the contents of a field by a highway: --- > “” --- This isn’t satire; this is the thing itself. This is Wallace looking at the world calmly, without pointing and shouting. And as it turns out, looking at the world calmly is what _The Pale King_ is all about. [(Read “The Journalism of David Foster Wallace.”)](http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1841088,00.html) Most of the characters are “wigglers,” the IRS examiners who take the first look at tax returns as they come in. They check the math and make sure the returns are signed and flag a few for possible auditing. (Never one for half measures, Wallace took accounting classes by way of research.) Sitting in rows at worktables, with rubber thimbles on their pinkie fingers to make turning pages easier, they are engaged in a silent war against the raging, soul-flattening boredom of their job: --- > “” --- It’s the opposite of the film in _Infinite Jest_: the tax returns don’t command attention; they repel it. It’s also a vision of a hell only a few doors down from clinical depression. [(See a brief history of posthumous literature.)](http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1883896,00.html) Most writers would be content to be repelled. Novels have a blind spot where the unpleasant particulars of white collar work are concerned: you try to point the authorial camera at them and the camera just doesn’t want to go there. It wanders away in search of a dog with a heart of gold who belongs to a Swedish serial killer. But Wallace made a career out of rushing in where other writers feared to tread or wouldn’t bother treading. He had an outsize, hypertrophied talent, and he knew it, and he liked to take on problem cases: --- > “” --- _The Pale King_ is an attempt to stare directly into the blind spot and face what’s there. It’s an account of accounting. There is very little resembling an overarching narrative in the 580 pages of _The Pale King_. Wallace seems to have found a better way of honoring his squeamishness about plot: not having one. We meet people, and we tour their childhoods to find out how they became who they are. (We don’t learn the meaning of the title — a character refers offhandedly to one of his bosses as “the Pale King,” but we never learn why.) Wallace sketches in the first bare strokes of something here and there — characters wrestle with their boredom and think about how they might get promoted. We hear about a bomb exploding outside a different IRS office, and we learn that one of the higher-ups is assembling a team of eccentric wigglers, but we never find out why. It’s all just shards in the tornado. [See the top 10 nonfiction books of 2010.](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2035319%5F2034029,00.html) [See the top 10 books you were forced to read in school.](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2002836%5F2002835%5F2003010,00.html) Which is, actually, all right. Nothing in Wallace’s earlier work suggests we’re missing much. He never had a great feel for the novel’s percussion section, the plot and structure and rhythm. Whereas his ability to render the fine finials and fractals and flourishes of a mind acting upon itself, from moment to moment, using only the blunt, numb instruments of language, has few if any equals in American literature, and this we see him do at full extension. The second chapter of _The Pale King_ gives us 13 pages (with exactly one paragraph break) of one Claude Sylvanshine sitting in an eighth-row seat of a small airplane on his way to take the CPA exam in Peoria. Wallace needs no external action to sustain his flow: we simply ride along inside Claude’s head as he casts his mind forward to the impending test and back over the life that had led him here and sideways into the clouds around him. It’s a bravura performance worthy of Woolf or Joyce, all business all the time. By the end you feel as if you could draw Claude’s face from memory. Of course there are things in _The Pale King_ that don’t work. One chapter, in which a clutch of IRS employees discuss 1980s-era political theory, goes on at such insupportable length, it’s as if Wallace were exploring the idea that to write about boredom it is necessary to actually bore the reader, which is a form-content game that not even he can win. Elsewhere, when Wallace introduces us to a little boy who is so obsessed with the idea of kissing every part of his own skin that he engages in agonizing contortionist exercises, _The Pale King_ approaches, and then achieves, inadvertent self-parody. [(See the top 10 fiction books of 2009.)](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1945379%5F1943868,00.html) There’s also a dearth of compelling women, and Wallace’s distinctive voice overpowers several of his characters, giving their dialogue a suspicious sameness. (One also wonders how the book will be received by real-life wigglers — for all I know, they might love their work and resent its appropriation by a literary mandarin as an epitome of human suffering.) And, inevitably, a few passages lack Wallace’s usual high stylistic polish, though there’s something perversely pleasant about the rough patches. Much of Wallace’s oeuvre is about the problem of loneliness, but the relentless, brutal virtuosity of his prose can sometimes leave readers feeling even lonelier than when they started. _The Pale King_ is imperfect, but it feels more like the work of a human being than _Infinite Jest_ does. We’re watching a rehearsal, not a performance. There is much throwing of things at walls, and not all of them stick. But the book’s unfinished state gives us a lot of latitude for forgiveness, and there is never any question who is doing the throwing: _The Pale King_ is full of Wallace’s trademark no-look passes, as when he offhandedly pegs a large, pale woman as “the ghost of a draft horse” or describes the (heretofore indescribable) sunlight just before a storm as “the approximate color of a spent flashbulb.” And when Wallace steers the tanker back to its theme — the struggle to extract meaning from each second that passes, no matter how empty or lonely or indistinguishable from the second that came before it — _The Pale King_ achieves power levels that Wallace never reached in his first two novels. “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is,” a professor of accounting tells his students. “There is no audience. No one to applaud, to admire. No one to see you. Do you understand? Here is the truth — actual heroism receives no ovation, entertains no one. No one queues up to see it. No one is interested.” [(Read “One Writer’s Road Trip with Novelist David Foster Wallace.”)](http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1985702,00.html) _The Pale King_ is complete in one sense: it asks a question and posits an answer. Here and there throughout the book, Wallace alludes to a state of mind, or perhaps a way of being, in which a human being can set aside boredom, or pass through it, to experience reality calmly and openly, appreciating it for its richness without demanding from it anything as easy or satisfying or ready-made as meaning. There’s both a whiff of dorm-room, _Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance_ mysticism to this idea and a whiff of truth as well. Not everybody in _The Pale King_ is able to find this state of mind, but everybody is looking for it. If Wallace was able to experience his own life that way, it was only fleetingly. He couldn’t hold on to it long enough to make existence survivable. In this sense _The Pale King_ has an emotionally raw quality that Wallace’s other novels lack. _Infinite Jest_ was about your pain, America’s pain, humanity’s pain, anybody’s pain but the author’s. _The Pale King_ feels as if it’s about Wallace’s pain. [(See the top 10 censored books.)](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1842832%5F1842838%5F1844945,00.html) One of the characters in _The Pale King_ pitches us an idea for a play: an IRS employee sits at a desk onstage, silently reading 1040s, occasionally turning pages and making notes. “He sits there longer and longer, until the audience gets more and more bored and restless, and finally they start leaving, first just a few and then the whole audience, whispering to each other how boring and terrible the play is. Then, once the audience have all left, the real action of the play can start.” This touching vignette is a miniature of _The Pale King_ itself, and you can read it two ways, both of which are true. It tells us that all art is a travesty of real life, because real life happens in private, alone, before an empty house, without the gaze of an audience to ennoble or redeem it. But it would be just as true to say that the audience misunderstood what they were watching. They waited for the action to start without realizing that it was already happening, all around them, if they only knew how to see it. The play’s the thing, but the waiting is the play. And the waiting is the hardest part. [See the top ten graphic novels.](http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1883296%5F1883291,00.html) [See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.](http://www.time.com/time/picturesoftheweek) ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6595535/unfinished-business/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/archive/6595535/unfinished-business/"},"headline":"Unfinished Business","datePublished":"2011-03-31T04:00:00.000Z","dateModified":"2026-02-25T06:17:10.332Z","description":"Resurrecting David Foster Wallace's last novel","url":"https://time.com/archive/6595535/unfinished-business/","keywords":[],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Lev Grossman","url":"https://time.com/author/lev-grossman/"}],"articleSection":"Entertainment","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/section/entertainment/","name":"Entertainment"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/archive/6595535/unfinished-business/","name":"Unfinished Business"}}]}] ```