David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King"

I have a paperback copy that came out in the UK last year or something?

that new yorker piece was pretty intense, yes

still think about this book a lot. i tried to pick it up again at the library a while back to re-read iirc chapter six - about the guy whose girlfriend is pregnant, the chapter chronicling the transcendence of his attitude toward this - & if possible to read the momentary flash-forward about steyck in his army days. so much just unique & shimmering gold in this book.

http://lareviewofbooks.org/article.php?type=&id=1634&fulltext=1&media=

KAREN GREEN’S NEW — and incredibly, her first — book Bough Down, from Siglio Press, is an astonishment. It is one of the most moving, strange, original, harrowing, and beautiful documents of grief and reckoning I’ve read. The book consists of a series of prose poems, or individuated chunks of poetic prose, interspersed with postage-stamp-sized collages made by Green, who is also a visual artist. Collectively the text bears witness to the 2008 suicide of her husband, the writer David Foster Wallace, and its harrowing aftermath for Green. The book feels like an instant classic, but without any of the aggrandizement that can attend such a thing. Instead it is suffused throughout with the dissonant, private richness of the minor, while also managing to be a major achievement.…

reread chapter six of this, wow

it's like a taxonomy of attention

I still think about this book on a very frequent basis. Strangely, it's the most longwinded and boring parts that stay in my mind - endless descriptions of car park traffic circulation; the whole long story about how the guy's dad died on the subway; the concluding chapters with the girl in the mental ward etc... I think I'd convinced myself that the tax office and the story around it was more-or-less factual and I was shocked to discover it doesn't even exist, at all, and therefore the entire story about DFW working there was almost certainly an elaborate lie.

The other bit I remember well is the new starter's 15 minute break where he counts the minutes and seconds he has until he has to go back in, like a death sentence, and wanting to 'run around the adjacent field and flap his arms in the air'.

I wish a fanfic culture existed where people tried to finish this and fill in the blanks

I disagree, but this would've been a great novel if it had been finished.

remembering getting to the end of it and being so frustrated and saddened by how abruptly it ends. brought home "one of your favourite writers has died before his time and you'll never read a new book by him ever again"

i'd feel worse about it if "infinite jest" had a proper ending.

it does!

as in by the end if you piece everything together it forms a cohesive linear narrative

(I had to google to figure out some bits I had missed tho)

im now going to reread it ive just decided

Anyone up for doing on of these in a book club?

YOU ARE CALLED TO ACCOUNT

this is really all i need from this novel

you're watching as the world turns

^^^ most stoner moment in a stoner oeuvre

haha, yeah that guy's story is great

claude sylvanshine, fact psychic, special assistant to an HR systems deputy

all the pictures that goes through this poor guy's head is pretty hilar