The State of the Pale King

April 15th, release-day of David Foster Wallace's posthumous novel The Pale King, looms large. And, with the release date approaching, lovers of literature (still burned by The Original of Laura) are starting to ask themselves just how much of a complete book this is.

In what became the essential epitaph after Wallace's death, DT Max's New Yorker piece "The Unfinished", Max mentions that,

the novel that, had he finished it, would have been his third, was one-third complete, by an estimate that he made to Nadell in 2007

Of course, from everything we've learnt, 2007 was also when Wallace's problems with Nardil surfaced and he was not able to write much after that. So using basic logic here, the common conception is that it is one third of a book.

So we have the sceptics, like Scott Esposito at Conversational Reading who writes

Its common knowledge now that Wallace did not get close to finishing The Pale King, and that the book that will be published on April 15 represents a heavily edited and stitched together version of what Wallace left behind. Clearly, this book has been made to serve the many readers out there who would like to see a completed, standardized version of The Pale King.

and on the other hand the optimists like Nick Maniatis who writes a good rebuttal on the stellar Howling Fantods, collecting all that we know about the state of the manuscript and concluding

So will The Pale King end up reading like 1/3 of a full novel? Will it suddenly and inexplicably end? My gut feeling is that it will be much more of a novel than we expected and thus when it reaches the 'end of material' point we'll feel a very different emotion to the usual Wallace kind of 'end'. I hope that doesn't occur, but I expect it will.

Will it be edited to a neat ending contrary to Wallace's 'design'? Discounting the ridiculous premise of this question... If it were the case, structuring it to have a neat ending would not even be an option. I can't imagine Pietsch making that kind of decision.

Personally I veer on the optimist side. I think anyone who thinks that it will be the first 400 pages of an uncompleted 1,200 page book is ignoring the work methods of authors like Wallace, who confessed to Amherst Magazine

I am a Five Draft man. I actually learned this at Amherst, in William Kennick's Philosophy 17 and 18, with their brutal paper-every-two-weeks schedules. I got down a little system of writing and two rewrites and two typed drafts. I've used it ever since. I like it.

From the descriptions of his agonising rewrites of everything, I find it very hard to believe that in 7 or 8 years of full-time writing on a project, he hadn't completed at the very least a first draft. Zadie Smith may write from A to Z, but Wallace never has. It's not going to be like "the story just ends" in the middle of a scene where Lane Dean Jr. is professing his love for Bella Swan but knows they can never be together because not only is he a vampire but he is also completely fictional. Rather, I believe it'll be a complete novel with some sections more revised than others. The absolute worst case scenario I can imagine is that he's described gaps in the narrative the way he did in Adult World II from Brief Interviews With Hideous Men, i.e. something akin to:

a. Question Jeni Roberts asks is whether Former Lover had indeed in their past relationship ever fantasized about other women during lovemaking w/ her.

1a(1) Inserted at the beginning of the question is participal phrase 'After apologising for how irrational and inappropriate it might sound after all this time...'

1b. At some point during J.'s question, J. follows F.L.'s gaze out fast-food window & sees her husband's special vanity license plate among vehicles in Adult World lot: → epiphany. Epiph unfolds more or less independently as facially asymmetric F.L. responds to J.'s question. [...]

(excerpt nicked from everything2.com since I don't have my copy of the book with me)

Which, considering the strength of the episodes we've seen so far is fine and dandy with me. What seems to be clear from the excerpts published is that the issues raised in the Kenyon Commencement address are going to be core elements to the novel, namely how to deal with monotony and spirituality. My favourite of the published excerpts is All That in the New Yorker, which tells the story of a child who thinks he has a magical toy cement mixer

At some point, several weeks or months after Christmas, however, my biological parents led me to believe that it was a magic and/or highly unusual cement mixer. Probably my mother told me this in a moment of adult boredom or whimsy, and then my father came home from work and joined in, also in a whimsical way. The magic--which my mother likely reported to me from her vantage on our living room's sofa, while watching me pull the cement mixer around the room by its rope, idly asking me if I was aware that it had magical properties, no doubt making sport of me in the bored half-cruel way that adults sometimes do with small children, playfully telling them things that they pass off to themselves as "tall tales" or "childlike inventions," unaware of the impact those tales may have (since magic is a serious reality for small children), though, conversely, if my parents believed that the cement mixer's magic was real, I do not understand why they waited weeks or months before telling me of it. They were a delightful but often impenetrable puzzle to me; I no more knew their minds and motives than a pencil knows what it is being used for. Now I have lost the thread. The "magic" was that, unbeknown to me, as I happily pulled the cement mixer behind me, the mixer's main cylinder or drum--the thing that, in a real cement mixer, mixes the cement; I do not know the actual word for it--rotated, went around and around on its horizontal axis, just as the drum on a real cement mixer does. It did this, my mother said, only when the mixer was being pulled by me and only, she stressed, when I wasn't looking. She insisted on this part, and my father later backed her up: the magic was not just that the drum of a solid wood object without batteries rotated but that it did so only when unobserved, stopping whenever observed. If, while pulling, I turned to look, my parents sombrely maintained, the drum magically ceased its rotation.

This is such an interesting concept to me: childhood credulity and faith in what we're told. It's this level of faith that, if we manage to keep it intact, become religious beliefs later. The magic only happens when you're not looking. You can't prove or disprove it.

And now, with just over a month left until the publication of Wallace's last novel, I have no way of proving or disproving that it is more than just cashing in on an author's fame with an incomplete manuscript. But I have faith.