First thoughts on the Pale King, without having read a single word yet.

(photo from Marlinspike Hall showing a Manhattan launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and what the launch of a DFW novel would look like in an ideal world)

I can't help but feel like Hachette botched something with the release of the Pale King. And not because they screwed over independent bookstores for the almighty Amazon or because all the launch parties are now significantly less exciting, but rather because the publication of this book is an event (for a very particular niche, mind you, but an event nonetheless: see articles in Time, GQ and Esquire as proof that this is something worthy of mainstream discussion and coverage) and there is a particular communal bliss in getting hold of something at the same time as many, many other people (see Harry Potter launch events like the photo above or, at a smaller but still significant scale, the way Radiohead can get thousands of people simultaneously downloading their music) that has now been somewhat ruined by the scrambling of people like myself who drop everything when a tweet by @mattbucher makes their day and informs them that Amazon has started to ship the book, push aside relatives and loved ones, stepping on the cat, ruining someone's game of Bejeweled for access to the computer for the fastest click on a  button since those weeks spent on the Impossible Quiz in 2008. This behaviour says something about our society, I'm sure, I just don't know what.

Nor do I care: I live in Dubai where there is no such thing as an independent bookstore and I had no idea when the best of the chains, the Kikokuniya in Dubai Mall would get it (the customer service woman's answer? "If it's not out yet, I don't know." "Yes, but it comes out April 15th in the US, so do you get new books monthly or weekly or what?" "I don't know. Nobody knows. It's impossible to know!") so for me, there was no guilt in ordering it from Amazon (except the slight guilt at paying through the nose for fastest possible shipping known to man disregarding the pain this would cause my poor friend the Visa card). So now I'm anxiously waiting for it to get here, carefully going through reviews while taking the advice at the Pale King info page at the Howling Fantods with regard to spoilers to keep me busy until the book gets here.

What I had missed in reading the previously published excerpts, was that this is a book set in the past. The pre-internet, pre-mobile phone past, in fact, the main narrative taking place in 1985. This in itself has me intrigued because Wallace had previously spoken so often of the fragmented nature of contemporary life, how the only way to deal with this is through “experimental and avant-garde stuff [that] can capture and talk about the way the world feels on our nerve endings,” and how, as he points out in his conversation with Lipsky,

Life seems to strobe on and off for me, and to barrage me with input. And that so much of my job is to impose some sort of order, or make some sort of sense of it. In a way that—maybe I’m very naive—I imagine Leo getting up in the morning, pulling on his homemade boots, going out to chat with the serfs whom he’s freed [Making clear he knows something about the texture and subject], you know. Sitting down in his silent room, overlooking some very well-tended gardens, pulling out his quill and…in deep tranquility, recollecting emotion.

And I don’t know about you. I just—stuff that’s like that, I enjoy reading, but it doesn’t feel true at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from the fact that, I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of which maybe twenty-five are important. And how am I going to sort those out, you know?

Infinite Jest, of course, was the embodiment of the last great pre-Internet novel. Though it imagined certain developments (e.g. the awkwardness of video calling and addictive non-stop entertainment) it was still in many ways a book from the era of television as the root cause of our fragmented narratives. We did not have YouTube or smartphones or hashtags yet and I have been wondering how the added fragmentation with the advent of the internet age was going to translate into Wallace's prose. Was he going to set the novel in the near-future like with Broom of the System and Infinite Jest (which is harder to do now in literary fiction, I presume, because so much of what makes our reality could very well be a fad and how do you describe the over-connected path that we're on without resorting to simplifications and cliché? Gary Shteyngart made a valiant, if failed, attempt to do so in Super Sad Love Story mimicking textspeak and social networking gone haywire but Wallace, regardless of what his critics think, was never about the gimmick), or would it have a contemporary setting? I had never thought of it being set in the past. In a way this is almost disappointing as Wallace had a knack for elucidating things for the reader, to pick out those twenty-five important bits of information amongst the multitude and since there are so few with the ambition to do such things, to do so much of the heavy lifting for us, to find that the world we live in now, the post-Infinite Jest world, is never going to be addressed by him is quite sad.

I am however reminded of what Amanda Wasielewski once told me about how a lot of students expressed frustration that there wasn't any theory on web 2.0 or the social internet or YouTube etc. and that the professors tried to explain in vain that theory doesn't appear overnight. We are so used to getting what we want immediately, be it knowledge or a copy of The Pale King, that the concept of distance and perspective being required for critical and analytical thought puzzles us somewhat. It is this patience, this time-consuming focus, that Wallace - if my understanding of the few pieces I've read is correct - wants to make valuable, to regain a sense of lost humanity (this last may be a tad hyperbolic, especially since I haven't even read the book, but it does feel true). In the end, we are encouraged to see through the "discrete bits of information" (which accounting, the overarching metaphor, contains a multitude of) that fill our every day, that - to quote old Ben here - surrounds us and penetrates us, and to be able to find something worthwhile and important through all of that. And that right there is a contemporary Internet-age subject if there ever was one.

Now. Where is that wretched Amazon delivery man?