The Pale King by David Foster Wallace – review

David Foster Wallace's suicide in 2008 was a shock that will go on reverberating for as long as people remain interested in the novel. Even if you had mixed feelings about his work, there was no doubting his colossal talent and no mistaking his centrality to his generation of American writers. If anyone was going to become the Melville of the corporatised society, the post-natural environment, the pharmacologically altered human landscape we all now inhabit, he was the one.

His big novel, Infinite Jest, was one of those densely summarising works that seem to reverse the chain of cause and effect around them. If the record didn't indicate otherwise, you might think that Pynchon, Gaddis, Burroughs et al had all been greatly influenced by it, so thoroughly does it metabolise their methods and sensibilities into its fantastical tale of rehab, tennis prodigies, wheelchair-using Canadian terrorists, and the quest for a piece of film footage so entertaining it reduces watchers to catatonic wrecks.

At his death, Wallace left behind an unfinished novel entitled The Pale King. Twelve chapters had been neatly printed out, and there were copious drafts of further chapters, along with memos concerning the overall intentions of the project. Out of these materials his editor, Michael Pietsch, has assembled a text which, if necessarily speculative, seems a plausible rendering of the work in progress.

The subject matter is as narrowly focused as that of Infinite Jest was richly profuse. It is, in a word, boredom. Boredom and its various effects on the spirit, ranging from suicidal despair (suicide was a constant motif in Wallace's work) to a transcendent power of concentration. The latter is periodically held up as the nearest thing to heroism left in a world where there are no more frontiers to push back, and all that remains to challenge the aspiring hero is the drudgery of organising data. "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space," one character remarks, "is what real courage is . . . "

The principal setting in which this austere and yet perversely thrilling theme is explored is a regional tax-processing centre on the outskirts of Peoria, Illinois. The year is 1985: "a critical year for American taxation and for the Internal Revenue Service's enforcement of the US tax code", as one of many passages of rather wickedly dulled-down prose puts it. At issue (and one gathers this as much from Wallace's notes, appended to the text, as from the narrative itself) is an intra-service fight over increasing automation, and the question of whether the IRS should be an organisation in which morally competent human beings enforce civic virtue, or just a money-making business in which machines process paperwork for maximum revenue. That question in turn becomes a way of thinking about relations between individuals and the state: among other things, The Pale King seems to have been intended as a rather serious novel of ideas.

Even at its robust 560 pages, it consists largely of beginnings – topics stated, settings described (superbly; Wallace had a detailed understanding of the physical textures of the American landscape), backstories laid down. The drama, as it stands, consists of one extended first act. An executive at the tax centre has been recruiting new accountants – most of them prodigies or freaks of one kind or another – in preparation for what seems to be an impending showdown between man and machine. The 50 monologues, skits and sketches that comprise the text as we have it introduce these oddballs and savants as they converge on IRS Post 047 in Peoria, and begin to interact.

That's about it, but the lack of development matters less than you might expect. For all his baroque plotting, Wallace was generally more interesting at the level of the part than the whole. You go to him for the self-contained, usually comic, often staggeringly grotesque riffs and routines at which he excelled, rather than some sustained Jamesian evolution of story out of character. The provisional nature of The Pale King adds to this montage-like effect. You move through it as if through some mildly phantasmagorical gallery, making your own connections as you wander along. Here is a tax-examiner who compulsively counts words as he converses. Here is another whose "immersive" powers are such that while working he will sometimes levitate. Here is a "fact psychic" whose mind streams with superfluous data about everything he encounters: "Tastes a Hostess cupcake. Knows where it was made; knows who ran the machine that sprayed a light coating of chocolate frosting on top; knows that person's weight, shoe size, bowling average . . . " Here is a young contortionist dedicating himself to the goal of being "able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body" (this excerpt, published in the New Yorker, has already won the book some notoriety). There are two ghosts in the building, and the bland offices are further intruded on by periodic, tedium-induced hallucinations.

Some of these notions work better than others. There's a wonderful 100-page monologue in the middle of the book describing a man's quasi-religious awakening from slacker "wastoid" to the high calling of accountancy, after an accidental encounter with a Jesuit teacher. There's a stunning passage about men on a work break: they're just standing outside talking about nothing in particular, but the few pages nail a condition of bleak office-life vacancy with definitive accuracy.

On the other hand there's some fairly run-of-the-mill metafictional business about the book not being a novel at all but a "non-fiction memoir" of the author's experience as a tax examiner in the 80s, which include a wearisome farce about being confused with another David Wallace. This side of Wallace – the rather leadenly playful postmodernist – always struck me as mystifying. Why the need for this kind of pseudo-sophistication when you are as genuinely sophisticated as he was?

Then too, the female characters are pretty crudely handled. One is made up "like an embalmed clown"; another gives "woodpeckerishly intensive" fellatio. There's a fat lady in a muumuu who looks like "several women all cohabiting in just one garment". And so on. It's not that the men are any less broadly satirised, but they tend to have other dimensions than the purely physical, whereas very few of the women do. You notice it.

But the book more than survives its flaws. In fact, as it wrestles with its own intuitions about dullness and repetition, it rises intermittently to something like greatness. The surprise (to me) is that it does so more in the prose itself than the many clever inventions comprising the story. Wallace's style often seemed to me bludgeoningly over-explanatory. It could hit the odd Pynchonesque note of forensic rhapsody as some highly complex process was articulated in minute detail, but mostly it sounded like a slangy technical manual; serviceable, but short on charm, and exhausting. The Pale King doesn't go in for understatement either (or charm for that matter). But in linking its exploration of tedium to the rarefied world of taxes, it opens itself to a very particular set of linguistic possibilities, exploiting them to create a verbal music of striking originality. Snatches of tax code drift through characters' minds, arcane fiscal questions erupt into conversations, or take over the text altogether for short stretches. They don't bear quoting out of context (just imagine the most mind-parching piece of legalese you've ever tried to read), but they are used judiciously and they become curiously mesmerising. You experience them less as words than pulsations; periodic incursions of some ambient deathly force into the characters' lives, that must be reckoned with even if it destroys them.

At a certain point it becomes impossible to resist the thought that under all the high talk about the place of boredom in modern life, what Wallace was really writing about was depression. There is a section in double entry columns that consists of little more than a roomful of examiners silently turning the pages of tax returns – "Ed Shackleford turns a page. Elpidia Carter turns a page. Ken Wax attaches a Memo 20 to a file. Anand Singh turns a page . . . " On it goes, column after column – "Ken Wax turns a page. David Cusk turns a page. Lane Dean Jr rounds his lips and breathes deeply in and out like that and bends to a new file. Ken Wax turns a page . . . " It is one of the strangest, saddest, most haunting things I've ever read.

In an interview once, Wallace rather surprisingly named Larkin and Auden as two of his favourite writers. Larkin's squatting "toad work" seems present somewhere in The Pale King, as does Auden's "Fall of Rome" with its tax-defaulters and "unimportant clerk" writing "I DO NOT LIKE MY WORK". But in relation to Wallace's own indefatigable engagement with his world, it's the lines from Auden that seem most apt: "coming out of me living is always thinking,/Thinking changing and changing living." He was such a figure himself.

James Lasdun's It's Beginning to Hurt is published by Vintage.