The Critics | American Writing Special

circumscribed than it had been before. His sen-

tences were as serpentine and as dizzyingly re-
cursive as ever, but he was now deploying them
in an attempt to present as fully as he could the
inner lives of characters more often than not
engaged in tedious corporate or bureaucratic
work. (When he is not at the local community
college or at church, Lane works in “dock and
routing at UPS”.)
Like Lane, the characters in these stories are
often haunted by the possibility that they are
locked inside their skulls, unable to make any
emotional connection with other people. As
Skip Atwater, the protagonist in “The Suffer-
ing Channel”, the last and longest story in
Oblivion, puts it, the “great informing [drama]
of the American psyche” is the “management of
insignificance” – of what Wallace once called a
“peculiarly American loneliness”.
“Good People” appears unchanged as chap-
ter six of The Pale King, the “unfinished novel”
that Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch has as-
sembled from “two Trader Joe’s sacks” full of
manuscript pages that the writer left behind in
his garage office in Claremont when he died.
An eye for the fascinatingly dull: IRS tax returns await sorting at a post office in New York This was the “long thing” that he had been
working on since 1997, a year after the publica-
BOOKS tion of his second novel, Infinite Jest, the book
that confirmed his reputation as the most am-

Bard of the bitious and gifted American writer of his gen-

eration. In his editor’s note, Pietsch says he was
approached by Wallace’s widow and his agent,
Bonnie Nadell, to put together “the best version

blank heart of The Pale King that I could find”.

The loneliness of David Foster Wallace.
By Jonathan Derbyshire
The Pale King: an Unfinished Novel
David Foster Wallace
Hamish Hamilton, 560pp, £20
The last story David Foster Wallace published and talking” about how to deal with an unspeci-
in his lifetime appeared in the New Yorker in fied calamity that has befallen them (which the
February 2007. Later that year, Wallace decided reader infers is an unplanned pregnancy). Lane
to come off the antidepressant he had been tak- recalls that earlier in the day, he had told Sheri
ing for the previous two decades after it started that he did not know what to do – but it is clear
to have severe side effects. The consequences of they have resolved that she will have an abor-
doing so were disastrous. The depression that tion (though Lane pretends that the procedure
the drug had kept at bay came back. “had no name”). Now he is “frozen” by the
Wallace began taking the drug again, was hos- recognition that he is “trying to say things that
pitalised twice and underwent electroconvul- would get her to open up and say enough back
sive therapy – all with little discernible benefit. that he could see her and read her heart and
On 12 September 2008, having written nothing know what to say to get her to go through with
I spoke to Pietsch down the phone from his
office in New York and asked him how he set
about fashioning this mass of material into
something resembling a novel (albeit one that
is half finished and, even in its edited state, is
full of false starts, repetitions and apparent non
sequiturs). “My goal,” he told me, “was to hon-
our the sequence where there was a sequence,
and to recognise the parts that were intended
to form a narrative – and there turned out to be
a fairly significant number of those.”
That narrative concerns a small number of
characters who arrive on the same day in 1985
at an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) tax return
processing centre in Peoria. One of them, it
turns out, is Lane A Dean, Jr. By the time we en-
counter him here, he has married Sheri – who
kept the baby – and is working at the processing
centre as a “wiggler”.
Hisjobistoexaminenewlysubmittedreturns
for orthographic and other errors – a “1040A
where the deductions for AGI were added
wrong”, for instance (Wallace’s long-standing
REDUX / EYEVINE ANDY KROPA 2004

for more than a year, he hanged himself at the
home he shared in Claremont, California, with
his wife, the artist Karen Green.
In the New Yorker story, entitled “Good Peo-
ple”, Lane A Dean, Jr and his girlfriend, Sheri
Fisher, sit silently together beside a lake in Peo-
ria, Illinois. Sheri and Lane have been “praying
it”. Yet he cannot “read her heart”. Sheri remains
“blank and hidden” to him.
“Good People” is an artefact of what we must
now learn to call Wallace’s late style. In the
stories he wrote in the last decade of his life
(eight of which appeared in the 2004 collection
Oblivion), Wallace’s focus became more tightly
fascination with esoteric argots or nomencla-
tures is fully intact here). The work induces in
Lane a “boredom beyond any boredom he’d
ever felt”, one that makes “the routing desk at
UPS look like a day at Six Flags”.
The extravagant ennui that Lane experiences
is the function of a sort of attention deficit: he is

44 | NEW STATESMAN | 18 APRIL 2011

 The Critics | American Writing Special
unable to achieve what Wallace describes ad-
miringly in one of the notebook entries Pietsch
has appended to the novel as a “steady state of
concentration [and] attention”.
There is a caste of IRS employees who do
achieve just such a state, however. They are
known as “immersives”, and while being given
a tour of the Peoria facility on his first day,
another character glimpses a room full of them,
absorbed in their work in monkish, “motionless
intensity”. (Readers of a novel so fascinated by
“dullness” will no doubt divide between im-
mersives and those, like Lane, whose attention
will wander. A character who happens to be
named “David Wallace” observes that “living
people do not speak much of the dull”; nor do
most novelists. Wallace’s gamble was to write
a book about it.)
Other notebook entries suggest that Wallace
intended to integrate the immersives into the
exploration of what he says somewhere is, or
was intended to have been, the novel’s “big
question”: “whether [the]IRSistobeessentially
a corporate entity or a moral one”. The project of
the new breed of IRS functionary is to replace
human wigglers with computers as a way of
maximising revenue while minimising costs.
Wallace imagines one of this new cadre, Merrill
Errol Lehrl, recruiting the finest, most immer-
sive “roteexaminers” available, sothatwhen the
computer “crushes them, the test’ll be all that
much more definitive”.
In 2005, Wallace gave the commencement
address to the graduating class at Kenyon Col-
lege, Ohio. “Our own present culture,” he said,
had yielded the “freedom to be lords of our own
tiny skull-sized kingdoms, all alone at the cen-
tre of creation”. But the “really important kind
of freedom”, he went on, “involves attention,
and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and
being able to truly care about other people”. In
The Pale King, Wallace puts a similar thought
in the mouth of DeWitt Glendenning, the di-
rector of the centre and a representative of the
IRS old guard: “Americans are in a way crazy.
We infantilise ourselves. We don’t think of our-
selves as citizens – parts of something larger to
which we have profound responsibilities.”
Wallace worried deeply about what the cul-
ture had done to Americans’ ability to acknowl-
edge such responsibilities. And here we see
him grappling with what he once said was the
fundamental question of all fiction: “How is
it that we as human beings still have the capac-
ity . . . for genuine connections, for stuff that
doesn’t have a price?” Few novelists have taken
as seriously as Wallace the obligation to write
truthfully about the way we live today. And,
as Pietsch says, even in an unfinished, uneven
novel such as this, the products of that serious-
ness are “spectacular”. l
Jonathan Derbyshire is culture editor
of the New Statesman
newstatesman.com/books
THE BOOKS INTERVIEW
Joshua Foer
You spent a year
becoming the US
memory champion.
Was that always
the plan?
No. The book started
as a magazine article
and then I just became
fascinated with the
subject. I thought it
was going to be about this whole weird
subculture of competitive memorisers.
That I was going to be at the centre of the
story didn’t become apparent until very late
in the game. And I only started writing the
book after I won.
Was it an unexpected triumph?
Yes, but it was also like, “Oh . . . crap.”
The way I’d been thinking about the story
was going to have to completely change.
And it was a struggle to put myself into the
story – I still feel the stuff I’ve learned, the
history, the science, the characters, are all
ultimately interesting. I don’t hold up against
the guy who can’t remember anything or the
Rain Man, Kim Peek.
Do you think some cultures have a
particularly strong collective memory?
Well, I will say there is some sort of G-spot
in the Teutonic soul that is massaged by this
kind of a contest. They have high-school and
regional championships. The German
memory champion is a national celebrity.
How did you train your mind to that level?
The entire art of memorising is figuring out
how to transform information that is utterly
unmemorable into scenes in your mind’s eye
that are weird, ugly, colourful and strange.
Such as the image you create of Claudia
Schiffer having a bath in cottage cheese?
Yes. It’s a kind of engagement of one’s
imagination you don’t practise in daily life.
I think a lot of the people who are involved
in this world have strange imaginations . . .
the other thing is that, in addition to being
mental athletes, an overwhelming number
of them are physical athletes. These are
people who love to push themselves. Such
as the guy who won the US championship a
couple of weeks ago, Nelson Dellis. He’s six
and a half feet tall, blond hair, blue eyes. He’s
now climbing Mount Everest. What else
would you do after winning the US memory
championship except climb Everest?
Did the process change the way you think?
I never thought that memorising stuff
would be fun. What you remember says
a lot about you. We remember the things
that are important to us, the things that
have meaning. I have tried to take away
from all of this something that is radically
outward-facing – what makes things
memorable is paying attention.
You quote William James on how life seems
to become less memorable as we grow older.
Do you now consciously make memories?
Yes. It’s a more philosophical way of
approaching life: how can I suck the
maximum amount of experience out of
whatever it is that I am involved in? To not
be someone who has a boring life. That is
what will hopefully make time feel like
it is passing more slowly, if every day I feel
I am doing something new and different.
People probably do not need to be told that
this is a good idea, but I think it is useful to
have it in the front of your mind.
Do you think we fear losing our memories
because it means losing ourselves?
It’s the thing that scares us most and it’s why
memory improvement is such an attractive
idea and, for centuries, has attracted all sorts
of people who have made a buck off of it.
Mark Twain got wrapped up in it. And go
back to the Renaissance – these people had
these loopy ideas about improving their
memories and gaining spiritual access to the
inner workings of the universe.
Your brother Jonathan Safran Foer draws
heavily on memory in his work. Was it always
a shared interest?
We grew up in a Jewish house. I was once
interviewed by a journalist for a Jewish
newspaper in New York, and he said: “Is
this a Jewish book?” I said, “No!” and then
I thought for a second: “Actually . . . yes.”
The entire Jewish enterprise is about
maintaining a collective memory. It is present
in every Jewish conversation, in every Jewish
ritual experience, so it is probably not
surprising that I ended up doing something
about memory. Or that Jonathan ended up
doing multiple things about memory, from
a very different perspective. l
Interview by Sophie Elmhirst
Joshua Foer’s “Moonwalking With Einstein:
the Art and Science of Remembering
Everything” is published by Allen Lane
(£14.99 hardback)
18 APRIL 2011 | NEW STATESMAN | 45