I remember being taught about the literary structure of a novel, the plot pyramid, I believe it was called. If you will reach back and dust off the mental boxes of memories and seemingly useless information, you will recall the each literary work should contain an exposition, rising action, climax, falling action, and a denouement. These five elements were supposed to give the story depth and order. While many books successfully follow this path, life usually doesn’t, and in a fashion patterned after such an event, neither does David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel, The Pale King. Go ahead and ask your questions. Who is the villain? Who is our story’s self-sacrificing hero. Are they static or dynamic characters? What lessons do they learn or fail to learn. What event catalyzes the conclusion and, of course, what is the glorious conclusion that brings us to the last page? What is the book about. Honestly, I really don’t know and while usually that confession would have forced be to simply swap the book out at the nearest used bookstore, Foster uses this literary deviance to create such an interesting story.

In high school, one of my professors led us through a series of exercises based on the idea that while most people will not judge a book by the cover, they will most definitely judge a book by its first sentences. Pale King begins in second person, with you, the reader. Wallace’s seamless and fluid narrative style creates high expectations pages yet to come. Then simply, humbly, and with the slightest hint of desperation he states, “Read these.” Now, whether, this voice belongs to the a distant, omniscient presence or Wallace himself, we can only speculate. This is just one of the mysteries of the novel. The narrator, whomever he may be, proceeds to introduce us to his friend Claude Sylvanshine who is uncomfortably seated on an unstable flight from Chicago Midway to Peoria, for his newest position with the service, or as outsiders know it, it IRS. As the story progresses we meet Sylvanshine’s co-workers both as adults and adolescents. His characters read like new friends that you’ve met before but can’t quite remember, familiar and strange all in one. Some of them are boring, some of them are funny, so are intriguingly shy, and some of them talk entirely too much because everything reminds them of something else. You know, or want to know, someone like all of them, or maybe you even recognize elements of yourself, which is one of the things that keeps you turning the page.

Of course of the most intriguing and unexpected characters, is David Foster Wallace himself. “All of this is true,” he confesses, “The book is really true.” His reasons for going with fiction instead of memoir are amusing but that’s a conversation I’ll leave you to have with Wallace, via the book. These moments feel personal, like you and David decided to meet at local cafe and talk about the weather, current events, and the burdens of a job that stifles your creative spirit. Somewhere along the way all the characters start to feel this way. Every chapter is a conversation in which you participate or that you observed, all of those idiosyncrasies that you judged are the chapters that make up the characters that you’ve become quite fond of.

The introductory quote, taken from Frank Bidart’s “Borges and I,” reads, “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.” In a simple and complex way, The Pale King is about people. To answer the question I posed in your stead, the characters are dynamic but not in a typical Introduction to Literature sense. In his own way, Wallace only gives them one option, they have to change because to experience something and not change, even minutely, is antithetical to living. So what is the book about? It’s about experiences and they shape us and how we interpret them and use them. Someone once said that we are made up of our experiences. What they said simply and almost humanely, Wallace says creatively, emotionally, and beautifully, and in his own words, I encourage you, “Please read.”