What the fuck did I just read
>>7868456
'The Pale King' by David Foster Wallace
A seriously unfinished work by a great author who was a pretty immature writer for most of his career who showed immense promise of a potential masterpiece with The Pale King but unfortunately ended his life before he could finish it (potentially knowing he never would be able to, anyway).
>>7868456
was it good?
At least there's a pretty good novella tucked away inside it.
>>7868456
An approximation of an incomplete book by a guy who eliminated his map for keeps 8 years ago. His editor made it by cobbling together a bunch of scattered materials he had on it and trying to make them stick together.
A great cover wasted on the claptrap ramblings of a failed artist
a meme writer
>>7868473
I really loved it at parts (the 100 page long chapter, Fat Marcus the Moneylender) but I feel like the best stuff was about to come hadn't he decked himself
>>7868482
this Chris Fogle's life was great
>>7868456
DFW looks like he is perpetually dressed to play beach volleyball.
>>7870093
Surf's up
Im on page 120 right now. Really enjoying it so far
>>7868468
The final Pale King woudn't have been as good as IJ.
>>7870182
I disagree. Why do you think this?
a cash grab
>>7870205
It's too much a case of split attentions. He really makes an active effort to have more realistic less zany and pomo-y characters while also doing shit like, well naming one Merril Errol Lehrl. He's half heartedly or prematurely trying to dive in a different type of characterization so most of them come out flat and boring cause he's not 100% in that zone unless he devotes a significant pagecount of brute in depth psychoanalysis of the one. Thematically it's also a step back. Infinite Jest has the query "why is my life unsatisfying" and goes on answering that about entertainment obsession and addiction to happiness. The Pale King kind of goes back and pretends that all that exploration and explanation didn't happen and insteads leaves "life is unsatistying" as kind of a dangling question and falls back more on what Camus said about it, imagining Sisyphus happy etc.
It's very hard to judge an incomplete work of course on what it's projected to be, but I look at The Pale King in sheer pagecount and think about how Infinite Jest had established a whole alternate reality america, went in depth with memorable characters from two separate communities, established important plot arcs, and fleshed out its themes convincingly in its first 500 pages. In that same pagecount The Pale King only puts you in the head of a handful of characters and only makes a small hint of stuff happening and then ends. I realize you could draw parallels with the allegory of the playwright who starts the play only after the audience has left but that would be a cop out because we know the novel isn't finished, only about half or so.
