King of Pain

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TL;DR

A 2012 review-essay in the conservative Claremont Review of Books, occasioned by the wave of posthumous Wallace publishing (The Pale King, the Kenyon book, the Fate/Time/Language thesis, the Lipsky road-trip transcript). It is one of the more skeptical-but-serious of the posthumous reassessments: Valiunas is impatient with the soaring encomia and the Dostoevsky/Joyce comparisons, ranks the fiction of Girl with Curious Hair as "sophomoric" and The Pale King as "too austere for a form such as the novel", yet argues that Infinite Jest is a genuine achievement of "impressive moral amplitude". Its through-line is that pain is the novel's master key — seeking, killing, using, and surviving pain — and that against the entertainment culture's pursuit of oblivion the novel opposes "pain that has a plan and a purpose", the pain of sobriety, embodied by its two "exemplars of moral beauty", Don Gately and Mario Incandenza. A substantive Infinite Jest reading (not merely biographical), argued through a Tolstoyan/Dostoevskian moral frame of the essay's own.

Key claims

The reception frame: "Just about everyone" knows two things about Wallace — "he wrote a thousand-page novel with hundreds of end-notes that launched him as a cult hero, and he killed himself while still quite a young man." Valiunas is sardonic about the "Wallace industry" and the escalating encomia, singling out Carlisle's five-year commentary and Jon Baskin's Dostoevsky/Joyce comparison for gentle mockery ("Encomia soar ever higher with the passing of time; every admirer feels obliged to surpass every other admirer").
Pain as the organizing principle: "The fundamental human experience in this novel is pain" — physical, mental, emotional; "The very word pain rings throughout the novel the way virtue does in Machiavelli or real in Proust or good in Hemingway." Seeking, killing, using, and surviving pain are the variations; American democratic life furnishes "tortures less spectacular but no less intense".
The two settings: the halfway house and the tennis academy, both "in a Boston suburb in 2009, the Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment," are both "rife with the endemic American pathology: the longing to avoid the unavoidable pains of living". Depression is quoted through Kate Gompert ("It's like horror more than sadness. It's more like horror") and Geoffrey Day's "black flapping shape".
Entertainment as the pursuit of death: invoking Pascal on diversion, Valiunas reads the samizdat and the culture around it as the case where "modern men so desperate for diversion that they use it not to avoid death but to pursue it" — "The perfect entertainment." Infinite Jest is called Wallace's "intended summa on the national compulsion for diversion unto death."
Moral beauty against the culture: "Against the world's inhuman cruelty… he opposes pain that has a plan and a purpose. That is the pain of sobriety, of seeing clearly". Wallace "updates Tolstoy, who labored all his life against the insidious collusion of sensuality and amour-propre."
The two exemplars: "Two exemplars of moral beauty stand out; both are damaged and strange." Gately, refusing pain medication in the hospital — "The closing pages of the novel, in which Gately recalls his last high, contain some of the strongest and most horrifying writing in 20th-century American fiction" — and Mario, who takes the street-corner figure's hand.
Ranking verdict: Infinite Jest is "a work of impressive moral amplitude, taking in more of modern American reality than the novels of most of the recent acknowledged realist masters"; "With this novel alone, Wallace will long outlive Mailer, Cheever, Updike, Styron, Roth, not to mention Eggers and Franzen." But he demurs at the superlatives: "To say it reaches the heights of Joyce or Dostoevsky is going too far".
The Pale King demurral: Valiunas judges the last novel's doctrine ("transcending the boredom… of inescapable routine through intense mindfulness") "too austere for a form such as the novel", of interest chiefly "as a document of Wallace's preoccupations as the end was approaching."

Theories & evidence

THEORY: The Entertainment is the extreme case of a culture that uses diversion not to avoid death but to pursue it — the samizdat offers "lethal bliss," death by ecstatic overload

Crux: entertainment-lethality
Stance: endorses
Evidence:
- [text] The film "offers lethal bliss: anyone who watches it once will watch it over and over again without pause… inevitably dying of the ecstatic overload." [sec. "Moral Beauty" lead-in]
- [secondary] Pascal on diversion supplies the frame: men "so desperate for diversion that they use it not to avoid death but to pursue it", because "they fear nothing that death might hold". [sec.]
- [text] Madame Psychosis / U.H.I.D. summons ("All ye peronic or teratoidal…") cited as the perversely funny face of the same horror (scene 053, pp. 181-193). [sec.]
Notes: The reading is thematic-moral rather than mechanical — it does not adjudicate how the film kills, only that its lethality literalizes the culture's death-drive, and it never asks what the film's maker intended it for. In-source qualification: he grants the novel is "also abundant in studied bizarrerie and rampaging ugliness", conceding "Not every reader can get past them."

THEORY: Infinite Jest is a Tolstoyan/Dostoevskian moral novel — its positive value is "pain that has a plan and a purpose", the pain of sobriety, incarnated in Gately and Mario

Crux: dostoevsky-frame (CANDIDATE — the Karamazov/Tolstoy intertext, sibling to hamlet-frame)
Stance: advances
Evidence:
- [text] Gately in the hospital refusing narcotics (scene 166, pp. 854-864), and the closing last-high recollection (scene 185, pp. 972-981), offered as the moral core. [sec. "Moral Beauty"]
- [text] Mario taking the street-corner figure's hand (scene 183, pp. 964-971) — a moment of "surpassing loveliness" set against Wallace's "habitual concentration on the hideous". [sec.]
- [secondary] Valiunas asserts Wallace "overtly likens" the two brothers' bet on whether humanity is beyond redemption "to that between Ivan and Alyosha Karamazov", and that the whole "updates Tolstoy". [sec.]
Notes: The Ivan/Alyosha likening Valiunas points to is genuinely in the novel's own text, though its brothers are Barry Loach and his seminarian brother, not the Incandenzas: the narration explicitly compares their debates to Alyosha and Ivan's conversations in The Brothers Karamazov (scene 183, p. 969). The verdict register ("moral beauty", "impressive moral amplitude") is the essay's own; the reading is a strong moral-novel stance, offered against the postmodernist-master framing Valiunas resists.

Themes

Addiction and recovery (the halfway-house pain-of-sobriety spine); entertainment and diversion (the samizdat as death-pursuit; Pascal); depression and pain (Gompert, Day, the "King of Pain" title); family and moral exemplarity (Gately, Mario); the biography and the suicide (Nardil, McLean, the Claremont death) run alongside as the essay's other half.

Cross-references

A direct counterpoint, in the same 2012 posthumous-reassessment moment, to the anniversary-defence and canonizing pieces: Valiunas grants Infinite Jest greatness while refusing the Joyce/Dostoevsky superlatives that baskin-coming-to-terms (quoted here by name) presses.
The entertainment-as-death-pursuit reading is kin to the reception cluster's E-Unibus-Pluram lineage and to splitsider-roberson-dfw-comedy-nerd.
Novel anchors: scene 024 (Kate Gompert's "horror", pp. 68-78), scene 053 (Madame Psychosis / U.H.I.D., pp. 181-193), scene 092 (the AA teaching that recovery comes through pain, not around it, pp. 442-449), scene 124 (Geoffrey Day's "black flapping shape", pp. 648-651), scene 166 (Gately in the hospital, pp. 854-864), scene 183 (the Loach wager and Mario's handshake, pp. 964-971), scene 185 (the last-high recollection that closes the novel, pp. 972-981).

Accuracy notes

The essay states as fact that Joelle "was accidentally disfigured by acid thrown in a fit of insanity by her mother." The novel leaves the question — disfigured at all, or veiled for being too beautiful — genuinely open, and readers argue it both ways; the acid version is the essay's commitment, not a settled fact.

Notable passages

"The fundamental human experience in this novel is pain" — physical, mental, emotional. (Valiunas)
"The very word pain rings throughout the novel the way virtue does in Machiavelli or real in Proust or good in Hemingway." (Valiunas)
"he opposes pain that has a plan and a purpose. That is the pain of sobriety, of seeing clearly" (Valiunas)
"The closing pages of the novel, in which Gately recalls his last high, contain some of the strongest and most horrifying writing in 20th-century American fiction." (Valiunas)
"Infinite Jest is a work of impressive moral amplitude, taking in more of modern American reality than the novels of most of the recent acknowledged realist masters." (Valiunas)