IJ study archive

David Foster Wallace: The Last Audit

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TL;DR

A New York Times Sunday Book Review notice of The Pale King by the novelist Tom McCarthy (author of Remainder and C), reviewing Wallace's unfinished posthumous novel alongside his undergraduate philosophy thesis (Fate, Time, and Language). This is a Pale King piece, not an Infinite Jest one: its interpretive work is scoped to the later novel — the I.R.S. as the ultimate stage for a culture's moral dramas, and the loss of "heroic codes" under a free-market administrative shift. It bears on Infinite Jest only obliquely, through the shared preoccupations (bureaucracy, tedium, the numbing of feeling) and through McCarthy's reading of Wallace's debt to Pynchon. Only the first of the review's three pages survives in this archived capture; the reading below covers that opening third.

Key claims

  • Two ways to read the book. McCarthy proposes the posthumous manuscript — "assembled from a jumble of boxes, disks and printed or handwritten papers" that "ran into the high hundreds of pages" and was "conscientiously and intelligently whittled down by Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch to 500-odd pages" — can be understood first "as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale", and (page 1 breaks before the second is fully developed).
  • The I.R.S. as total stage. The setting "could not be more systematic": the agency's protocols and procedures make it the world in miniature. McCarthy quotes the novel's Director DeWitt Glendenning Jr. — "The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life" — and an accounting character's premise that "the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy," so the I.R.S., "a system composed of many systems," both represents that world and "furnishes the ultimate stage on which its moral dramas are enacted."
  • Heroism of tedium. The instructor's evangelical claim that "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is" and that "To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting -- this is heroism"; the scene, McCarthy notes, is "comic" yet "sincere as well" — the instructor is a Jesuit priest, the scene rendered "with a genuinely epiphanic air", ending "you are called to account."
  • The Spackman Initiative and the godless agency. The bulk of the book is set in the mid-1980s as a "Pure invention (as far as I can tell) on Wallace's part" administrative shift supplants a public-service ethos with a profit motive — auditing only returns with the highest "yield-to-man-hour-spent-investigating ratio" — and the agency's logic is being automated by software, described by the character "David Wallace" as "like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human."
  • A grand parable. The first of the two readings frames the novel as "a grand parable of postindustrial culture" or "late capitalism," and "an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual" caught in the system's mesh.

Theories & evidence

The review's interpretive claims are about The Pale King and its bureaucratic-culture parable, not any Infinite Jest plot or reading; one block on the later novel is recorded below.

THEORY: The Pale King is designed around, and derives its subject from, its own incompletion — an unfinished novel about boredom whose form the editor recovered from fragments

  • Crux: pale-king-incompletion
  • Stance: mentions
  • Evidence:
    • [secondary] McCarthy frames the book by its physical provenance — a "jumble of boxes, disks and printed or handwritten papers" running "into the high hundreds of pages", cut by Pietsch to "500-odd pages" and published as "An Unfinished Novel." [p. 1 (page 1 of 3)]
  • Notes: Recorded as a sighting only; the review's page-1 fragment does not develop a reading of the incompletion itself (that likely sits on the unrecovered pages 2-3). Non-IJ / oeuvre-scoped.

Themes

Bureaucracy and the administered life; boredom and attention; the numbing of feeling under systems; postmodern inheritance (McCarthy reads Wallace's debt to Pynchon on the later pages, per the article's own trail). These are Pale King concerns that rhyme with Infinite Jest's anhedonia and its institutions (E.T.A., Ennet House) without McCarthy drawing the line to IJ on this page.

Cross-references

Notable passages

  • On the manuscript: "a document that, conscientiously and intelligently whittled down by Wallace's editor Michael Pietsch to 500-odd pages".
  • The instructor: "Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is".
  • The character David Wallace on automation: "like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human."

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