David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” depicted an America so distracted and obsessed with entertainment that a mesmerizing movie becomes a potential terrorist weapon — capable of making viewers die of pleasure.

His posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

Just as this lumpy but often stirring new novel emerges as a kind of bookend to “Infinite Jest,” so it demonstrates that being amused to death and bored to death are, in Wallace’s view, flip sides of the same coin. Perhaps, he writes, “dullness is associated with psychic pain because something that’s dull or opaque fails to provide enough stimulation to distract people from some other, deeper type of pain that is always there,” namely the existential knowledge “that we are tiny and at the mercy of large forces and that time is always passing and that every day we’ve lost one more day that will never come back.”

Happiness, Wallace suggests in a Kierkegaardian note at the end of this deeply sad, deeply philosophical book, is the ability to pay attention, to live in the present moment, to find “second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive.”

Although “The Pale King” was pieced together by Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch from pages and notes that the author left behind when he committed suicide in 2008, it feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished his work from the beginning. After all, Wallace always disdained closure, and this volume showcases his embrace of discontinuity; his fascination with both the meta and the microscopic, postmodern pyrotechnics and old-fashioned storytelling; and his ongoing interest in contemporary America’s obsession with self-gratification and entertainment.

“The Pale King” is less inventive and exuberantly imagined than Wallace’s previous novels: no herds of feral hamsters roaming the land, no artificially created deserts in Ohio, no ad-bearing Statue of Liberty. But like “Infinite Jest” it depicts an America in thrall to myopic consumerism, and like his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” it grapples with corrugated questions of identity and the difficulties of communication.

By turns breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull — funny, maddening and elegiac — “The Pale King” will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life. But it may also snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window — albeit a flawed window — into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America, toward the end of the 20th century, by worker bees employed as number crunchers for the federal government, worried that they are going to be replaced by computers.

Told in fragmented, strobe-lighted chapters that depict an assortment of misfits, outsiders and eccentrics, the novel sometimes feels like the TV show “The Office” as rewritten with a magnifying glass by Nicholson Baker. Sometimes it feels like a hallucinatory variation on Sherwood Anderson’s “Winesburg, Ohio,” giving the reader a choral portrait of a Midwestern community — though in this case, that community is not a town, but the I.R.S. Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill., in 1985.

Little happens dramatically in real time in this novel; rather, the graphic deaths and accidents chronicled in its pages are almost always part of its characters’ back stories. In fact “The Pale King” is in some ways an ode to stasis and perseverance, to the human ability to endure all the slings and arrows of monotony and everyday misfortune.

Among those characters is a fictional version of the author himself — he claims that this novel is really a memoir — who says he took a year off from college to work at the I.R.S., “in exile from anything I even remotely cared about or was interested in” and who is mistaken there for a higher ranking employee also named David Wallace.

This narrator named David Wallace says he “dreamed of becoming an ‘artist,’ i.e., somebody whose adult job was original and creative instead of tedious and dronelike,” and at times this narrator feels like a might-have-been version of the real author had he not become a writer — much the way that Harry Rabbit Angstrom feels like a might-have-been version of John Updike.

The other characters include a sad sack named Sylvanshine, who regards himself as “a dithering ninny”; a colleague by the name of Cusk, who is embarrassed by his own heavy sweating; an executive named Stecyk, who was an “insufferable do-gooder” as a child; a beautiful woman named Meredith, who did a stint in a psych hospital; and a young man named Lane A. Dean Jr., who married his pregnant girlfriend even though he didn’t love her and now needs to support his new family.

Wallace is focused on how various characters came to work at the I.R.S. — what combination of psychological tics, childhood trauma, financial circumstance and random luck propelled them into the rat race and tossed them onto the hamster wheel that is life as accountants there, pushing paper and numbers in a deadeningly generic office fitted with fluorescent lights, modular shelving and the ceaseless “whisper of sourceless ventilation.”

Though at least one character argues that being an accountant is heroic — providing order in a chaotic world, corralling and organizing a torrential flow of information — Lane Dean, for one, feels that the work is “boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt,” and he begins thinking suicidal thoughts.

“He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he’d ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind’s own devices.”

Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers, who come to remind us of the unhappy hero of Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” or some of Beckett’s bone-weary characters, stuck in a limbo of never-ending waiting and routine.

The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.

Yet at the same time there are some wonderfully evocative sections here that capture the exhausting annoyances of everyday life with digital precision. The sticky, nauseating feeling of traveling on a small, crowded commuter plane, crammed up against “paunched and blotchy men in double-knit brown suits and tan suits with attaché cases ordered from in-flight catalogs.” Or the suffocating feeling of being stuck on a filthy bus, with ashtrays spilling over with gum and cigarette butts, the air-conditioning “more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning” than the real thing.

In this, his most emotionally immediate work, Wallace is on intimate terms with the difficulty of navigating daily life, and he conjures states of mind with the same sorcery he brings to pictorial description. He conveys the gut deep sadness people experience when “the wing of despair” passes over their lives, and the panic of being a fish “thrashing in the nets” of one’s own obligations, stuck in a miserable job and needing to “cover the monthly nut.”

Along the way he gives us chilling, Grand Guignol scenes involving a ghastly subway accident and a grotesque industrial-arts class accident. And he makes us see, with gorgeous sleight of hand, the “very old land” in a Middle America that exists somewhere between Grandma Moses and “Blue Velvet”: the “flannel plains” and “the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight,” an “arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch,” a “sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding.”

This novel reminds us what a remarkable observer Wallace was — a first-class “noticer,” to use a Saul Bellow term, of the muchness of the world around him, chronicling the overwhelming data and demands that we are pelted with, second by second, minute by minute, and the protean, overstuffed landscape we dwell in.

It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.

Reff:http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/01/books/the-pale-king-by-david-foster-wallace-book-review.html?_r=1&ref=books