11 Apr 2011, 7:35am
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Ulrich Blumenbach on The Pale King

[Ulrich Blumenbach translated Infinite Jest into German (Unendlicher Spass). Here are his first impressions of Wallace’s new novel.]

The Pale King is a sad novel. And it is a novel about boredom. Everybody knows that by now. But it is funny, too, and I liked the way Wallace connects the two. What surprised me and what I didn’t like was his use of metafiction. Let’s start with the first observation: Take the passage from §22, for instance, where Chris Fogle describes some skull-crunching intricacies of American tax law:

The easiest way to define a tax is to say that the amount of the tax, symbolized as T, is equal to the product of the tax base and tax rate. This is usually symbolized as T = B— R, so you can then get R = T/B, which is the formula for determining whether a tax rate is progressive, regressive, or proportional. This is very basic tax accounting. It is so familiar to most IRS personnel that we don’t even have to think about it. But anyhow, the critical variable is T’s relationship to B. If the ratio of T to B stays the same regardless of whether B, the tax base, goes up or down, then the tax is proportional. This is also known as a flat-rate tax. A progressive tax is where the ratio T/B increases as B increases and decreases as B decreases. (p. 193)

Fogle goes on to illustrate the consequences of a progressive sales tax with a pseudo-historical example from Illinois in 1977, using as an aid “a fundamental rule of effective tax enforcement“ which I’d rather call a psychological law of nature “that the average taxpayer is always going to act out of his own monetary self-interest” (p. 195):

The result was retail chaos. At, for instance, the supermarket, shoppers would no longer purchase three large bags of groceries for $78 total and submit to paying 6, 6.8, and 8.5 percent on those parts of their purchases over $5.00, $20.00, and $42.01, respectively—they were now motivated to structure their grocery purchase as numerous separate small purchases of $4.99 or less in order to take advantage of the much more attractive 3.75 percent sales tax on purchases under $5.00. […] So, at the store, you suddenly had everyone buying under $5.00 worth of groceries and running out to their car and putting the little bag in the car and running back in and buying another amount under $5.00 and running out to their car, and so on and so forth. Supermarkets’ checkout lines started going all the way to the back of the store. […] I know gas stations were even worse,  […] fights broke out at gas stations from drivers being forced to wait as people ahead of them at the pump tried putting $4.99 worth in and running in and paying and running back out and resetting the pump and putting in another $4.99, and so on. (p. 195f.)

Wallace being Wallace, he doesn’t stop here but starts to really turn up the heat and triggers off some comic pyrotechnics which with good reason can be called post-Pynchonesque slapstick:

From the perspective of administrative costs, the worst part came when enterprising businesses saw a new opportunity and started using “Subdividable” as a sales inducement. Including, for instance, used-car dealers that were willing to sell you a car as an agglomeration of separate little transactions for front bumper, right rear wheel well, alternator coil, spark plug, and so on, the purchase structured as thousands of different $4.99 transactions. (p. 196)

Another example of Wallace’s genius is §24 when the IRS-workers sit in the car and get stuck in a traffic jam. The prose slows down and the text goes nowhere for ten or twenty pages: a brilliant example of the fusion of form and content.

As I said, what I either don’t like or don’t understand in The Pale King so far is the author’s intrusion into the text in §9. I side with those people who think metafiction spoils a story even if it’s meant to criticize or parody metafiction. When I came across these twenty pages of the “Author’s Foreword” I thought “Why this?” For me, Wallace is the author who definitively laid metafiction to rest in “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way.” Now twenty years later he of all people exhumes the corpse with just the same kind of “really blatant and intrusive interruption” (Girl with Curious Hair, p. 264)?

The Pale King – Section 1: Will it Play in Peoria?

The Pale King opens with a prose poem-y thing originally published in Triquarterly in 2002 under the title “Peoria (4)”. (I’m not sure why this previous publication is not credited on the copyright page of TPK. I guess TriQ is just not on the same level as the New Yorker.) Supposedly, one of the alternate titles of The Pale King was “What is Peoria For?” Maybe that “(4)” is Wallace’s sly way of getting us to ask What is Peoria (4)? Well, what is this thing? Has Wallace ever written anything like this before? It’s a curious opening to a novel about the IRS. It seemed like a weird thing for DFW to publish way back in 2002 (frankly, it was a bit of a disappointment. When one is expecting a new DFW story in a literary magazine and is confronted with a short, but plentiful description of a field in Peoria, IL, a natural response might be What is this?). Really, though, the opening was Pietsch’s call:

“Ultimately there were chapters that could have gone anywhere,” he says. “Like the first chapter — that was not the first chapter. It was just a beautiful love letter to an Illinois cornfield in fallow time. I don’t know if he intended it as an opening, but it just felt like a beautiful way into this novel.”

Wallace mentions Peoria a lot in his writing. He mentions it in one of the first stories he ever wrote: “The Enema Bandit and the Cosmic Buzzer.” The story has never been published anywhere (yet) {he wrote it as an undergrad at Amherst}, but it resides in the Wallace archive at the Ransom Center (container 27.9). The enema bandit (probably a reference to Frank Zappa’s song “The Illinois Enema Bandit“) is called “The Purging Scourge of Peoria.” [Zappa’s bandit is supposedly from Bloomington, IL. Peoria and Bloomington (where Wallace lived for a long time) are only 60 miles apart.]

Peoria is somewhat well-known for being the standard-bearer of Midwestern values or at least middle-American demographics. The famous phrase “Will it play in Peoria?” refers to the idea that for something to be mainstream in the U.S., it needs to succeed in somewhere as “average” or “common” as Peoria. So, in reality, Peoria is not home to an IRS Regional Examination Center—it is America’s Test Market. And I feel like that Harry Potter and Twilight and Dean Koonz play well in Peoria, but that The Pale King is not the sort of novel or book or entertainment that would  likely appeal to mainstream America. And yet. And yet… The Pale King is a bestseller. It reached up to #4 on Amazon’s list of the top 100 books and will likely debut high on the New York Times hardcover fiction list. It does appeal to many, many people who take reading seriously and that mysterious “general reader” who still, in fact, reads for pleasure. But the scale is way different and far fewer people will buy The Pale King than will see The Hangover 2 or watch American Idol or buy whatever Stephanie Meyer writes next, so therefore it is a little easier to get on the NY Times Bestseller Hardcover Fiction list than it is to win the weekend box office or set Nielsen ratings records (and it helps when the publisher keeps the ebook release date 4/15, driving folks to cancel their kindle orders and buy the hardcover two weeks early instead).

The local press in Peoria has acknowledged the book at least once: this blog entry by Dave Haney on pjstar.com:

I actually did not know the book or name until I ended up in one of Wallace’s classes in 1998 or 1999 at Illinois State University. It was a grammar for writers class. You kind of suspect something is different about a professor who on the first day (and many after) arrives in sweatpants cut into shorts; who wears a well-fitted white T-shirt on a not-so-well fit torso; who wore a bandana and rarely seemed to shave; and who spit chewing tobacco into a styrofoam cup he brought along.

He gave the class grammar handouts he said were the same his mother used for English classes she taught to prisoners.

30 Mar 2011, 7:35pm
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The Pale King: Analyzing “Good People”

The first excerpt of The Pale King appeared in the February 5, 2007 issue of the New Yorker under the title “Good People.” At the time, there was no indication that this was a novel excerpt and Wallace had not published anything in the New Yorker in a long time (since 1995, I believe, when a couple of Infinite Jest excerpts appeared). And it seemed a little odd. As a story it had a lot of things going on in terms of character, diction, and themes, but, to me at least, it seemed like a slightly new trajectory for Wallace after Oblivion.

You can read the story here.

When the story came out, it generated a lot of discussion on our listserv. The following analysis was written by a former list member and I’m republishing it here (with permission) to spark new discussion about this four-year-old story and to start thinking about some of the themes and ideas in The Pale King. I’m sincerely interested in what people have to say about this story, so you if you have something to add, please leave a comment.

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1. The story is full of references to division and dichotomy.  The two main characters, the “two great and terrible armies within himself”, “Two-hearted”, “their shadow a two-headed thing in the grass before them”; the downed tree being “half hidden” and “all half in the water”; Lane’s and Sheri’s praying over the phone “in a kind of half code”.  The sounds of chainsaws dividing up the past week’s storm’s downed trees.  The two opposite sides of the lake.  The binary either/or nature of the issues Lane and Sheri must weigh — abort or carry, love or not love, truth or lie, goodness or sin.

Even the title, “Good People”, is a plural word used as a description of a single person (“she was good people”, “he was desperate to be good people”), suggesting the divisions within ourselves.

(I note there are four uses in the story of the word “individual” as a noun—its Latin meaning being “not divisible”.)

And yet the whole backbone of the story is not division but union: the union of Lane and Sheri, and the product of that union: the baby.  (One could even say that the pregnant Sheri is herself two people in one body.)

2. Lane’s references to the Biblical burning lake of fire are contrasted with the constant references to freezing and being frozen and wanting Sheri to unfreeze him.  (And possibly echoed by the fact that Sheri is a hostess at “the Embers.”)  And the lake of fire image is echoed by the lake they’re sitting next to.

3. Religious imagery?  The men fishing in the lake may be references to Christ (symbolized by the fish, the ichthus), the first apostles (who were fishermen), and to the evangelical metaphor of being “fishers of men.” Note also Sheri Fisher’s last name.

4. References to blackness and darkness: “The whole last black week had been this way and it was wrong.” Plus the darkness and blackness of the water of the shallows, which notably is caused by the angle of the sun’s light.

Plus Lane’s reference to the “blacks” fishing on the opposite side of the lake—”mostly only your blacks from the East Side”—a somewhat prejudiced phrasing, dismissive, conscious of them as others.

Possibly in the same vein as the references to blankness and hiddenness. “She was blank and hidden.”  Story’s opening line ends with: “half hidden by the bank.”

5. The old man looking out over the lake is identified as having a gray hat, not to mention being elderly himself (“gray”), and seems to make contact with the men on the opposite site of the lake.  No mention is made of his race, but since Lane’s prejudice leads him to specifically identify the fishing men as being “blacks”, we can assume that the old man in the hat is white.  The old man and the fishermen do seem to make contact across the lake’s wide gulf—one of the fishermen raises his arm in ostensible greeting.  (“raises his arm in what may be greeting, or waving off a bee”—Lane’s not a discerning enough observer of things outside him?)

The old man and the fisherman’s moment of contact and “grayness” (black in accord with white, plus the old man’s double grayness) as a contrast to Lane’s and Sheri’s frozen black-and-white view of things.

Note that the old man is also compared to Lane’s grandfather “as a young insurance man”.  Why insurance?  Safety, peace of mind?  Profiting from fear of misfortune?

Lane thinks the old man “looked more like a picture than a man” … “looked also out of place in a suit coat or jacket” … Lane’s dismissiveness of the old man suggesting Lane’s resistance to the old man’s moment of contact? Emphasizing Lane’s youth? Perhaps the old man’s evocation of an older generation echoes Lane’s thought of “He felt like he knew now why it was a true sin and not just a leftover rule from past society”.

6. The fallen tree — while it may be an illustration equating “fallen” with “sin” (what Lane calls “inborn fallen nature”), or perhaps echoing the twice-used description of Sheri as being “down to earth” — seems to be described with abortion/miscarriage/infant imagery:

a. “Looking at the torn-up hole in the ground there where the tree had gone over”
b. “The shallows lapped from different directions at the tree as if almost teething on it”
c. “and the downed elm shed cells into the water”

Further birth references in the detail about his father’s and grandfather’s birthdays.  Also the word “born” in “inborn fallen nature” and “last-ditch gamble born out of the desperation in Sheri Fisher’s soul”.

7. “the angle of the sun made the water of the shallows look dark” — a suggestion of false depth? (i.e. of their fath?)  Or of hidden stuff under the surface? (i.e. of the story, of their outward appearances)

Later: “you could see into the shallows and see that all the water was moving but gently, this way and that” — awareness of what’s under the surface.

Also: “the downed tree’s branches seemed to all bend so sharply just under the shallows’ surface” … refraction of light, subjectivity of perception

8. What to make of Lane’s train image?
“he pictured in his mind an image of himself on a train, waving mechanically to something that got smaller and smaller as the train pulled away”
Fantasies of abandoning Sheri?  Of being carried away by forces beyond his control?

9. “That Lane should please please sweetie let her finish” — they’re both trying to cut each other off, in the sense of interrupting each other. Parallel with being cut off from each other, and Lane’s inner armies being cut off from each other?  (And the neighborhood trees being cut up by chainsaws, and the reference near the end to the lawnmowers cutting grass?)

10. Lane’s constant fear of being a hypocrite, of thinking hypocrisy a sin: the word “hypocrisy” comes from “hypokrisis”, the Greek word for oration and theatrical acting.  Perhaps he considers it a sin to communicate, to take action, to play a role?  The Greek word also has its roots in “hupo” (= under) + “krinein” (= decide, judge).

11. Possible wordplay: Besides the many references to the “downed” tree, Sheri’s twice described as “down to earth”, and having “downy” arms, is “looking down” … versus Lane’s job at UPS (i.e. “up”).  Opposites? They’re going in different directions?  Salvation vs. shame?  Heaven vs. hell?

12. The two Scripture quotes:

12a. Timothy 1, “disputeth over words”
full quote: “he is proud, knowing nothing, but is obsessed with disputes and arguments over words, from which come envy, strife, reviling, evil suspicions”
seems to dismiss or negate language, communication; can’t communicate in ways other than evangelical language, platitudes, prayer (in “half code”)

12b. Galatians 4:16, “Have I then become your enemy”
full quote: “So then am I become your enemy, by telling you the truth?”
the black/white view of morality, of being either “with me” or “against me”; making a contention out of telling the truth

13. “She continued to sit as if thinking, in the pose of thinking, like that one statue.” – Resembling thinking.  But not actually thinking.

14. The name “Lane A. Dean, Jr.”  Initials = LAD, a boy.  Suffix “Jr.”, suggesting junior status, named for one’s father, living in his shadow? (“the blank frozenness of his father”)  Plus note the connection with his mother’s father, being born on the same day, both being Cancers (literal cancers? malignant influences?).  What of the gray hat man, compared to Lane’s grandfather (paternal or maternal?).  References to family lineage emphasize the issue of birth.

15. The beautifully-written “two armies” passage, perhaps the crux of the story:

“But sitting here beside this girl as unknown to him now as outer space, waiting for whatever she might say to unfreeze him, now he felt like he could see the edge or outline of what a real vision of Hell might be. It was of two great and terrible armies within himself, opposed and facing each other, silent. There would be battle but no victor. Or never a battle — the armies would stay like that, motionless, looking across at each other, and seeing therein something so different and alien from themselves that they could not understand, could not hear each other’s speech as even words or read anything from what their face looked like, frozen like that, opposed and uncomprehending, for all human time. Two-hearted, a hypocrite to yourself either way.”

It reminds me, in a way, of Sartre’s famous line “Hell is other people” … only Lane’s case, Hell is the others within oneself.  Those parts of our inner selves that remain forever *other* from each other, so cut off that they’re unable to even bring themselves to the point of conflict. Interesting combination of two common Wallacean themes: the struggle to communicate with others, and the struggle to overcome self-consciousness. Instead of the self-consciousness cripple the communication, but in this case the lack of communication within oneself is what cripples the self.

Also, why the idea of Hell being two armies facing each other, rather than two people facing each other, a good angel and a bad angel, two sides of oneself?  Why the military conceit?  Something about religious views of good vs. evil, Heaven vs. Hell, always a “versus”, a contention — the idea of a battle, of life and the world as a war against something, of Hell being a place of violence and physical pain — being supplanted by another idea of Hell as being a place not of violence but of incommunication.  Not of violence but silence.  (The writer’s version of Hell? loss of language?)

What’s worse?  Conflict, or the inability to even manifest that conflict?

16. The story is yet another instance of that scenario Wallace revisits again and again: The idea of a terror so terrifying that the object of the terror comes true.  Lane is so terrified of being a hypocrite — to him it’s a worse sin than even the abortion, which would place it above Commandment #1—that of course his actions, or lack of them, handily make him one: a person who believes one thing but does another thing—or does nothing—and wants nothing more than for someone else to make the decision for him.

They are hamstrung by the black-and-white code their piety equips them with.  Faced with a complex moral situation that seems to demand a more nuanced outlook — something other than good vs. evil, righteousness vs. sin, “with me” vs. “against me” — they have no idea what to do, and cannot reconcile their own inner opposing thoughts, if they have them (“the pose of thinking”), and are so petrified of being hypocrites, so they remain frozen and silent and cannot communicate with each other or anyone else.

Yet they both seem to be struggling against what their beliefs and values are telling them is right, though they can’t identify or name what it is inside them that’s struggling.  Very vague language.  “He felt a terrible inner resistance but could not feel what it was that it resisted.” “Something in him, though, some terrible weakness or lack of values, could not tell her. It felt like a muscle he did not have. He didn’t know why; he just could not do it, or even pray to do it.”

17. Third sentence from the end: “What would even Jesus do?” — Is this meant to be taken seriously?  It’s such a cliche now, a platitude; my first reaction when I hit the line was that now DFW was just being mean, having Lane think this in such a serious situation, resorting to such a t-shirt slogan.  But maybe it’s meant to be taken straight; perhaps the variation, the word “even”, suggests that it’s meant to be asked as a real question and removed from its cliche context.

18. “Sometimes they had prayed together over the phone, in a kind of half code in case anybody accidentally picked up the extension.”  Is this supposed to be funny?  Seems so poignant and sad and desperate despite its absurdity … praying in code, obscuring words that already probably obscure what they truly feel, what they truly want or need to communicate to one another.  Suggestion that prayer already is a kind of coded language, intended to be spoken but not comprehended?

10 Feb 2011, 7:06pm
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I created a Facebook fan page for The Pale King here: http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Pale-King/183356045035816

I might post some things there that are not right for this site. Feel free to “like” it.

8 Feb 2011, 9:58pm
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The Pale King so far

Wikipedia tells us that there have been at least five published “stories” that are likely excerpts of The Pale King:

  • “Good People”, in the February 5, 2007, issue of The New Yorker.
  • “The Compliance Branch”, in the February 2008 issue of Harper’s.
  • “Wiggle Room”, in the March 9, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.
  • “All That”, in the December 14, 2009, issue of The New Yorker.
  • “A New Examiner”, in the January 2010 issue of The Lifted Brow and the September 2010 issue of Harper’s.

Nick also covers more about the potential excerpts at The Howling Fantods. It’s also thought that previously published stories “The Soul is Not a Smithy”, “Incarnations of Burned Children”, and the “Peoria” prose pieces from Triquarterly are likely excerpts from the unfinished novel—as are several stories Wallace read in public but did not publish separately (namely the Lannan readings and one story about a man caught in a subway train accident). The structure then partly seems to be that the characters in The Pale King work at the “IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois,” but their stories are told (partly) through their childhoods. [Bear with me, this is all just speculation, I know, I know.] The catalog copy does state that “David Foster Wallace” is also a character in the novel. The only other time Wallace has directly mentioned himself or named a character after himself is in “Good Old Neon” — could that be a novel excerpt also? Or is it just that Wallace has been dealing with these ideas for a long time? [GON appeared in 2001 and DT Max tells us that Wallace had started researching The Pale King as early as 1997. I’ve seen some of these early research materials in the Ransom Center archive. For example, there is a 1997 letter from Frank B. Linton, who says that DFW’s question regarding “The Silver Butterfly” caught him off guard.]

“Good People” concerns Lane A. Dean, Jr. and his girlfriend Shari sitting beside a lake discussing what they should do about the Shari’s pregnancy. “The Compliance Branch” (I think of it as the “Fierce Infant” piece) is set in the IRS processing center and describes the Group Manager Gary Yeagle’s infant son. The story/excerpt is narrated in the first person, but it’s unclear who the narrator is. Could it be “David Foster Wallace”? It doesn’t sound like the interior voice of Lane Dean in “Good People.” These first two excerpts, both featuring Lane A. Dean, Jr. appeared before Wallace died. There was a palpable sense, in 2008, that there was a forthcoming novel announcement imminent.

Lane Dean shows up again in “Wiggle Room” (in the third person narration), and this story, it seems, gets into the guts of the novel. Lane is diligently working away at his IRS Tingle table and watching the clock.

Try as he might, he could not this last week help envisioning the inward lives of the older men to either side of him, doing this day after day. Getting up on a Monday and chewing their toast and putting their hats and coats on knowing what they were going out the door to come back to for eight hours. This was boredom beyond any boredom he’d ever felt.

Sounds very very much like one of the big themes of “The Soul is Not a Smithy” to me. The narrator of “Smithy” is never named, but his interior voice sounds nothing like that of what we’ve seen from Lane Dean so far. Also, the narrator’s father in “Smithy” works not for the IRS but for an insurance company. It will be interesting to find out which childhood story is Lane Dean’s. Could it be that he’s the baby from “Incarnations of Burned Children”?

We see Lane Dean Jr. again in the excerpt titled “A New Examiner” (it appeared first in the Australian journal The Lifted Brow and then in Harper’s). This excerpt is every similar to “Wiggle Room” except that Lane is not at his Tingle table but on a break, listening to an older examiner tell a boring story. In fact, the only story not to feature Lane A. Dean is “All That”, which leads me to wonder how that story fits in, if at all. When “Good People” first appeared in 2007, it had been a while since we’d seen any fiction at all from Wallace.  The strange Peoria pieces were published in 2002, Oblivion was published in 2004, then practically nothing fictionwise until “Good People” in 2007. It will be fascinating to see how this sliver is representative of the whole—even of Lane Dean’s story.

We know that the novel deals with boredom (Max paraphrases the theme as “Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment”), but it Wallace is excels at transcending just one theme in a novel. Infinite Jest is about more than just addiction or entertainment. The Broom of the System is about more than just the limits of language. I’d imagine that The Pale King is about more than just boredom. In fact, a big theme of “Good People” and “All That” is the role of spirituality, religion, and mysticism in everyday life. Wallace began writing more about religion and Christianity with his lengthy review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky biographies, but it’s hard to forget Don Gately’s struggle with AA’s Higher Power in Infinite Jest. I’m not sure how any of this figures in The Pale King, but I can’t wait to find out.

31 Jan 2011, 10:00pm
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The Pale King Approaches

I really wish The Pale King had a different subtitle. Instead of “An Unfinished Novel” it should say “A Novel” or “An Entertainment” or “Volume 1” or anything but unfinished, half-finished, never completed, no. We can’t edit time, though. The ravages of time. What we face is a future without new writing by David Foster Wallace. There will be many, many future books examining exactly how he accomplished what he did and who he influenced and why, but no more novels by him. This is it.

Without a doubt, April 15, 2011 is one of the most anticipated release dates in literature. I predict that The Pale King will draw many more readers into Wallace’s other works, and surprise many skeptics who don’t believe an unfinished novel is worth reading. There are also a lot of haters out there who think any book by or about David Foster Wallace will now be a pure money grab and they can’t wait to make terrible pronouncements about how something is being trampled. But of course all this is ridiculous baloney; and if you’ve learned anything about the internet by now it’s this: ignore the haters. Look, I don’t pretend to be an objective reviewer. This is my Star Wars, my Harry Potter, my Steve Jobs keynote and Christmas morning all rolled into one. If there were a parking lot where I could set up a tent and a lawn chair months in advance and camp out and be first in line for this, I’d do it.

I’m going to start reading The Pale King the day it is released and I’m going to post about it on this site until I’m finished with it. No set schedule, no forums, but I invite you to share your thoughts with me in the comments here and on twitter under the hashtag #paleking. After all the buildup, I’m especially interested in people’s first impressions of the book, and then how it feels to turn that last page and close the book and set it down and consider what might have been in light of what was.

We know roughly what the book is about and to me, from the excerpts published so far, it appears to be Wallace’s most humanistic novel, one less interested in showing off and more interested in exposing nerve endings. I believe Wallace accomplished a similar thing in Oblivion, but short story collections just don’t have the cachet of novels. (I also think there is a deep, humanistic side to Infinite Jest, but have to concede that not every page of the novel burns with the same concerns.) I’ll be interested to see if the short story “The Soul is Not a Smithy” ends up as part of the unfinished novel—it does seem to fit with the boredom-tax processor theme, and how it fits in with the other characters we’ve seen in the excerpts. But I find myself coming back to worrying about that narrator and his fear of his father’s job, his despair at the prospect of facing that soulless room of white-collared men everyday of his working life. I worry that I don’t have enough of that despair, or that I’ve already conditioned myself out of any instinct to run from such a horrorshow of cubicles. Or that I have no choice. I don’t know, but I think about that a lot.

19 Jan 2011, 8:24pm
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26 Dec 2010, 10:06pm
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