In March of 2009, Little, Brown and Company announced plans to publish an unfinished novel titled The Pale King, which David Foster Wallace worked on sporadically for at least a decade before his death. The novel is based on main character Lane Dean careening into transcendence simply by living a life of utter boredom. In a new excerpt just published by The New Yorker, we catch a glimpse into the troubled childhood of Pale King’s floundering leading man. As a reader, the selection is both comforting and frustrating to devour, much like Lane’s encounters with the voices in his head.
“(…The experience of the voices was analogous to the feeling of turning a pillow over to the cool side.) Sometimes the experience of the voices was ecstatic, sometimes so much so that it was almost too intense for me—as when you first bite into an apple or a confection that tastes so delicious and causes such a flood of oral juices that there is a moment of intense pain in your mouth and glands.”
Basically, it’s so good it hurts. More on DFW, the bookworm’s Cobain, after the jump.
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If you’re in New York: Tonight’s SWEET comedy show at the Slipper Room features some funny people Judd Apatow hasn’t managed to recruit just yet.
If you’re in Los Angeles: Skylight Books hosts a party for all those tackling Infinite Summer, the project to read David Foster Wallace’s gargantuan Infinite Jest in its entirely. Unlike the summer reading you did as a child, this won’t require a book report at the end.
If you’re in San Francisco: John Doe & the Sadies make beautiful alt-country music together at the Great American Music Hall, with a special appearance by our girl Jill Sobule.
If you’re in Chicago: Born Yesterday (the 1950 version, not the one starring Melanie Griffith) screens at Grant Park as part of the Chicago Outdoor Film Festival..
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In addition to an excerpt from his final novel, the New Yorker has a long profile of David Foster Wallace online today. D.T. Max delves into the psychopharmacological shifts that preceded Wallace’s suicide in September of last year, and manages to draw an original portrait of his life without presenting the same facts that every other profile has trotted out during the flurry of posthumous hype. Some of us have been reading about Wallace and his work for years — going on a decade now — and it remains a thrill to find a previously undiscovered “chunklet” of info, to use a word coined by the man himself.
The most striking chunklet in Max’s profile, at least for some one whose all-time desert-island novel is Infinite Jest, is that the primary female character, Joelle Van Dyne, is based on the poet and memoirist Mary Karr.
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