David Foster Wallace is a controversial literary figure. His work is generally gruelling and I’d say at times hostile to his audience. Yet, despite his punishing style, he retains an (often diehard) following that routinely touts his genius. I can’t help but find myself compelled to explore this phenomena and attempt at least some explanation for why, alongside his other works, The Pale King is a divisive moment in literature.
Returning to core themes from his previous novel, Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace began a draft of The Pale King, a novel unfinished at the time of his suicide in 2008. The book reconsiders attention, perception, and boredom, this time from the angle of IRS agents in the late 70s and 80s as the institution attempts to reconcile itself with an increasingly digital world. The novel progresses as, essentially, a series of vignettes, interviews, newspaper clippings, and conversations, each focusing on a sort of dream-team of IRS agents, each with a traumatic past and a particular quirk that makes them specifically good for such a mundane job.
I am no stranger to maximalism. I’ve read some of Thomas Pynchon’s massive tomes, Don DeLillo’s Underworld, and David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. These books are brutal. The sheer number of characters to keep track of, the detailed descriptions of minutiae, and the extent of background knowledge you’re expected to bring to the text form all kinds of barriers to engagement with the work. I think, perhaps, that’s why these authors get such cult-like followings: only the initiates have proven themselves smart enough to engage with these texts and they form a society of the talented few to discuss their interpretations—either that, or the sunk cost fallacy appears in literature as much as in gambling.
That being said, of the maximalist writers with whom I’m familiar, David Foster Wallace is the one that most justifies the use of the form. Infinite Jest, for example, is well over a thousand pages and has hundreds of meandering footnotes, but the whole book revolves around themes of obsession and the form emulates the pitfalls of such obsession (it’s in this way that I think of DFW’s writing as somewhat hostile to its audience—it illuminates its readers as it dismantles them). The Pale King offers a similar set of keys for reading it that justify its boring bits—or rather, most of the book.
From the very first chapter, The Pale King outlines the central themes around perception. Wallace gives an extraordinary lush description of a setting—the early chapters of The Pale King are, in my opinion, DFW at his most ‘literary’—which concludes as follows:
“Your shoes’ brand incised in the dew. An alfalfa breeze. Socks’ burrs. Dry scratching inside a culvert. Rusted wire and tilted posts more a symbol of restraint than a fence per se, NO HUNTING. The shush of the interstate off past the windbreak. The pasture’s crows standing at angles, turning up patties to get at the worms underneath, the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail. Read these” (6).
The final sentence of the first chapter is two simple words that offer a kind of treatise for the book’s overall project: “Read these.” There’s a full list of items that comes before: “socks’ burrs”, for instance, that are all compressed by that simple pronoun “these.” Of course, due to its proximity to the final sentence, I read “the shapes of the worms incised in the overturned dung and baked by the sun all day until hardened, there to stay, tiny vacant lines in rows and inset curls that do not close because head never quite touches tail” as the objects of interest. First, I think that such a lush description of dried worms in dung is a bold subversive move, but I also appreciate how DFW turns the reader’s attention to something completely below our interest. People are more likely to turn away in revulsion or simply not examine dung on the ground, and yet that is where he forces our attention. Each of the other items in the list is a shorter, more direct sentence: the embellishment comes on that most unpleasant and most explicitly non-communicative. I can picture dried worms twisting into nearly-letters to examine.
This passage, in my mind, sets up the tone for the rest of the book. It teaches us to pay attention to the minutiae and in so many ways the book recycles that theme for further consideration. The book is a matter of scope and perspective. As such, using the IRS as a milieu is a perfect vehicle for exploring these themes.
Of course, DFW had not completed the novel at the time of his death, but it does appear that he sequenced the extant chapters and left some notes behind to elaborate on intentions. In a note for an “embryonic outline”, Wallace notes two broad arcs: “1. Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs” (547)—check!—and “2. Being individual vs. being part of larger things — paying taxes, being ‘lone gun’ in the IRS vs. team player” (547). Of the two, the first is by far the more obvious and more clearly well-developed. The latter, however, is interesting in its own right to see how the “embryonic” motif begins to emerge.
Again in an early section of the book, Wallace provides a kind of key passage for addressing that theme (how considerate that the themes are established early, actually!). Reflecting on auto manufacturing, Wallace writes that
“Each car, not only parked by a different human individual but conceived, designed, assembled from parts each one of which was designed and made, transported, sold, financed, purchased, and insured by human individuals, each with life stories and self-concepts that all fit together into a larger pattern of facts. Reynold’s dictum was that reality was a fact-pattern the bulk of which was entropic and random. The trick was homing in on which facts were important – Reynolds was a rifle to Sylvanshine’s shotgun” (18).
In this moment, the two themes seem to converge. On the one hand, we are asked to consider the relationship between data and information. Deciding “which facts were important” is critical to interpreting the world (not to mention the novel itself), so it is once again a matter of where to focus attention. At the same time, though, we are offered an image of a literal assemblage. The mass of cars are all driven by individual people, pointing to that relationship between the individual and mass society (there’s no parking in the front/back lot of the IRS), but even what we consider individual—one car—is only possible through a number of steps all completed by different individuals and manufactured from a range of parts.
In a later section, several IRS employees have a conversation about the nature of the American citizen, suggesting that “We don’t think of ourselves as citizens in the old sense of being small parts of something larger and infinitely more important to which we have serious responsibilities” (138). Wallace posits a thesis of sorts that the rebellion of the 1960s produced an overwhelmingly counter-effect to our common knowledge. The logic progresses that hippies, under the guise of peace and love and togetherness, actually succeeded in pushing for individualism. As hippies dodged the draft, for example, they asserted the individual over the communal “good” of fighting in Vietnam (and of course I use quotation marks to note the absurdity of Vietnam war). The conversation then continues to discuss how that individualism is easy to commodify—certain modes of consumption become markers of rebelliousness, yet remain subservient to a system of consumption. Meanwhile, our individual consumption creates the society we, as individuals, decry. The conversation continues:
“We do still think of ourselves as citizens in the sense of being beneficiaries—we’re actually conscious of our rights as American citizens and the nation’s responsibilities to us and ensuring we get our share of the American pie. We think of ourselves now as eaters of the pie instead of makers of the pie. So who makes the pie? [...] ‘Corporations make the pie. They make it and we eat it.’ [...] Something has happened where we’ve decided on a personal level that it’s alright to abdicate our individual responsibility to the common good and let government worry about the common good while we all go about our individual self-interest business and struggle to gratify our various appetites.’ [….] ‘But the whole dark genius of corporations is that they allow for individual reward without individual obligation. The workers’ obligations are to the executives, and the executives’ obligations are to the CEO, and the CEO’s obligation is to the Board of Directors, and the Board’s obligation is to the stockholders, who are also the same customers the corporation will screw over at the very earliest opportunity in the name of profit, which profits are distributed as dividends to the very stockholders-slash-customers they’ve been fucking over in their own name. It's like a fugue of evaded responsibility” (138).
While a little on-the-nose, David Foster Wallace’s argument has a cogency that is hard to deny. I remember back to a philosophy course I took in University where the professor talked about how whenever we are asked to vote, politicians need to appeal to self-interest. That the politician will lower your taxes, for instance, accrues them a vote, because we tend to substitute our individual wants for the collective. If a politician guaranteed a better society for a group you’re not a part of, you’d have to have a pretty incredible sense of ethics to vote against yourself. Wallace’s statement “fugue of evaded responsibility” is particularly illuminating in this respect.
While the individual-vs-society motif emerges economically (they do work for the IRS, after all!), the conversation then takes a philosophical bent wherein
“the individual US citizen’s deep fear, the same basic fear that you and I have and that everybody has except nobody ever talks about it except existentialists in convoluted French prose. Or Pascal. Our smallness, our insignificance and mortality, yours and mine, the thing that we all spend all our time not thinking about directly, 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 and our childhoods are over and our adolescence and the vigor of youth and soon our adulthood, that everything we see around us all the time is decaying and passing, it’s all passing away, and so are we, so am I, and given how fast the first forty-two years have shot by it’s not going to be long before I too pass away, whoever imagined that there was a more truthful way to put it than ‘die,’ ‘pass away,’ the very sound of it makes me feel the way I feel at dusk on a wintry Sunday—’” (145).
This is another passage where multiple themes converge. Of course there’s the layer where we consider our relationships with others as an individual, but there’s also a layer in which our individual fears are collective. Everyone seems to share the fear that time is passing and we are all dying. This fear of losing time runs parallel to the way we spend our attention, of course—and fear is itself a motif in the text.
When Wallace explores the relationship between surface and depth (or lack thereof), that same existential dread re-emerges. At least one character espouses a nihilistic lack of meaning underneath phenomena, while another considers Franklin D. Roosevelt’s statement that “there’s nothing to fear but fear itself” and adds yet another layer to it, suggesting that the fear of fear is something to be afraid of. (Incidentally, In some ways, that was my experience with The Pale King: I was afraid to read it. I thought it was another 800 page slog waiting on my shelf, despite it being only around 550. I was afraid I wouldn’t “get it” (and sure, there are gaps in my lazy readings, so that one might be accurate).)
There’s something to be said for the relationship between fear and interest, of course. Wallace describes the efficacy of dullness for the IRS, “one of the very first government agencies to learn that such qualities [the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex] help insulate them against public protest and political opposite, and that abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy” (86). He goes on to note that the “great disadvantage of secrecy is that it’s interesting. People are drawn to secrets; they can’t help it” (86). I am compelled to consider surface and depth here. With secrecy, there is an unexplored depth that can never be reached [cf. that whole thesis I wrote about paranoia in 2020]. With boredom, there is complete transparency which, ironically, obfuscates:
“consider the fact that just about every last transcript, record, study, white paper, code amendment, revenue-ruling, and procedural memo has been available for public perusal since date of issue. No FOIA filing even required. But not one journalist seems ever to have checked them out, and with good reason: This stuff is solid rock. The eyes roll up white by the third or fourth. You just have no idea.” (86)
This, essentially, is what distinguishes The Pale King (or Infinite Jest) from other maximalist novels: it capitalizes on boredom. It understands its relationship with the mundane. Ultimately, Wallace offers the following explanation for “why dullness proves to be such a powerful impediment to attention. Why we recoil from the dull” (87). He posits that “dullness is intrinsically painful; maybe that’s where phrases like ‘deadly dull’ or ‘excruciatingly dull’ come from” or that
“Maybe 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, if only in an ambient low-level way, and which most of us spend nearly all our time and energy trying to distract ourselves from feeling, or at least from feeling directly or with our full attention. Admittedly, the whole thing’s pretty confusing, and hard to talk about abstractly…but surely something must lie behind not just Muzak in dull or tedious places anymore but now also actual TV in waiting rooms, supermarkets’ checkouts, airports’ gates, SUVs’ backseats. Walkmen, iPods, BlackBerries, cell phones that attach to your head. This terror of silence with nothing diverting to do. I can’t think anyone really believes that today’s so-called ‘information society’ is just about information. Everyone knows it's about something else, way down” (87).
To me this forms a central question of the text. In my hazy recollection of Infinite Jest, I think a core problem is that we are amusing ourselves to death. In The Pale King, Wallace seems to delve into the reason for that, namely that boredom exposes the existential pain from which we are always striving to escape via Muzak and TV. Considering it this way, The Pale King, for all its purported humour, could be reframed as a horror novel. The book is inflicting boredom on you—and what is more terrifying than that?
Following from the section where Wallace turns our attention to the worms in the dung, which demands close-up scrutiny, he shifts to a plane ride where everything below becomes indistinct. This interplay is a beautiful spin that then shifts focus towards Claude Sylvanshine on his way to his new appointment at the IRS. He reflects, “knowing that internal stress could cause failure on the exam merely set up internal stress about the prospect of internal stress” (16). The prospect of stress is itself a stress (like how fear of fear is fear). He considers the “disastrous consequences fear and stress could bring about” (16) before then shifting to considerations of perspective, literally and figuratively. He wonders if people can trick themselves into just not thinking and worries everyone knows the trick but him: “He tended to conceptualize some ultimate, platonic-level Terror as a bird of prey in whose mere aloft shadow the prey was stricken and paralyzed, trembling as the shadow enlarged and became inevitability” (17). It’s noteworthy that his fear is characterized as something with greater perspective that can view him from a distance before, presumably, swooping down on him. He asks himself, “What if he was simply born and destined to live in the shadow of Total Fear and Despair, and all his so-called activities were pathetic attempts to distract him from the inevitable?” (17) before noting that “Tedium is like stress but its own Category of Woe” (17). He then lists all the most tedious accounting-based jargon that pops into his head—boring for us and a terror to him. They then begin the descent and Wallace plays with perspective once again, commenting on the traffic looking like it moves so slowly from above: “The whole ball game was perspective, filtering, the choice of perception’s objects. Sylvanshine tried to envision the small plane as seen from the ground” (17). The passage is important for two reasons: 1) Attention becomes an outlet to avoid boredom. Sylvanshine recognizes that his “so-called” activities (presumably our boring ones) serve as a distraction from tedium and therefore stress and therefore woe. 2) The idea that perception must focus itself in certain ways and that imagining alternate perspectives of close-up and far-away is critical to attention. I’d also posit that Wallace significantly uses “the choice of perception’s objects” to place more agency in perception itself as proprietor of objects and choice, as though our attention is guided from some unknown force in perception itself.
We see frequent, frequent repetitions of the motif throughout the book. In one section, a character talks about how he had wanted to write a play where a rote examiner is “poring over 1040s and attachments and cross-filed W-2s and 1099s and things like that” (108) on a minimalist stage, performing a job until the audience is bored and restless so that they decide to leave. He says that “once the audience have let, the real action of the play can start. [...] Except I could never decide on the action, if there was any, if it’s a realistic play” (108). Later, a character explains how his dad liked to systematically mow the lawn in little patches and recognizing how satisfying it was. He compares his job at the IRS to that, where each file “gives you that solid little feeling” (117) before recognizing that the job never really stops. So, even when we are satisfied by the tedium there’s a kind of greater horror in that it never ends.
The book, though, offers justification of boredom and even aggrandizes it. There are two sections where IRS trainers(?) justify the tedium. One talks about how noble the work is, building up IRS agents to the status of modern day mythic heroes, the mighty few capable of battling the boredom day-by-day to ensure that the country runs smoothly. In another section, the trainers talk about the difference between information and data. They explain how the recruits’ job is to sort out what is relevant from a mass of raw data. They must always be calculating what avenues are worth exploring (i.e. which are most likely to increase revenue). That, essentially, teaches the readers how to read this book.
We are placed in the role of IRS agents, given a wealth of raw information that could be irrelevant and asked to determine what is worthy of our attention. Whole passages are so bogged down in minutiae and the names of different forms or the medical descriptions of vertebrae that they seem irrelevant. Whole characters don’t seem to contribute to the plot very much. There’s even a note in the back that DFW wanted to set up a series of would-be events that don’t go anywhere: a seeming terrorist attack is actually just a manure explosion, for example. I suspect that even if the novel were finished, there would be so much irrelevant information that the book itself is challenging you to adopt the IRS ethos: make a decision about what matters.
Beyond just the content of the book, Wallace’s style demands close attention. Even at the level of the sentence, Wallace forces you to linger. There were a number of times when I thought to myself I’d finish the sentence, close the book for a break, and return later. Yet, I’d find that by the time I finished one sentence I was three quarters down the page and figured I might as well continue. One cannot simply stop mid-page, right? The compulsion to carry on is built into the very structure of the work.
This pattern, sometimes, governed the narration of the different sections. The most notable example to me is a section narrated by the ADD-led mind of Chris Fogle, a teenage burnout who fumbles his way towards the IRS after feeling like he’s nothing. His lack of attention to what details actually matter makes his narration a thoroughly gruelling section. You beg for him to get to the point and it takes forever.
Beyond that, though, the sections tend to be short and manageable. While the narration that weaves them together is barely explicit, they form little islands of meaning that often have their own charm. I’m unclear, exactly, why. Much of my interest seems to be in the bizarrely endearing characters that populate the novel. Even though their narrative arcs often go nowhere [in the span of over 500 pages, we barely get to see one day’s work at the office; very few of the characters interact in an ensemble], the profiles Wallace provides have a strangely compelling flavour.
When it comes to character, one of my early favourites is the child Leonard Stecyk. He’s a nearly infallible young man, raising money for charity, baking cookies for his bullies—that kind of thing. The portrait is so absurd which would normally destroy my immersion in the text, but it’s like an overlong joke: it stops being funny before becoming funny again from its excess. DFW then takes a turn and notes how Stecyk’s school principal had fantasies of dragging Leonard behind his truck from a hook—a gruesome image that stands out more starkly due to its juxtaposition with the humour.
Most of the characters are similarly defined by one character trait, which is narratively unsatisfying —- and yet, each character has their own charm and sometimes offers philosophical-thematic turn. For instance, Claude Sylvanshine is characterized by his Random Fact Intuition. Essentially, he’s a psychic of useless information. He’ll know how many grains of sand are on a particular stretch of beach without having counted them, but it’s rare for these details to be useful in any way. Meanwhile, David Cusk suffers from excessive sweating—and his fear of sweating makes him sweat. Again, the fear of fear emerges as the difference between surface and depth collapses.
In one of the final chapters, the characters all meet at a bar and it’s one of the more conventional sections, but it helps to illuminate DFW’s approach to characterization. I suspect that people who don’t like DFW don’t like him because he’s a very ‘masculine’ author, but I think there’s a particular richness to his characterization of Meredith, a beautiful woman who is concerned that her beauty prevents other people from engaging with her authentically. The premise is a little trite, but her way of speaking and her frank outline of her time in a mental hospital as a teenager helps to develop her into a character worthy of consideration. There’s a tragedy to her life wherein she marries an employee from her mental hospital with the assumption that his medical condition would kill him sooner rather than later. Now, years after the fact she seems stuck. Her conversation with Shane Drinion, a stoic and largely passive interlocutor is just the kind of dynamic that highlights her own sincerity. I found myself drawn to Drinion, as well, and DFW has a note outlining their final interaction in the book that I just wish could have been finished. When recounting meeting her husband, Meredith explains how he would ask if she wanted a casual or intense conversation. Drinion seems to have intense attention, though he’s not a great conversationalist. DFW’s note is that at their last interaction, Drinion would ask if she wanted casual or intense and she would just cry. That tenderness forms, in my mind, a human core to an otherwise cerebral work.
By contrast, some of the other female characters are admittedly not given proper treatment. Chahla Neti-Neti serves as a tour guide for David Foster Wallace when he arrives at the IRS for his first day. She leads him around impatiently before enacting oral sex on him, thinking he was a different David Wallace. She’s a nothing character—Googling her name reveals neti-neti to be Sanskrit for “not this, not that”). Toni Ware is given very little attention and is disconnected from the main narrative. Her origin story is horrific—she’s only able to avoid being murdered because of her incredible capacity to not blink—but overall her character does not seem to really be that significant (perhaps because other characters see her as “damaged goods” and so avoid her).
The most irritating of the characters, as I mentioned earlier, is Chris Fogle. I think it’s characters like this that are one of the more contentious elements of Wallace’s writing. Chris Fogle is a college student who cuts class, changes majors, has no direction, does drugs, etc. but has a secret kind of genius. Despite the fact that the novel hardly romanticizes his burnout, I feel like it’s the kind of figure the most annoying people you know identify with. The fact that he can’t stop talking about irrelevant tangents doesn’t help. Ultimately, his section of the book is the one that most wore me down; by necessity it needs to be sprawling to encapsulate his voice but I definitely was counting the pages until the focus changed. That said, thematically his section has a lot to offer, namely when he accidentally stumbles into an accounting class final and has an almost religious experience similar to an actually religious experience that he criticized in another character. For those that are curious, his special claim to fame is that he seems to have discovered a sequence of numbers that, when recited, gives him the ability to hyperfocus. Since this is an unfinished work, that doesn’t really get expanded on yet.
It wouldn’t be a David Foster Wallace novel if there weren’t some sneaky contrivances, though, so David Foster Wallace appears as a character and frames the book as a memoir, offering his first-person metacritique, replete with his characteristic footnotes. After the first few chapters, David Foster Wallace announces the presence of him, the author, and offers a foreword to the book partway through. It’s an amusing turn that he then justifies as needing to be done for legal purposes. He then expounds on the truth-value of the work and says he actually did work for the IRS and that these are all real people. It’s almost convincing. I’m curious to know where this particular character would have gone, particularly because in one of the notes DFW had for the novel, it was that the David Foster Wallace character would disappear altogether after the first hundred pages or so—again an amusing turn since DFW’s main story arc is that he mistakenly took over the identity of another IRS agent named David Wallace after a computer programming glitch collapsed their files.
There’s quite a bit of this absurdist humour interspersed throughout the book, which emerges (generally) in its excess. If it’s not Leonard Stecyk’s characterization as an excessively good boy, it’s the chapter dedicated to an account of him saving his shop teacher from bleeding out. There’s a baby in a man’s office—not his own—that is purportedly able to talk and behave like an adult. There’s a chapter where a horde of mosquitos disastrously ruins a picnic. One character, as a child, has the ambition to kiss every inch of his own body, which leads to some absurd contortions and medical problems and overly long lips. For me, these scenes are less impactful than the more serious ones—and again, it’s a particular brand of humour that might divide readers. I often question when people find DFW funny. Sure, kind of. But even in those moments of humour I see such a darkness that it’s hard to laugh about them.
The Pale King is one of those books that teaches you how to read it. It forces your perspective in particular ways, commands attention to irrelevant details, and then aggrandizes the power of boredom. Since the book is written in a series of short bursts, it essentially forms these little islands of meaning that serve as keys (to extend the archipelagic metaphor: Florida Keys?) to the rest of the text. Really, DFW sets up a model of literature wherein you are presented with an excess of raw data. It’s your job to sit with the boredom and, like the IRS, determine which information is most relevant.
This being the case, it’s completely understandable why some people have an aversion to David Foster Wallace’s writing. It is literal boredom. The book is not there to entertain—I think even the claims for its humour might be trap doors—but instead to force you into a different mode of being. Yet, the end goal here is fraught with challenge. As I mentioned, the book is somewhat hostile to its audience; when the boy who wants to kiss every inch of his body essentially breaks his spine, DFW refers to the different causes, the vertebrae, the symptoms, and so forth all in medical jargon. He provides the raw data; where a more poetic writer might put the pain in comprehensible terms, DFW expects you to bust out your medical dictionary to engage with the work.
Ultimately, I’m torn on Wallace’s project because two very conflicting strands emerge. Earlier, I cited from a conversation where dullness is psychic pain because there is nothing to “distract ourselves from feeling” and that there’s “something else, way down” causing us suffering that boredom forces us to confront. Yet, there’s also the aggrandizing of boredom that ennobles the work of the IRS—boredom as heroism. In one of the notes about the direction of the novel, DFW says that “Drinion is happy. Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss – a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious – lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom” (548).
I’m really struck by this note, particularly since it’s in the final pages of the unfinished manuscript. I love the phrase “Constant bliss in every atom” and all its bittersweet implications. Like Chris Fogle’s experience, it does sound religious in its flavour: a kind of reverence to that which is undeserving of it. I’m curious to know if this is the experience of the diehard David Foster Wallace fans: do they push through the boredom to find the ecstasy? Or are they in denial about their own experience.
For myself, I’m neither one nor the other. I appreciate what Wallace is up to, and I think his form is a perfect match for his style. In that way, he does encapsulate his motifs in a way I cannot imagine anyone else being able to achieve. It’s not exactly a fun read, but it is one that provides some rich rewards, the richer when you’re more thoughtful. I suspect that’s one of the key areas of divisiveness for works like this: what do you want your reading to do? It has beautiful moments, but its key purpose is not beauty. It has philosophical ideas, but their applicability is hazy at best. It’s not like you’re likely to find yourself by reading such absurd characterizations. Yet, it undeniably has literary value and is worth close attention. Wallace is establishing an alternative epistemological mode to train you how to read differently, which I suppose is a kind of ethics of attention [cf. my final paper for my graduate Beckett seminar].
If nothing else, The Pale King is a book that commands attention—but how that attention gets spent; well, that’s up to you.
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