David Foster Wallace’s Final Attempt to Make Art Moral

Before David Foster Wallace died by suicide at his California home, in 2008, he left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage. The collection of notes, outlines, prose fragments, character sketches, and partial chapters reportedly ran to hundreds of thousands of words, most of them circling a group of accountants at an office for the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, circa 1985. According to David Hering, a lecturer at the University of Liverpool who has visited Wallace’s archives in Austin, Texas, the material went back more than a decade, to the period immediately after the publication of Wallace’s second novel, the career-making “Infinite Jest” (1996). Over the years, Wallace had often referred to the project as the “long thing,” and worried that it was becoming unmanageable. The editor Michael Pietsch, who assembled some of the pages into the book that would become “The Pale King,” published in 2011, says Wallace compared writing the novel to “trying to carry a sheet of plywood in a windstorm.” In an e-mail to his friend and sometimes rival Jonathan Franzen, Wallace wrote, “The whole thing is a tornado that won’t hold still long enough for me to see what’s useful and what isn’t.”