Several excerpts have been published*, mostly since Wallace's death in September 2008 (links here), and now Publishers Weekly has posted a review. I have read all of the excerpts, but I'm trying to avoid learning any of the actual plot details, so I skimmed some of this.
* - "The Soul Is Not A Smithy", a story from Wallace's 2004 collection, Oblivion, may also be part of TPK. (An excellent essay about that story is here.) Looking through the list of stories -- "Mister Squishy", "Another Pioneer", "Good Old Neon" -- I really need to read some of these again.
PW:
[T]his isn't the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction. (To be fair, how many of those sorts of books can one person be expected to write?) It is, however, one hell of a document ... a transfixing and hyper-literate descent into relentless, inescapable despair and soul-negating boredom.* - There is a character in the book named David Wallace.
The story ostensibly follows several recruits as they arrive at an IRS processing center in Peoria, Ill., in May 1985. ...
Stretches of this are nothing short of sublime - the first two chapters are a real put-the-reader-on-notice charging bull blitz, and the David Foster Wallace sections* ... are tiny masterpieces ... Then there are the one-offs — a deadening 50-page excursion to a wiggler happy hour, a former stoner's lengthy and tedious recollection of his stony past — but this is a novel of boredom we're talking about, and, so, yes, some of it is quite boring. ...
Of course, this is an unfinished novel. It's sloppy at times, inconsistent in others, baggy here, too-lean there, and you rarely feel that the narrative is taking you somewhere. Instead, it's like you're circling something vague, essential, and frustratingly elusive.
In March 2009, Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, told Entertainment Weekly that Little, Brown would be posting large sections of the manuscript (as well as earlier drafts and notes) online, so readers can get a "detailed sense of Wallace as a working writer" and see how the book was compiled and edited. There has been no subsequent news about this website, so I hope LB follows through on its plan.
5 comments:
No game thread tonight? Watching my first televised baseball game of the season.
Bound to be an uneven document. I have to get caught up on his main works.
Aceves looking good vs Yanks.
the first two chapters are a real put-the-reader-on-notice charging bull blitz
The novel begins:
Past the flannel plains and blacktop graphs and skylines of canted rust, and past the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight through them on the water downriver, to the place beyond the windbreak, where untilled fields simmer shrilly in the a.m. heat: shattercane, lamb’s‑quarter, cutgrass, sawbrier, nutgrass, jimsonweed, wild mint, dandelion, foxtail, muscadine, spinecabbage, goldenrod, creeping charlie, butter-print, nightshade, ragweed, wild oat, vetch, butcher grass, invaginate volunteer beans, all heads gently nodding in a morning breeze like a mother’s soft hand on your cheek.
***
That is actually from "Peoria (4)", which was published in the fall 2002 issue of Triquarterly.
Benjamin Alsup, Esquire:
The last work of fiction by the greatest American writer of my generation is an incomplete and weirdly fractured pseudo memoir about the United States tax code and several employees of the Internal Revenue Service. The work is frustratingly difficult in places. It's potholed throughout by narrative false starts and dead ends. Characters appear without introduction and disappear without cause. ...
[Wallace] invites you to consider some very heavy things — like what it means to consider heavy things and how we go about deciding what's worth our consideration. ...
And you'll be asked to consider other, still more difficult things that you might prefer not to consider at all. Like the ways you treat those whom you profess to love. The ways in which you have failed them. Can you make amends? I mean for real. I mean serious. Do you believe that wounds ever heal? Can things gone wrong be made right? And what of all those whom you should love and do not? The sweaty kid in the back of your geometry class. The wastoids with whom you've lost touch. Have you even tried to love them? Have you tried hard enough? And how would you know and what would that mean? ...
Fortunately, you don't have to answer these questions now. Unfortunately, you do have to answer them soon. ...
***
I have read in many places this book. Everyone praised. Does anybody know that the Hungarian translation when he appears? I've watched a lot of the shop, but could not find it. I have been looking online (www.konyv-konyvek.hu), but could not find it in a bookstore or online. Therefore I think that has not yet appeared in Hungarian.
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