“The Pale King,” the novel about the Internal Revenue Service that author David Foster Wallace was writing before he committed suicide, hit the bookstores on April 15.
Wallace, who wrote the cult classic novel “Infinite Jest,” died in September 2008 while he was working on his novel about employees at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill. The novel’s subject is boredom, but Wallace used his imagination to also describe the IRS’s varied employees, and the agency’s perpetual dilemma of spending its funds on hiring people or developing software.
Wallace’s editor Michael Pietsch needed to reconstruct the book from thousands of pages of manuscript after the 46-year-old author hung himself. Described as an “unfinished novel,” Little Brown & Co. timed the release of the 548-page book for the end of tax season.
