Wallaceblogging: The error of I

Unrelated to the rest of this post: an extensive survey of DFW's self-help library.

The rest of this post may contain THE PALE KING spoilers, although they are more general knowledge at this point. I'm still processing this book, obviously, so I'm going to keep writing about it. 

That is your warning.

There may not even be actual spoilers in this, but better safe, etc. 

It is with regret that I have to call out some other critics who have reviewed THE PALE KING and decided, based on the fragments that are extant, that it is some kind of boredom-related manifesto dressed up as a novel. We can debate whether it is or isn't (see below), but in jumping to that conclusion is dangerous, especially the frequency of conclusion-jumping I'm seeing. I'm seeing the same error made over and over again, conflating characters' narration for the stance of the author/ Conflating one character in particular whose name is "Dave Wallace" and who shares some biographical detail with David Foster Wallace, author, and making a one-to-one correlation thereof. 

This is such a basic mistake that it really makes my head throb to have to correct it. This is like Book Reviewing 101. Characters are not authors, and unless authors are very widely acknowledged to be writing roman a clefs, it's important -- I think -- to go in to a fiction experience not assuming that the author has some axe to grind. A lot of them do, but that's not the point. Maybe you even have a novel in your bottom drawer that espouses Your Correct And Right View Of The World God Damn It (...no comment) but you can't assume everyone is like you.

Dave Wallace, character, waxes nearly poetic on the state of his job. So does Irrelevant Chris Fogle. So do several other characters, and the ones that don't narrate, indicate their own world-views, some more clearly than others. Maybe these are authorial stand-ins, maybe not, but automatically jumping to that conclusion is sloppy and foolish. At the New York Times critical level? Hard to believe. 

As to that debate I mentioned I think the correct answer to the question is, alas, "Maybe, but we don't really know." (Everything beyond this point is my untutored speculation.) If DFW had lived to finish THE PALE KING he would have many points to make, and none so unsubtle as spelled out in the extracts of TPK. The passages most often quoted to support this decision are sometimes very moving, but there are dozens of those in INFINITE JEST. (How soon we forget...) I think had he finished we might have had a new model for the didactic or moral novel that is not the 19th century, and not the postmodern, and it wouldn't be so awkward having to point to a piece of fiction and say "I learned something really, really important from this book." But since he won't be taking up that task...