The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
David Foster Wallace · an unfinished novel in sections, as edited by Michael Pietsch · Little, Brown, 2011 · scored on Pietsch’s edition and on Wallace’s English, read from knowledge; no text in hand, and English quoted only where its words are certain
Mode
Workplace novel as a meditation on attention; comic, documentary, confessional and visionary by turns, in an unfinished whole
Mythos
The hero remade as the examiner, a knight of endurance at a desk; a conversion with a voice from the doorway; a purgatory of the office, with its ghosts, its saint and its seer; and a title that points to a pallid king
Phase
The Examinations Center in 1985, with lives reaching back into the 1970s: a conversion, an arrival, an afternoon at a desk, an evening at a bar, with no authored beginning or end binding them
Presentation
Fiction; sections of very unequal length, from under a page to around a hundred, in the editor’s order: lyric description, close third-person scene, first-person monologue, transcribed interviews in question and answer, an author’s foreword with footnotes placed inside the novel, a sequence of employees turning pages, and dialogue nearly without narration; an Editor’s Note at the front and notes drawn from Wallace’s papers at the back
Register
From the psalm-like catalogue of an Illinois field to bureaucratic idiom and Midwestern speech, a young man’s articulate, evasive, self-mocking monologue, and the footnoted self-commentary of an author who calls himself the author
Scale
One office of one federal agency in one year, and through it the work, the families and the civic life of a country turning from citizenship to consumption
Governing Proposition
At the Regional Examinations Center of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, in 1985, examiners sit at their desks over other people’s tax returns, while the Service turns from enforcing what citizens owe to collecting revenue. The wager of the novel is that in an administered, consumer society the heroic act is no longer the dramatic one but sustained attention to what is dull and unseen, and that a book which makes its reader sit through the tedium its characters sit through can show the capacity to bear boredom as a civic virtue and the threshold of a kind of grace. Wallace left it unfinished at his death in 2008; the book is the arrangement his editor made of what he left.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
“Past the flannel plains” the book begins, and its first section is an Illinois field at harvest, catalogued exactly and musically and raised to the pitch of a psalm. It ends by turning to the reader with an injunction. The novel that follows is about people who sit at desks all day over paper, and it opens out of doors, in the fields and weather around the city where they work.
The work is at the Regional Examinations Center of the Internal Revenue Service in Peoria, Illinois, in 1985. The examiners read returns. They check the figures other people have sworn to, hour after hour, at their desks. Backstories reach into the 1970s, to the childhoods and the drift that brought each of them there. The Service itself is changing, and the book watches the change: from enforcement to revenue.
The form is a sequence of sections of very unequal length, some under a page, one around a hundred. Their modes change from one to the next: close third-person scenes, first-person monologue, transcribed interviews in question and answer, a sequence of employees turning pages, dialogue nearly without narration. The book was published in April 2011 by Little, Brown, subtitled “An Unfinished Novel”, two and a half years after Wallace’s death. Michael Pietsch, his editor, assembled it from the manuscript, drafts, notebooks and files Wallace left, and says in his Editor’s Note that no final order was among them.
Movement II
At one point the fiction stops and a voice says “Author here”. It belongs to “David Wallace”, who announces that what the reader holds is not a novel but a memoir, and that the disclaimer on the copyright page, which calls it fiction, is a legal device. He tells of his own time at the Center, with footnotes of his own. The gambit is metafictional, but it is turned toward sincerity rather than play: the foreword claims for the book the status of a document, so that a book about returns becomes itself a kind of return.
This “David Wallace” arrives at the Center and is mistaken for someone else, and the account of his arrival and of the mistaken identity is long and comic. It runs well past its point. His self-commentary, qualified and requalified, sometimes falls into the very tic of self-consciousness it diagnoses, and the book lets it. The foreword is one of the places where the unfinished state shows most plainly, a brilliant device with no finished structure around it to say what it is for.
Others arrive too. Sylvanshine is a “fact psychic”: facts come into his head unbidden, attention without will. The Center has its ghosts, Garrity and Blumquist, and men who speak for the purposes of the Service, among them Glendenning. There are interview sections in question and answer, transcribed as documents, many voices answering one question, which is what an institution sounds like. Some of these sections are sketches of characters who never return.
Movement III
The longest section belongs to Chris Fogle, and it is a monologue of around a hundred pages in the voice of one articulate, evasive, self-mocking young man. Fogle describes his years of drift: the amphetamine Obetrol, afternoons given to a soap opera. His father dies, caught in the doors of a train. The monologue takes its time, and it needs to. Without the drift there would be nothing for what follows to turn.
Fogle walks by mistake into the wrong classroom, an Advanced Tax class, and stays. At the end of it the substitute, a Jesuit, speaks to the room. He recasts the accountant as the true heroic figure of the age: a knight of endurance in a confined space, unseen and unapplauded. His last words are “Gentlemen, you are called to account”, and Fogle hears them as a summons addressed to him.
The conversion is the book’s height, and it is also its most open question. Fogle joins the Service. A voice from a doorway has turned a drifting life into a vocation, and the book tells it with the force of a religious narrative. Whether it is grace, or a young man’s capture by a career, it does not say. The Jesuit’s speech recasts the examiner as a knight of endurance, the true heroic figure of the age, and it is the novel’s argument stated outright; Fogle is the one figure in whom it is enacted.
Movement IV
Lane Dean Jr. sits at his desk examining returns, and his chapter gives the afternoon minute by minute. The strain is rendered without a slack sentence, and the reader is made to sit the afternoon with him. Elsewhere in the book is the backstory that brought him there, his pregnant girlfriend at a picnic table. At his desk, at the extremity of his boredom, a ghost sits down beside him, and the torment turns into something like an annunciation.
One section is nothing but employees turning pages. It runs like a list, page after page turned, the clock and the ventilation noted between them. It does not describe tedium; it gives it, and the reader is made to bear what the examiners bear. One of the ghosts explains the history of the word “boredom”. Wallace’s notes, gathered at the back of the book, put the far edge of the idea in one sentence: bliss lies on the other side of “crushing, crushing boredom”.
The social half is argued in a long conversation about civics. Its speakers watch the citizen dwindling into the consumer, the person who owes something to others into the person who is owed, and the Service turning from enforcement to revenue as it goes. Elsewhere Toni Ware’s childhood is given, in trailers with her mother. The family, the state and labour sit in the same building, in sections of their own.
Movement V
Late in the book Meredith Rand and Shane Drinion sit at a bar after work and talk through a whole evening. Rand makes a long confession, and Drinion, who is almost entirely attention, listens. The section is a long two-hander in which one speaker is all speech and the other all regard, and it rises to a strange tenderness. Drinion is so absorbed that he rises from his chair into the air.
There the book’s line stops. The arrangement is Pietsch’s, and the novel has no authored ending and no authored order; facts and ages shift between sections, as the Editor’s Note acknowledges, and some passages are notes in prose. At the back the editor gives “Notes and Asides”, drawn from Wallace’s notebooks and files, in which the shape of what was planned can be glimpsed: a structure, the notes suggest, of things about to happen that never quite do. Several sections that would have been the book’s summits exist only there.
The book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012, the year the Board made no award. What it is, then, is a set of achieved forms inside an editor’s arrangement: the field at harvest, the foreword, Fogle’s summons, Lane Dean’s afternoon, the turning pages, Drinion attending to Rand. Each says the same thing in its own way, that attention paid without reward to what is unremarkable is the act that remains. What would have made them one book is the part Wallace did not write.
Act III · The Twelve
The subtractive test bites hard, and in two ways. Within the major sections much is compelled: Fogle’s hundred pages need their drift, the Obetrol, the soap opera, the father caught in the train doors, for the conversion in the wrong classroom to mean anything, and Lane Dean’s afternoon needs every minute of its tedium. But the book as a whole was never ordered by its author. The Editor’s Note says plainly that Wallace left no final sequence, and the arrangement is the editor’s. Many sections could be lifted out with no loss to the argument: several Sylvanshine passages, some interview fragments, sketches of characters who never return; and the comic account of “David Wallace”’s arrival and mistaken identity runs well past its point. Nothing in the assembly can show that its parts are required by what the whole has to say, because the whole was not finished. That holds the axis lowest of the twelve.
Score: 7.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated, and it holds: in an administered, consumer society the heroic act is no longer the dramatic one but sustained attention to what is dull and unseen, and the capacity to bear boredom is both a civic virtue and the threshold of a kind of grace. Wallace’s notes put it at the far edge: bliss lies on the other side of “crushing, crushing boredom”. The book makes this visible where no serious novel had looked: in tax returns, in the examiners at their desks, in a ghost who explains the history of the word “boredom”, in Drinion so absorbed that he rises from his chair. The civics argument states the social half, the citizen dwindling into the consumer as the Service turns from enforcement to revenue. Held at its figure because much of the meaning is spoken, by the Jesuit, by Glendenning, by Drinion, and the unfinished book never puts it to the test of a completed action.
Score: 8.5 / 10
Elevation comes, more often than the subject would seem to allow. The opening, “Past the flannel plains”, raises an Illinois field at harvest to the pitch of a psalm. Fogle’s conversion is the height: a substitute Jesuit at the end of an Advanced Tax class telling the room “Gentlemen, you are called to account”, and a drifting young man hearing it as a summons. Lane Dean’s long afternoon at his desk turns from torment to something like an annunciation as a ghost sits down beside him. Meredith Rand’s confession and Drinion’s attention to it, over a whole evening, rise to a strange tenderness. Held in the low eights because the method is tedium by design: the heights are spaced through long flat stretches, and several sections that would have been the book’s summits exist only as notes.
Score: 8.1 / 10
The archetypal frame is real and only partly built. The hero is remade as the examiner: the Jesuit’s speech recasts the accountant as the true heroic figure of the age, a knight of endurance in a confined space, and Fogle’s turn is a conversion narrative with a voice from the doorway. The Center is a purgatory of sorts, with its ghosts, Garrity and Blumquist, its saint in Drinion, its seer in Sylvanshine, the “fact psychic”, and the Service as a secular church of account. The title points to a fallen king, a pallor of sovereignty in the bureaucrat. But the patterns do not bear the book: the heroic arc is announced in a speech and enacted once, in Fogle, and the purgatorial and saintly figures stay attributes rather than load. What would have made the structure built is precisely what the book left unwritten.
Score: 7.6 / 10
The inheritance is Wallace’s own encyclopedic manner, Infinite Jest and the long essays, with Gaddis and Pynchon behind it, and the American workplace novel. The turn is radical in subject and in wager: a novel about boredom that bores on purpose, set inside the tax service, that asks the reader to endure what its characters endure and offers the endurance as the point. Inside it the Author’s Foreword, which opens “Author here”, breaks the fiction to call the book a memoir and the copyright disclaimer a legal device, a metafictional gambit turned toward sincerity rather than play. The stake was very high: Wallace worked on the book for about a decade against the expectation his earlier novel had set, and did not finish it. Held below the bar because much of the instrument, the sectional mosaic, the footnoted self-commentary, the maximal monologue, is his own proven manner, and the swerve lies mainly in subject and in the reader’s endurance.
Score: 8.2 / 10
Where the form is achieved it is the instrument of the knowledge. The section in which employees turn pages, the clock and the ventilation noted between them, is tedium given as experience, not described. Lane Dean’s chapter makes the reader sit the afternoon. The interview sections give the Service as many voices answering one question, which is what an institution sounds like. The Author’s Foreword makes the fiction claim the status of a document, so that the book about tax returns becomes itself a return. But the whole is an editor’s mosaic. The form that would have bound these pieces, which Wallace’s notes suggest involved things about to happen that never quite do, does not exist as made. What stands is a set of achieved forms inside an arrangement that knows nothing by being arranged.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Evidence, fifteen years of it, and the axis declines forecast. The return is real: the book has a substantial criticism inside the study of Wallace, which grew quickly after 2011, and it keeps its questions open. Is the boredom it praises a discipline, or a surrender to the administered life it describes? Is Drinion a saint or an emptiness? Is Fogle’s conversion grace, or a young man’s capture by a career? What would the finished book have been, and how far should the notes govern a reading of it? The prose of the best sections repays rereading at the level of the sentence. Held below eight because the criticism is concentrated in a single author’s studies, much of it is about the manuscript and its assembly rather than the work, and fifteen years is a short test.
Score: 7.9 / 10
The field is the American novel of the 2010s. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the most consequential matter of modern life, the administrative and fiscal state, could be the whole subject of a serious novel, and that tedium could be a literary medium, not only a topic. That is a reorganisation of possibility, but stated as much as realised, because the book is unfinished. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it was widely reviewed and read on publication, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2012, and it is taught in courses on Wallace and on contemporary fiction; its arguments about attention and boredom entered criticism and the essay. It has not redirected the novel. The workplace and attention novels of the following decade owe more to Wallace in general, to Infinite Jest and the essays, above all the Kenyon commencement address, than to this book, and its reach is hard to separate from its author’s posthumous fame.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Weighed on form, then presence, then fabric, over fifteen years. Form: the published text survives whole and in print, but its form is the editor’s, and a later edition added material, so the text itself is less settled than that of a book its author finished; that holds the figure at the foot of what fifteen years can show. Presence: continuous since 2011, translated, taught chiefly in courses on Wallace and on postmodern fiction, and read very largely as the sequel and coda to Infinite Jest; wide for a posthumous book, narrow beside its predecessor. Fabric: nothing to charge. The surface is fixed in part to its moment, the tax code and the computerisation of 1985, though the book makes that fixity its subject. Fifteen years demonstrate far less than the decades and centuries behind the summit, and the axis credits survival shown, not survival foreseen.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Judged on Wallace’s English, with no translation between. At its best the command is as high as anything he wrote: Fogle’s monologue holds a hundred pages on the voice of one articulate, evasive, self-mocking young man; the opening’s catalogue of a field is exact and musical; the Rand and Drinion conversation sustains a long two-hander in which one speaker is almost all attention; the Lane Dean chapter renders minute-by-minute strain without a slack sentence. The ear for bureaucratic idiom and Midwestern speech is exact. The charges are those of the assembly and of drafts: several sections are plainly unrevised, characters’ facts and ages shift between sections, as the Editor’s Note acknowledges, some passages are notes in prose, and the self-commentary of “David Wallace” sometimes falls into the tic it diagnoses.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the lyric field of the opening and the section of employees turning pages. They obey one law: attention, paid without reward to what is unremarkable, is the human act that remains, and its opposite is the flight from boredom into entertainment or sensation. The law runs through the ghosts, through Sylvanshine’s involuntary facts, attention without will, through Drinion’s rising, attention as grace, through Fogle’s conversion and the civics argument. That is a wide range held by one physics. Charged on two counts. The book’s laws of the real are not settled: documentary realism, metafictional memoir and the supernatural sit side by side without the finished structure that would have reconciled them. And the unfinished state leaves contradictions in fact and in arc that a coherent work would not contain.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Many orders, and some the novel seldom holds. Labour, as the subject: the examiner’s work given in its procedures, its tools and its hours. The state, in the Service, taxation and the civics of who owes what to whom. Consciousness, in Fogle, Lane Dean, Rand and Sylvanshine. The family, in the death of Fogle’s father, Lane Dean’s pregnant girlfriend at the picnic table, Toni Ware’s childhood in trailers with her mother. The natural order, in the Illinois fields and weather. The sacred, in the Jesuit, the ghosts, Drinion. History, as the America of 1985 and its turn from citizenship to consumption. In the achieved sections one question binds them: what attention is owed, and to whom. Held off the top because the binding is unfinished, and several orders sit in separate sections that the book never brings together.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
7.9 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier III · Major
Strongest Dimensions
The Unconcealment at 8.5, then The Made at 8.4, then The Swerve at 8.2. A disclosure that holds and was new, that in an administered society the heroic act is sustained attention to what is dull and unseen, made visible in tax returns, in the turning of pages and in Drinion’s regard; a command of English as high as anything Wallace wrote, in Fogle’s hundred pages, the field of the opening and Lane Dean’s afternoon; and a wager on a novel about boredom that bores on purpose, staked on a decade’s work.
Limiting Dimension
The Inevitable at 7.0, held by an order that is the editor’s, not the author’s, and by sections that could go without the argument changing: several Sylvanshine passages, interview fragments, sketches of characters who never return, and an account of an arrival that runs past its point. Next above it, The Archetypal Deep, The Living Form, Pressure on Tradition and The Inner Law at 7.6: a heroic and purgatorial frame announced and enacted once; achieved forms inside an unauthored whole; a reorganisation stated as much as realised; and laws of the real left unreconciled.
The Necessity Cap is unmet: The Inevitable at 7.0 falls five tenths short of the threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Made at 8.4, The Living Form at 7.6, The Inner Law at 7.6, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on four axes: The Unconcealment at 8.5 meets the bar of 8.5 exactly, but The Swerve at 8.2, The Imperishable at 8.0, The Archetypal Deep at 7.6 and Pressure on Tradition at 7.6 each fall short of it. The Universal Minimum is unmet at The Inevitable, 7.0, below 7.5; The Encompassed, which it exempts, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.1. Two of the five summit conditions are met. The work stands where its aggregate places it: 7.9, in the band of Tier III, short of the 8.0 at which Tier IV begins and of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, published by Little, Brown and Company in April 2011 with the subtitle “An Unfinished Novel”, two and a half years after Wallace’s death in September 2008. It is scored as Michael Pietsch’s edition of 2011, the book its editor assembled from the manuscript, drafts, notebooks and files Wallace left: the unit includes the Editor’s Note at the front and the “Notes and Asides” at the back, drawn from Wallace’s notes, and the order of the sections is the editor’s. The scenes added to the later paperback edition are not part of the work scored. The assembly is charged where it costs, chiefly on the necessity of the whole, its form, its inner law and its survival, and Wallace’s writing is judged in full wherever it stands on its own. The book is in copyright and no text of it was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. Every axis is judged on Wallace’s English, with no translation between. Events are paraphrased, and English is quoted only where its words are certain: the opening words, the first words of the Author’s Foreword, the Jesuit’s last words to the class, and a phrase from Wallace’s notes; the subtitle and the title of the notes are given as printed. Infinite Jest and Wallace’s essays are named as inheritance and as the measure of the book’s reach, and are not credited to it. Facts that could not be verified, among them the number of the sections and their numbering, the length of the first edition, and the placing of individual sections in the sequence, are not given. Citations are by episode.