An existential hero

Sam Leith is enthralled by a masterpiece on monotony, but is devastated by its author’s death

When David Foster Wallace took his own life two and a half years ago, we lost someone for whom I don’t think the word genius was an empty superlative. He was an overpowering stylist, and a dazzling comedian of ideas. He could be gasp-makingly funny, but had an agonising moral seriousness. There’s more on one page of Wallace than on ten of most of his contemporaries. His mind seemed to have more buzzing in it than the rest of us could imagine being able to cope with, and perhaps than he could.

The Pale King, assembled from his notes and papers by his editor Michael Pietsch, is an unfinished novel of more than 500 pages about the American IRS. It’s about tax-inspectors, basically — specifically, a dozen or so recruits to the Service who arrive at the same training and induction centre in Peoria, Illinois, on the same day in 1985.