The king is crowned

The moment has arrived. David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King is published today to great fanfare and no small measure of regret that there is no more to follow – rediscovered boyhood poems aside. The lead books article in this week’s Spectator is Sam Leith’s review of Wallace’s posthumous unfinished novel. Here it is for readers of this blog:

An existential hero

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.