Hey Dave,
Pretty good job on this (understatement/smile emoji).
Really impressive work. Flat out. THE TRUTH.
You were at it for like ten years, right?
Be proud of its current state, and not too daunted by what it’ll take to fulfill its awesomeness.
If anyone can transmit a final complete version from the afterworld, you can. (Sky’s the limit for your rep if you do.)
They’re sainting you, y’know. Or at least they were until 1) sexually deviant dudes in Brooklyn started recommending your books to women who think Brief Interviews is about hideous men (FWIW my mother first recommended your first collection of essays to me in 1997) and 2) “think pieces” began asserting that your obsessive insanity for a writer you loved and other allegations of totally unacceptable earthly behavior (probably not unrelated to your history of clinical depression and eventual tragic end) trump your excellence and influence in the utopian realm of language.
Preliminary remarks complete, here are some quick thoughts on your work in progress, which I’ve only read once so far. I’m sure you know it way better than I do, even if you apparently ceased work on the book right around the time your pal John McCain introduced Sarah Palin to the world (Sept 2008) and you eliminated your map.
Anyway, wherever you are now — lounging at the celestial poolside with other sainted writers perhaps — I hope you’ll keep working on this since it’s mostly as good as all your other stuff. One of the notes at the end about a dragon that guarded and embodied someone’s innermost secret that they’re ignorant of mercy is maybe even as good as any of those late-era Kafka aphorisms?
First, although this has been hyped as an office novel, I like how not many scenes are set in an office.
Internal Revenue Service agents (love how you call them “service” members to emphasize their humble heroism) are profiled in 3D character sketches of representative scenes from their youth, what may have caused them to be “called to account.”
Characterization, as always, is fully realized. The young devout potential father who tends to excessively sweat, Lane Dean Jr . . . Leonard Steyck, always so helpful.
The draft I read, I think we need to award an A++ to the editor for the sequencing job—can’t be emphasized enough how well Michael Pietsch ordered the chaos of 200+ polished pages, scraps, fragments, and notes so it seems like controlled po-mo chaos instead of old-fashioned mess.
I liked how, for inattentive readers who make it to the end still unsure what they’ve been reading for 540 or so pages, you explicate conflicts and basic thematic dealios in the final “notes and asides” section: maturity and responsibility require ability to pay attention, especially in the face of “boredom,” which is really just an inability to pay sufficient attention—and paying attention has a moral dimension.
Reading this felt like Saramago’s Blindness in that I was aware that, physically, I was reading—in this case, either paying perfect immersive/primed attention or zoning out a bit.
Attention is rewarded throughout. Apparently purposefully dull passages come studded with Easter eggs—for example, toward the end of a really really long dull footnote there’s a bit of “woodpeckerish” fellatio; toward the end of a semi-dull section, someone named Diablo the Left-Handed Surrealist is introduced and scatological hilarity ensues; in the two-column pages where Service workers turn pages and make small deskbound gestures between turning pages it suddenly says: “Every love story is a ghost story” and something else I can’t remember right now maybe about angels in disguise.
Minor magic realism: a character just barely levitates when he’s immersed, paying serious attention to work or listening to someone; there are also a pair of minor phantoms.
Four major writers mentioned in the book as major writers a writer might aspire to be like are echoed throughout: Gaddis (dialogue onslaughts of JR), Perec (Life—attention to detail, structure, the name Sylvanshine echoes the name Bartlebooth), Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio—portraits of an ensemble cast in the Midwest), Balzac (ridiculous attention to detail? I haven’t read enough to have much insight).
LOLs a-plenty, often at revelation of a paradox (see your very own essay on humor in Kafka, the bit about “A Little Fable” — I was there on March 26, 1998 when you read at Town Hall in NYC with Susan Sontag, Paul Auster, et al., all of which can be listened to here).
Several dozen pages turned down, sometimes top and bottom corners turned in—first time I’ve done that since Gilead.
A systems novel—like most of DeLillo or Kafka—focused on individual/very much individuated lives (thanks to author’s observations) inside a major faceless institution.
Maybe, structurally, the book would’ve been loosely organized to have something to do with a yaw system—that is, attention, responsibility, maturity are the rotor that turns the propeller that cuts through the wind of boredom, loneliness, excessive thought, and, as Shane Drinion demonstrates, enables levitation/flight (temporary transcendence). As noted early on in the book, “yaw” backwards is “way,” which is the English word for “tao.”
There’s a great 100+ page chapter about a slacker stoner being “called to account”—ie, to make some decisions about his life and say more than “whatever” in response to the world—after his pop’s gruesome death.
There’s a 60+ page tete-a-tete between Shane Drinion and a beautiful woman who used to cut herself who talks about how the man who’d become her husband told her to take responsibility for herself—her husband, who has a serious chronic heart condition, I think may be the Pale King of the title (although the title comes up one other time earlier on)?
No less finished-seeming than anything else you ever did (I mean, your first novel ends mid-sentence and you intended for Infinite Jest to “resolve off-screen”).
No plot, but thematic balls are always in the air and bouncing around, plus the prose is always so readable—often easier, more mature, more steady, less trying to impress than your earlier stuff? Only had to look up two or three vocab words!
A messy book involving accountants: one of many abounding paradoxes—it’s also an entertaining book about boredom, and there’s a character so helpful he actually does harm.
Now I need to go back and re-read all the dozens of pages I dogeared. And then maybe read Oblivion again.
I strongly encourage you to finish it properly one day. For now, this collection of 540+ bound pages of your writing, whether it’s an unfinished novel, linked collection of stories, fragments, dialogues—whatever you call it—like a massive Snickers bar offered to all those famished for your particular caloric content, really satisfies on micro and macro levels.
Kind regards!
LFF
Note: this originally appeared in somewhat different form in the letters section of the tenth print-only edition of The Lifted Brow.
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To support the kind publishers who have taken a chance on my writing, please acquire a copy of Neutral Evil ))) and/or JRZDVLZ. Or my translation of Horacio Castellanos Moya’s Revulsion: Thomas Bernhard in San Salvador. Or Thanks + Sorry + Good Luck: Rejection Letters From the Eyeshot Outbox directly from the publisher. Or even a copy of The Shimmering Go-Between directly from me (the publisher is kaput).