Hey, so I had the honor of joining some great writers/literary nerds under the guidance of DFW-expert Seth Colter Walls for a “roundtable discush” that ran on The Daily Beast about DFW’s posthumous novel The Pale King, which in case you’ve been living in a cave has more or less published over the past few weeks. I’m not going to write at length about it here except to say that I found the book both hilarious AND tragic (both in terms of its unfinished quality and due to a constant awareness of the author’s suicide that hangs over it at all times), but with more than enough great stuff in it to make it a “must-read” for DFW fans. For those new to him, I would recommend Oblivion, his short story collection, with which I think The Pale King dovetails very nicely, if bleakly, for setting up a worldview in which to survive, those with a restless mind must either 1) kill yourself (see “Good Old Neon” from Oblivion), 2) find some bullshit religion/dogma to believe in (see Chapter 22 in TPK), 3) become criminally insane (see “Mr. Squishy,” also from Oblivion), 4) “self-medicate” (see Infinite Jest), or 5) just stop thinking so much (see the Drivion character in TPK), at the cost of ever having any kind of human emotion. Which, good luck with that…
