The literary world rejoiced recently when it was announced that Little, Brown, & Company would be publishing David Foster Wallace’s third novel, THE PALE KING, left unfinished at the author’s death. Wallace had worked on the manuscript for many years, accumulating thousands of pages which a crack editorial team had begun to distill into readable form.
But all work on the project recently ceased, when the manuscript began literally to kill its readers.
Life, it seems, was imitating Wallace’s own art. His previous novel, INFINITE JEST, featured a videotape which, when viewed, robbed the viewer of all sentience and willpower. THE PALE KING had a similar effect, only fatal, much like the lethal joke in the famous Monty Python sketch.
Little, Brown spokesperson Ethan Foote-Naught said, “It’s not so unlikely, is it? After all, Wallace’s pedantic, derivative, dense and obscure style had already put thousands of readers into a kind of catatonic state. Imagine reading hundreds of thousands of words in his tediously self-important manner about ‘a group of I.R.S. agents working in a Midwestern office!’ You’d be ready to shoot yourself. But there was no need for any actual gunplay among the readers, since the book’s lethality on a purely psychosomatic level was total.”
Given this tendency of the novel to kill its readers, Little, Brown reluctantly decided to abort its plans to release the book—although they might yet allow further sections of it to be published, since the first excerpt in THE NEW YORKER apparently caused nothing more serious than a few cancelled subscriptions and migraines.
Revelation of the deadly nature of the manuscript naturally leads to speculation about whether the project was instrumental in Wallace’s own lamentable suicide.
“The best medical authorities we’ve consulted,” says Foote-Naught, “believe that Wallace was immune to his own poisonous memes and toxic sentences. Imbibing continuous small dosages in the form of his daily writing output had immunized him to the lethality of his prose. So his suicide cannot be directly attributed to the manuscript in the same way that reading it killed so many esteemed Little, Brown personnel, as well as a few disposable freelance copyeditors.”
Wallace’s death, rather, might have been a consequence of realizing what a monstrous tome he had produced, and the knowledge that his contorted prose was deadlier than viper’s venom.
Posted by Paul DiFi.