Something to Do with Paying Attention

by David Foster Wallace, McNally (Preface by)

Overview

David Foster Wallace’s last unfinished work, a wise and unexpected tour de force “using the IRS the way Borges used the lipary and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world.” —John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

When David Foster Wallace died in 2008, he left behind a vast unfinished novel—some 1,100 pages of loose chapters, sketches, notes, and fragments. This material was collated and published in 2011 as The Pale King, which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

But the unfinished King did contain a finished novella that Wallace had already considered publishing as a stand-alone volume. It is the story of a young man, a self-described “wastoid,” adrift in the suburban Midwest of the 1970s, whose life is changed forever by an encounter with advanced tax law. It is, as Sarah McNally writes in her preface, “not just a complete story, but the best complete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.”

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781946022271
Publisher:	McNally Editions
Publication date:	04/05/2022
Series:	McNally Editions
Pages:	152
Product dimensions:	4.00(w) x 6.19(h) x 0.38(d)

About the Author

David Foster Wallace (1962–2008) was the author of two finished novels, The Broom of the System (1987) and Infinite Jest (1996), six collections of stories and essays, two book-length essays in mathematics and philosophy, and one unfinished novel, The Pale King, which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

Date of Birth:

February 21, 1962

Date of Death:

September 12, 2008

Place of Birth:

Ithaca, NY

Place of Death:

Claremont, CA

Education:

B.A. in English & Philosophy, Amherst College, 1985;MFA, University of Arizona, 1987

Editorial Reviews

First among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest . . . He was a wake-up artist.”

—George Saunders

“Delicious . . . An unmistakably Wallace-esque tale of inanity and profundity."

—Hillary Kelly, Vulture

“Enthralling . . . Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of [Wallace’s] best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest . . . You open [the] text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention.”

—Patricia Lockwood, London Review of Books

“Distinct in Wallace’s work is an attention to the secret, battered, deflated spiritual existence of America and Americans. Underneath the professional smiles there is a sadness in this country that is sunk so deep in the culture you can taste it in your morning Cheerios . . . Wallace identified it: many, many people followed him.”

—Zadie Smith, The Burned Children of America

“The final finished work by the late, widely influential novelist and essayist . . . Darkly fascinating. A valediction for Wallace’s fans. Accountants will enjoy it, too.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“David Foster Wallace captured a palpable truth almost indescribably profound about contemporary American life . . . Wallace, like few of his peers and few living writers, managed to depict the emptiness at the center of American culture . . . It was out of his sensitivity to the oddity of American life that Wallace was able to inject laugh-out-loud humor into [his] scenes . . . The new publication of Something To Do With Paying Attention . . . presents the perfect opportunity to revisit Wallace’s major ideas, his stylistic choices, and the largely neglected political implications of his work . . . The transformation of Something To Do With Paying Attention’s protagonist should serve as conversion testimony for a country that has become something of one big ‘wastoid.’”

—David Masciotra, CounterPunch

“Complete in itself . . . [Something to Do with Paying Attention] has to be the most unusual conversion experience in confessional narrative.”

—Judith Shulevitz, Slate

“Wallace was both satirist and preacher in the same breath, and the idea that the IRS, imagined as a quasi-religious foundation in which the burdensome and egotistic self might find redemption in the service of a greater good, could be both a comic conceit and a heartfelt belief seems to have been central to his conception of The Pale King.”

—Jonathan Raban, The New York Review of Books

“The Pale King is light-years beyond Infinite Jest . . . Among many other things, the record of a struggle against all the things that ‘boredom’ comes to stand for in this novel: disengagement, distraction, isolation, an inability to feel.”

—Hari Kunzru, Financial Times

“Wallace doesn’t write about his characters; he hadn’t in a long time. He writes into them . . . He was using the IRS the way Borges used the library and Kafka used the law-courts building: as an analogy for the world.”

—John Jeremiah Sullivan, GQ

From the Publisher

Complete in itself . . . [Something to Do with Paying Attention] has to be the most unusual conversion experi- ence in confessional narrative.”

Slate - Judith Shulevitz

It’s easy and seems obvious to say that Wallace the novelist was an ethicist, deeply concerned with fidelity to the truth. He didn’t flinch from plumbing the scariest, strangest, most difficult things right to the bottom: scenes of psy- chic torture, or right-to-life Christians facing an unwanted pregnancy, of suicide or murder, addiction or philosophy, the mathematics of Georg Cantor or the ethics of eating meat. In fact, though, his fiction is full of whoppers. I mean plain lies, as in, you can’t kill someone with ground glass (as in The Pale King) any more than you can use Lemon Pledge as sunscreen (as in Infinite Jest) . . . Why do this to us? It’s to make us do the ‘hard work,’ as he used to call it, of reading well. Through these cascades of weird little fibs, reality itself is over and over called into question. All of it. Experience, reading, writing. Being.

Popula - Maria Bustillos

First among us. The most talented, most daring, most energetic and original, the funniest . . . He was a wake-up artist.

George Saunders

"In the introduction, the bookseller and editor Sarah McNally calls these pages 'not just a complete story, but the best concrete example we have of Wallace’s late style, where calm and poise replace the pyrotechnics of Infinite Jest and other early works.' McNally is right to underscore the story’s relatively serene narration, which stands out even more now that it can be encountered independently from the larger book . . . And Fogle’s monologue offers, as McNally indicates, Wallace’s most sustained effort to adopt the plainspoken frankness that he admired in the 'morally passionate, passionately moral' fiction of his Russian heroes, especially Dostoyevsky."

New Yorker - Jon Baskin

Wallace was both satirist and preacher in the same breath, and the idea that the IRS, imagined as a quasi-religious foundation in which the burdensome and egotistic self might find redemption in the service of a greater good, could be both a comic conceit and a heartfelt belief seems to have been central to his conception of The Pale King.

New York Review of Books - Jonathan Raban

What [is] distinct in Wallace’s work is an attention to the secret, battered, deflated spiritual existence of America and Americans. Underneath the professional smiles there is a sadness in this country that is sunk so deep in the culture you can taste it in your morning Cheerios . . . Wallace identified it: many, many people followed him.

The Burned Children of America - Zadie Smith

"Delicious . . . An unmistakably Wallace-esque tale of inanity and profundity."

Vulture - Hillary Kelly

Enthralling . . . Something to Do with Paying Attention has the spirit of [Wallace’s] best non-fiction, that of the set-apart morning, with a ray shining on the page. It both demonstrates his greatest gift and represents the desire to have this part of him set alone from the rest . . . You open [the] text and it wakes. What is alive in it passes to the living. His attention becomes our attention.

London Review of Books - Patricia Lockwood

2022-01-19
The final finished work by the late, widely influential novelist and essayist.

The present novel, which clocks in at 136 pages, was first published as part of Wallace’s unfinished book, The Pale King. Unlike much of the larger work, it is a finished whole, an onrushing confessional set in an IRS processing center in Peoria, Illinois. The narrator, named Chris Fogle in The Pale King but unnamed here, begins his saga as an aimless young adult who lives at home in Libertyville, a North Side suburb of Chicago. His frustrated father tells his mother that their son “couldn’t find [his] ass with both hands,” and though dad has a point, Chris waxes analytical in classic Wallace form: “From what I understand of basic psychology, this is a fairly typical dynamic—son is feckless and lacks direction, mother is sympathetic and believes in son’s potential and sticks up for him, father is peeved and endlessly criticizes and squeezes son’s shoes but still, when push comes to shove, always ponies up the check for the next college.” Chris eventually comes around and signs up to join “the Service,” the IRS become a quasi-religious institution, driven to do so in part out of remorse for a grisly accident that kills his father. Wallace, as Chris' interviewer, is really a stenographer, recording his subject’s every offhand remembrance of his early years in the 1970s: “Acapulco Gold versus Colombia Gold,” disco, the bankruptcy of New York, the “Uncola,” and other cultural touchstones of an unsettled time. Much can be read as roman à clef, with mental illness, drugs, and misdirection at the heart of the book, brimming over with irony and obsessive attention to the tiniest detail (“the Advanced Tax students had multiple pencils lined up on their desks, all of which were extremely sharp”). Not much happens outside Chris’ head, but what’s going on there is darkly fascinating.

A valediction for Wallace’s fans. Accountants will enjoy it, too.

Kirkus Reviews