Not surprisingly, a novel about boredom is, more than occasionally, boring. It’s impossible to know whether Wallace, had he finished the book, might have decided to pare away such passages, or whether he truly wanted to test the reader’s tolerance for tedium — to make us share the misery of his office workers, who come to remind us of the unhappy hero of Joseph Heller’s “Something Happened,” or some of Beckett’s bone-weary characters, stuck in a limbo of never-ending waiting and routine.

The big clash in the novel pits old-school I.R.S. employees, “driven by self-righteousness,” against newer ones with a corporate desire “to maximize revenue.” We have to slog through stultifying technical talk about “the distinctions between §162 and §212(2) deductions related to rental properties,” and inside-baseball accounts of obscure battles within the I.R.S. hierarchy. There is even one chapter that consists of little but a series of I.R.S. workers turning page after page after page.

Yet at the same time there are some wonderfully evocative sections here that capture the exhausting annoyances of everyday life with digital precision. The sticky, nauseating feeling of traveling on a small, crowded commuter plane, crammed up against “paunched and blotchy men in double-knit brown suits and tan suits with attaché cases ordered from in-flight catalogs.” Or the suffocating feeling of being stuck on a filthy bus, with ashtrays spilling over with gum and cigarette butts, the air-conditioning “more like a vague gesture toward the abstract idea of air-conditioning” than the real thing.

In this, his most emotionally immediate work, Wallace is on intimate terms with the difficulty of navigating daily life, and he conjures states of mind with the same sorcery he brings to pictorial description. He conveys the gut deep sadness people experience when “the wing of despair” passes over their lives, and the panic of being a fish “thrashing in the nets” of one’s own obligations, stuck in a miserable job and needing to “cover the monthly nut.”

Along the way he gives us chilling, Grand Guignol scenes involving a ghastly subway accident and a grotesque industrial-arts class accident. And he makes us see, with gorgeous sleight of hand, the “very old land” in a Middle America that exists somewhere between Grandma Moses and “Blue Velvet”: the “flannel plains” and “the tobacco-brown river overhung with weeping trees and coins of sunlight,” an “arrow of starlings fired from the windbreak’s thatch,” a “sunflower, four more, one bowed, and horses in the distance standing rigid and still as toys. All nodding.”

This novel reminds us what a remarkable observer Wallace was — a first-class “noticer,” to use a Saul Bellow term, of the muchness of the world around him, chronicling the overwhelming data and demands that we are pelted with, second by second, minute by minute, and the protean, overstuffed landscape we dwell in.

It was in trying to capture that hectic, chaotic reality — and the nuanced, conflicted, ever-mutating thoughts of his characters — that Wallace’s synesthetic prose waxed so prolix, his sentences unspooling into tangled skeins of words, replete with qualifying phrases and garrulous footnotes. And this is why his novels, stories and articles so often defied closure and grew and grew and grew, sprouting tendrils and digressions and asides — because in almost everything Wallace wrote, including “The Pale King,” he aimed to use words to lasso and somehow subdue the staggering, multifarious, cacophonous predicament that is modern American life.