Thus, by backtracking to the “Flint­stonianly remote” era of mainframe computers, tape-and-card-based data storage and so on, Wallace identifies a watershed moment, a kind of base layer in the archaeology of the present — rather like Thomas Pynchon tracing the origins of the 1970s to 1945 in “Gravity’s Rainbow.” There’s a lot of Pynchon in “The Pale King,” in fact: the I.R.S.’s deployment of agents gifted with psychic powers, its harnessing of the occult for political ends, surely owe something to the White Visitation research facility in “Gravity’s Rainbow.” That ghosts roam the audit booths surprises none of Wallace’s characters; they even sit through lectures on the etymology of the word “boredom” given by spirits whose voices slip into and out of audibility against the Examination Center’s monotonous background hum. Like Wallace’s breakthrough novel, “Infinite Jest,” “The Pale King” is pervaded by an air of melancholia, an acute sense of loss. Nostalgic images of childhood lakes and ponds, since algaed or cemented over, crop up repeatedly. There’s a dead father, who, like James Incandenza in “Infinite Jest,” met a baroque end before the novel’s outset (dragged to his death along a subway platform through a jumble of Christmas shopping bags, the clutter and paraphernalia of consumerism). There’s lingering teenage depression everywhere. Wallace could be called an “adolescent” writer: one whose characters, like the worlds they inhabit, find themselves in states of transition, prone to all the awkwardness this entails. David Wallace (the character) is cursed with awful acne; another figure has a propensity to sweat profusely. I don’t use the term pejoratively here — far from it: adolescence is about being trapped in bodies, in between, half-formed. It’s Gregor Samsa’s state.

And then, perhaps, there’s a MacGuffin, peeping through this networked novel like James Incandenza’s lethally seductive film through “Infinite Jest.” Agent Chris Fogle, it is rumored, has concocted an algorithm that bequeaths to those who intone it a state of pure, impenetrable concentration — and the I.R.S.’s chiefs, for obvious reasons, want to prize this from him. But the formula, rather than accelerating the system’s ends, might instead allow the semi-enslaved worker to slip his shackles even as he dons them, to achieve a kind of mystical, if beleaguered, enlightenment. The novel’s final image sends us back to a 19th-century factory, in which a woman counting loops of twine is shown enjoying Zen-like immersion in her task. A transcendent ergonomics of the assembly line is, perhaps, the best that we can hope for, Wallace seems to conclude.

I say “perhaps” and “seems” because a good portion of this framework comes in the final “Notes and Asides” section tacked onto the main, patently partial manuscript. Which brings me to the second way of understanding the whole document: as a much rawer and more fragmented reflection on the act of writing itself, the excruciating difficulty of carrying the practice forward — properly and rigorously forward — in an age of data saturation. The Jesuit presents “the world and reality as already essentially penetrated and formed, the real world’s constituent info generated . . . now a meaningful choice lay in herding, corralling and organizing that torrential flow of info.” He could just as well be describing the task of the novelist, who, of course, is also “called to account.” It’s hard not to see in the poor pencil-pushers huddled at their desks an image of the writer — nor, given Wallace’s untimely end, to shudder when they contemplate suicide.

Lost childhood pools, by this reading, would constitute a kind of pastoral mode cached (or trashed) within the postmodern “systems” novel — which, in turn, is what the systems-within-systems I.R.S. really stands for. The issues of emotion and agency remain central, but are incorporated into a larger argument about the possibility or otherwise of these things within contemporary fiction. The data-psychic character Sylvanshine can glean trivia about anyone simply by looking at him, but is “weak or defective in the area of will.” Nor, due to endless digressions, can he complete anything. No one can; in “The Pale King,” nothing ever fully happens. That this is to a large extent a metaphor (for the novel in general, or this novel in particular) becomes glaringly obvious when we hear one unnamed character describe the play he’s writing, in which a character sits at a desk, doing nothing; after the audience has left, he will do something — what that “something” is, though, the play’s author hasn’t worked out yet.