What would it be like to inhabit such a suffering consciousness, without muffling it in a thousand pages of voluble prose? Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, the book Wallace published after Infinite Jest, is his devastating answer. The book consists of a number of stories, interwoven with “transcripts” of the titular interviews, from which the questions have been deleted. Both stories and interviews show that Wallace’s truest subject as a writer, the one that provoked his most moving and convincing work, was the sickness of the will. Again and again, he creates characters who are intelligent enough to anticipate every one of their own thoughts and reactions, even the most destructive and dysfunctional, but who lack the will to change them. The maddening self-consciousness and hyper-articulacy that sometimes seem like mere tics of Wallace’s prose become, in Brief Interviews, the absolutely faithful reflection of a consciousness that knows itself too well, and is disgusted by what it knows.

The ultimate case study here is “The Depressed Person,” in which we see how a woman’s unbearable suffering—“depression’s terrible unceasing agony itself, an agony that was the overriding and unendurable reality of her every black minute on earth”—makes her unbearably self-obsessed. This, in turn, renders her deeply unsympathetic, not just to the friends who abandon her but also to herself, so that self-hatred is added to unhappiness. It is a spiral or Möbius strip of misery, a genuinely Dostoevskyan performance. Behind the Depressed Person we hear another eloquently damned soul, the Underground Man, who also suffers from the gap between reason and will, between knowing what’s wrong with you and being able to repair it.



III.

“STANDARD THERAPY [is] such a waste of time for people like us—they thought that diagnosis was the same as cure. That if you knew why, you would stop. Which is bullshit.” So says Meredith Rand, one of the half-dozen IRS agents who emerge as major characters in the incomplete drafts and notes of Wallace’s last novel, now published as The Pale King. Other prominent voices in the plotless chorus include Lane Dean Jr., who takes a job at the IRS after getting his high school girlfriend pregnant; Claude Sylvanshine, a hapless underling whose career has stalled at a low pay grade; Toni Ware, whose violent childhood is narrated in a florid style that reads like a parody of Cormac McCarthy; and most significantly, Chris Fogle, who describes his work as an auditor as a kind of religious vocation.

And then there is “David Wallace” himself, who addresses us directly in a few passages. The Pale King was apparently meant to be cast as Wallace’s own “vocational memoir,” a description of the year he spent working for the IRS in the mid-1980s, after being suspended from college for running a term-paper mill. Of course, the real Wallace never worked for the IRS, and it is a little dispiriting to see him still toying with metafictional tricks—all the more so when he teasingly disavows those tricks even as he plays them: “Please know that I find these sorts of cute, self-referential paradoxes irksome too—at least now that I’m over thirty I do—and that the very last thing this book is is some kind of clever metafictional titty-pincher.” The awkwardness of the “David Wallace” passages in The Pale King are indicative of Wallace’s difficulty in finding the right way to frame his material. It seems clear from the book as we have it that Wallace chose the IRS as a subject without knowing quite how to write about it, or what stories he wanted to tell.