Four “previously unpublished scenes” accompany the paperback edition of David Foster Wallace’s unfinished novel, “The Pale King,” which arrives in bookstores this week. Three of them are nice for any Wallace fan to read and keep, but are not essential to our understanding of the novel about a group of I.R.S. agents working in Peoria in the nineteen-eighties. The last literary “bonus track,” though, is a keeper. And, at fourteen pages, it’s also the longest new piece of unpublished Wallace fiction to emerge since “The Pale King” itself.

In this excerpt, Claude Sylvanshine, a “special assistant” to a Human Resources Systems Deputy, observes and lightly interacts with a group of low-level rote examiners who are on a lunch break. Though Sylvanshine appears at several junctures in the novel, most of the other characters in the scene do not. In addition to being hilarious, the conversation at this lunch table is a device that Wallace uses to riff on a variety of the novel’s concerns. In the scene, readers are introduced to an examiner with the last name of Hovatter, who is practicing a form of “ascetic frugality” in his personal life, so that he can afford to take off a full year of work. His stated, presumptive purpose is to watch “every last second of television broadcast in the month of May 1986.”

What at first seems mathematically straightforward—twelve cable channels on offer, multiplied by twenty-four hours of watching each signal in its daily entirety, thus equalling a year of marathon at-home viewing—is quickly complicated by the gaggle of tax assessors at the lunch table. How will Hovatter record all of May’s television programs? How many VCRs will be required? How often will tapes need to be changed—and can Hovatter budget the seconds needed to change and archive every VHS cassette against his schedule of actually needing to watch television? The forecasting becomes a fearsome zone of accounting contention, with some of the lunch-hour hangers-on becoming visibly upset by realities that the group has failed to consider.

The scene also expresses Wallace’s ideas about mindfulness, spectatorship, and the philosophical consequences that derive from the act of choosing one’s fascinations. A character named K. Evashevsky asks: “Does it seem to anyone else that Hovatter’s overcomplicating this? Type of thing… With all the tapes being changed right there, bing bang, type of thing. Why overcomplicate it with all these friends and the TVs at different points all over that Terry has to service type of thing?” (The “type of thing” verbal tic identifies this speaker as the novel’s Ken “Type of Thing” Hindle.) Another lunch-table interlocutor gets at the metaphorical import of Hovatter’s insane scheme: “It’s not choice if it drowns you in choices so you can’t meaningfully choose because there’s too many options to choose from,” he says, adding later: “This may be the last time a lone man can absorb it all.”

In this way, the argument tracks with one made by the fictional narrator of “The Pale King”—who is named, in a po-mo fillip, David Wallace—and who observes in Chapter 9 how potentially controversial issues of tax reform can be hidden in plain sight via the government’s ability to make the data-dump insurmountable. In the Hovatter scene, Wallace makes the reader aware of the impending information morass in a much more tactile way, with a load of pure-fact accretion that prompts Evashevsky to plead with his colleagues not to overcomplicate the television scheme.

The author hardly pulled these abstruse accounting complexities from thin air. Last week, after speaking at the David Foster Wallace Symposium at the University of Texas at Austin, I looked at Wallace’s own accounting-class notes with this new excerpt in mind. (Wallace attended tax courses as research for “The Pale King”; those notes make up a part of his archive, which is housed at the university’s Harry Ransom Center.) These papers, which are mostly related to in-class lectures and problem-set solutions, occasionally became a place for Wallace to observe his classmates, who were taking the classes for credit toward a degree. “ACCOUNTING STUDENTS ARE INCREDIBLY ORGANIZED NOTE-TAKERS,” reads one jotting that found its way into “The Pale King.”

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That same page of Wallace’s notebook also contains what looks like a plea regarding the author’s own boredom: “God please help me—Pain, captain.” The mood suggested here is evoked by another unnamed examiner in the Hovatter scene, who at one point “made as if to cover her ears and asked whether please might they be spared listening to this all again.” Submitting to the grind of tax scholarship wasn’t merely a method by which Wallace tried to empathize with the more distractible I.R.S. agents, though. He was also working to understand tax dodges. “An avoidance scheme, perhaps?” Syvlanshine asks the lunch crowd in the new paperback scene, regarding Hovatter’s proposed year-long TV-watching project. “Passive losses?” he then adds, as a reference to a type of deduction that can be used to offset passive gains—but which results in a penalty if abused. During a class that Wallace described in his notes as a “Scam-Fest,” he scribbled the phrase: “PASSIVE a big word for IRS.”

Hovatter likely wouldn’t experience many passive gains in his year of TV-watching—even though one character in the new scene suspects that “Hovatter’s got some way of cashing in.” But there’s evidence that Wallace was fascinated by the prospect of passive material gains: both in the tax-owed sense and the philosophical one, which he kept close accounting of, using his own personal ledgers and guides. During an accounting class that dealt with tax-deferred exchanges of property and gifts, Wallace wrote to himself: “Need I pay FICA on grants, fellowships?” (Nearby, once again, is the marking, “God help me.”) In a separate paragraph, running down the left margin of this same page, Wallace added: “I am a MacArthur Fellow. Boy am I scared. I feel like throwing up. Why? String-free award—nothing but an avowal of their belief that I am a ‘Genius.’ I don’t feel like a Genius.”