“Infinite Jest,” published in February, 1996, quickly became a totem for young people. The postmodernist heyday was long past; minimalism was in decline. There was a wide opening for Wallace’s opaque sincerity. His “impulse to second-guess every thought and proposition became something like a generational style,” as Gerald Howard says. One day, Howard was walking down West Broadway, in Manhattan, and came across a long line of people waiting to hear Wallace read at Rizzoli. “There was this adoration,” he remembers. “He had reached people in this highly personal way.”

Wallace did not like being the object of so much attention. He wrote to Don DeLillo, with whom he had begun a correspondence, that he had “tried my best to tell the truth and to be kind to reporters who hadn’t read the book and wanted only to discuss the ‘hype’ around the book and seemed willfully to ignore the fact that articles about the hype were themselves the hype (for about a week there it seemed to me that the book became the Most Photographed Barn, everyone tremendously excited over the tremendous excitement surrounding a book that takes over a month of hard labor to read).”

As soon as he could, he finished his book tour and retreated to Bloomington, to his house and to Jeeves and the Drone—a stray who had joined him and Jeeves one day when they were out running. In the wake of “Infinite Jest,” he felt anxiety about his writing. Earlier, Wallace had asked DeLillo whether it was normal. DeLillo reassured him, invoking Henry James’s words: “Doubt is our passion.” He added, “Some writers may have to do 2, 3 books, say in midcareer, before they remember that writing can be fun.”

Wallace worked successfully on some stories, later published in the 2004 collection “Oblivion.” In “The Soul Is Not a Smithy,” a man looking back on his childhood wonders how his father could have endured the boredom of his work as an actuary. “The truth is I have no idea what he thought about, what his internal life might have been like,” the son acknowledges. Wallace also began to develop a taste for journalism. He could transmit, in a more straightforward way, his point that America was at once overentertained and sad. He took a trip on a cruise ship out of Florida to sample the packaged hedonism, and chronicled the casual cruelty of the Maine lobster fair. “Is it all right to boil a sentient creature alive just for our gustatory pleasure?” he asked.

Yet he felt unfulfilled. When Charlie Rose interviewed him, in 1997, Wallace said, “A lot of my problem right now is I don’t really have a brass ring, and I’m kind of open to suggestions about what one chases.” He wrote to DeLillo that he thought he knew what was missing to get his fiction moving forward: “I believe I want adult sanity, which seems to me the only unalloyed form of heroism available today.”

“T he Pale King,” the name Wallace gave to the novel that, had he finished it, would have been his third, was one-third complete, by an estimate that he made to Nadell in 2007. The novel continues Wallace’s preoccupation with mindfulness. It is about being in the moment and paying attention to the things that matter, and centers on a group of several dozen I.R.S. agents working in the Midwest. Their job is tedious, but dullness, “The Pale King” suggests, ultimately sets them free. A typed note that Wallace left in his papers laid out the novel’s idea: “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (Tax Returns, Televised Golf) and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Instant bliss in every atom.” On another draft sheet, Wallace typed a possible epigraph for the book from “Borges and I,” a prose poem by Frank Bidart: “We fill pre-existing forms and when we fill them we change them and are changed.”

The problem was how to dramatize the idea. As Michael Pietsch points out, in choosing the I.R.S. as a subject Wallace had “posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,” which is “leaving out the things that are not of much interest.” Wallace’s solution was to overwhelm his seemingly inert subject with the full movement of his thought. His characters might be low-level bureaucrats, but the robust sincerity of his writing—his willingness to die for the reader—would keep you from condescending to them.

In one chapter, Wallace narrates the spiritual awakening of a college student named Chris Fogle:

I was by myself, wearing nylon warm-up pants and a black Pink Floyd tee shirt, trying to spin a soccer ball on my finger and watching the CBS soap opera “As The World Turns” on the room’s little black-and-white Zenith. . . . There was certainly always reading and studying for finals I could do, but I was being a wastoid. . . . Anyhow, I was sitting there trying to spin the ball on my finger and watching the soap opera . . . and at the end of every commercial break, the show’s trademark shot of planet earth as seen from space, turning, would appear, and the CBS daytime network announcer’s voice would say, “You’re watching ‘As the World Turns,’ ” which he seemed, on this particular day, to say more and more pointedly each time—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ” until the tone began to seem almost incredulous—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns’ ”—until I was suddenly struck by the bare reality of the statement. . . . It was as if the CBS announcer were speaking directly to me, shaking my shoulder or leg as though trying to arouse someone from sleep—“You’re watching ‘As the World Turns.’ ” . . . I didn’t stand for anything. If I wanted to matter—even just to myself—I would have to be less free, by deciding to choose in some kind of definite way.

Fogle decides to join the I.R.S., and soon heads off for training in Peoria. He finds that the sustained attentiveness demanded by tax work is not easy to muster. One of Fogle’s colleagues, Lane Dean, Jr., finds it especially difficult to push away the outside world. As he processes forms, Dean tries to visualize a sunny beach, as the agency taught him to do during orientation. But he cannot maintain the image—it turns in his mind to a gray expanse covered with “dead kelp like the hair of the drowned.” Overcome with boredom, he entertains suicide as a possibility. “He had the sensation of a great type of hole or emptiness falling through him and continuing to fall and never hitting the floor,” Wallace writes.

Other agents are adepts. An agent named Mitchell Drinion is so centered and calm that he levitates as he works. “Drinion is Happy,” Wallace wrote in one of the notebooks he kept while writing “The Pale King.” Another agent can recite a sequence of numbers that takes him into a state of exalted concentration. There is also an anxious young agent who sweated uncontrollably in high school, racing to the bathroom where “the toilet paper disintegrate[s] into little greebles and blobs all over his forehead.” He is afraid of thinking about being afraid, lest he suddenly become afraid and break out in a sweat—the victim of “an endless funhouse hall of mirrors of fear.” In the quiet study of tax forms he seeks composure.

“The Pale King” does not abandon postmodernism entirely: the novel is structured as a mock memoir. In a chapter called “Author’s Foreword,” Wallace informs the reader that he was once an employee at the I.R.S. Upon entering the bureaucracy, he reveals, agents are given new Social Security numbers; taking a job there is like being “born again.” (The conceit is pure fiction.) In the mid-eighties, Wallace announces, he became “947-04-2012.” After being caught selling term papers and suspended from his preppy college, he cast around for something to do, and applied to work at the I.R.S. The agency hired him as a “wiggler”—the first people to go over returns arriving at the agency. “I arrived for intake processing at Lake James, IL’s I.R.S. POST 047, sometime in mid-May of 1985,” Wallace writes. (A digression follows—a long footnote on the history of Lake James, followed by commentary about the confusion of having an I.R.S. office whose mailing address and building address are in separate towns.) Upon arriving at the intake center, Wallace says, he was given special treatment after being mistaken for another David Wallace—a high-powered accountant transferring to the facility from Rome, New York. For much of the chapter, everyone at the I.R.S. thinks that David Foster Wallace is the other Wallace, giving the author a double to go with his fictional rebirth.