It isn't gamesmanship, exactly. Nor is it even a question of what Wallace intended, since we don't know what he intended. Michael Pietsch has done yeoman's work as an editor here—as readers, we're in his debt—but there wasn't enough to edit. It would be dishonest to say otherwise. The story never really attains what Poe called "unity of impression" in the way that Infinite Jest, even with all its poly-skeinedness, did, or did at times. Also, there's something about the posthumous thing. It robs you of a certain pleasure that you take in reading, of being in dialogue with the author's decisions, judging them and at the same time having the excitement of witnessing them, which is part of the drama of a book. Here you don't know what they were. Every word you read and don't like, you think, "Well, he would have changed that." Whereas everything that does work, that's the real Wallace. Yet even major choices, such as what to use for the novel's ending, were made, out of necessity, not by Wallace but by Pietsch. "There was no outline or chapter sequence," he told me, "and no indication of what should be the opening or closing chapter." At that point, the whole question of whether we can call this "a Wallace novel" becomes unsolvable.

If we want another ending, we could say this: The Pale King, as we have it, is true to Wallace in a very important respect. He himself was unfinished, unresolved. There's a great Stevie Smith poem called "Was He Married?" It's her argument that normal human beings are more heroic than gods. Their difficulties are much greater, she says, "because they are so mid." Wallace was so mid. He was ambivalent and conflicted, about, among other things, the difference between the kinds of writing in this novel. He wasn't sure which he preferred, or how they might go together. And what if the one he wound up valuing most wasn't the one he was best at, by nature?

To give up these contradictions would've been to give up his source of power. They saved him from self-righteousness. He was a writer who in fighting to rise above the noise of his time remained hopelessly of it, susceptible to its voices even while trying to master them. His reality, as he once wrote, had been "MTV'd." This is why, like no one else, he seems to speak from inside the tornado. (A symbol that haunted his work, and that reappears in The Pale King.) It's this quality, of being inwardly divided, that risks getting flattened and written out of Wallace's story by his postmortem idolization, which would make of him a dispenser of wisdom. We should guard against that. We'll lose the most essential Wallace, the one that is forever wincing, reconsidering, wishing he hadn't said whatever he just said. Those were moments when his voice was most authentically of our time, and they are the reason people will one day be able to read him and feel what it was like to be alive now.

Wallace's work will be seen as a huge failure, not in the pejorative sense, but in the special sense Faulkner used when he said about American novelists, "I rate us on the basis of our splendid failure to do the impossible." Wallace failed beautifully. There is no mystery whatsoever about why he found this novel so hard to finish. The glimpse we get of what he wanted it to be—a vast model of something bland and crushing, inside of which a constellation of individual souls would shine in their luminosity, and the connections holding all of us together in this world would light up, too, like filaments—this was to be a novel on the highest order of accomplishment, and we see that the writer at his strongest would have been strong enough. He wasn't always that strong.