And David Foster Wallace committed suicide in the middle of writing this book, "The Pale King." The "most boring and unpleasant" thing he was writing about was the IRS.
Today, the pages of "The Pale King" sit in bins and boxes around [editor Michael] Pietsch's desk at home, but he bristles at the suggestion that he won't get through them in time to publish the novel, as he has promised -- and as Little, Brown has announced -- in the spring of 2010.Good God. May I suggest not making a book at all, but a website? Put everything up, connected with links, and just let us try to find our own way through it ... or give up, as Wallace did.
It doesn't seem to faze him that among the various drafts are sometimes "10 different versions of one chapter or one scene."...
"You do not change a word if someone's not there to argue with you or discuss it with you," he says.
What this means is that he has his work cut out for him. "It's not clear what the intended structure was," Pietsch admits, although Wallace left copious outlines and notes about "The Pale King" that he will use as guides. The published book "will just stop where it stops," and may include some of Wallace's notes and journals.
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It would be interesting to put it online in such as way that you could choose which of the many versions of the text to read. That way, there's be many many versions of the same book.
But that would not be new. Didn't some french author do the same thing with slit pages that could be independently turned so one book was essentially a million different books? I don't recall the author's name, but I think he also wrote Anglicisms.
$.
I'm thinking it will be a big, heavy book with lots of footnotes.
Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes. Raymond Queneau. Not a novel, then, but a shredded book of sonnets.
The simple fact is that Wallace didn't "write a novel about the most boring and unpleasant parts of life ..." When the editor admits that "[i]t's not clear what the intended structure was," you know you're not dealing with "editing" at all. If anything is ever published from whatever materials Wallace left behind, it will be a novel by Michael Pietsch, or worse, a committee of which Pietsch is chairman.
He should follow the Tolkein family model. Publish the actual chapters. The publish the footnotes. Then publish the outlines. This could go on forever.
The first Fitzgerald novel I read was "The Last Tycoon." I picked it up at age 17, having heard of Fitzgerald but knowing little about him. I was engrossed by the book. Imagine my disappointment when I found Fitzgerald had not been able to finish it.
As to publishing, it depends on whether it's any good or not. If it's good, we will read it. But it could be very bad. The early drafts of even the best writers can be terrible. Most of the good ones make it shine through constant revision.
I hope they will publish all ten versions of the scenes that have been revised often in some form. It would be very interesting to see how he went about it.
he bristles at the suggestion that he won't get through them in time to publish the novel, as he has promised -- and as Little, Brown has announced -- in the spring of 2010
I'm so glad I don't have that job. I enjoy Wallace's writing, but just reading "Infinite Jest" was challenging enough. Imagine having to assemble it from boxes full of multiple versions of the manuscript. Arrggghhhh....
My daughter expresses frustration when she reads Wharton's The Buccaneers because Wharton didn't finish it but they apparently don't publish it like that; you can find editions that different people finished different ways, but she'd rather read what Wharton wrote and have it stop abruptly. I suppose she is in the minority there.
Just bought Infinite Jest last night and began. The prose is dense, but I'm liking it. I give myself a 15% chance of finishing.
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