When most people imagine an IRS office, images of broken copiers, stale coffee, and frustratingly slow-moving clocks come to mind.  If you’ve ever renewed your license at the DMV you probably can empathize with the feeling of communal dread experienced while waiting, for hours, to complete the simple task of signing a document and having your picture taken. In David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King, Wallace makes a surprisingly convincing case for bureaucracy actually being the new and highest form of American-heroism. The Pale King, Wallace’s third and final novel, considered by many as a postmodern masterpiece (as well as a 2012 Pulitzer finalist), uses the intersecting lives of several members of an IRS office to explore drug addiction, personal loss, subjective-realism, American pop-culture, civic duty, heroism, personal freedom, boredom (Of which the text is self-consciously boring) and of course the overarching theme of bureaucracy. The fragmented narrative of The Pale King follows two characters specifically: David Wallace, a meta part-fiction, part-fact character spoof of the real life David Foster Wallace, that is written with such realism that while reading you seriously reconsider whether the character and the author are separate beings and Shane Drinion, an apathetic man who can summon facts at random and whose interactions with other humans are minimal. 
         There are about fifty chapters of The Pale King, ranging from half a page to 200 pages in length. These chapters include transcripts from the IRS job interviews of more than fifty future employees, lengthy narratives about how the Movie the Exorcist serves as a perfect allegory for civic duty, a girl trying to recover from the loss of her drug addicted mother, and a boy who vows to press his lips to every inch of his body. The main chunk of the Narrative is made up of two lengthy sections.
The first details the experiences of fictional David Wallace as his life is taken over by drugs, and the growing separation between him and his father because of it. Wallace describes taking a mixture of pot and Obetrol and doing something he calls “doubling” in which you take a mixture of perception altering drugs, play good music (in this case Brian Eno’s Another Green World) and think consciously about where you are and what you are doing. Similar themes arise in some short sections towards the end, especially in the final pages which focus mainly on thinking about menial things such as breathing and sitting to achieve higher levels of awareness. The middle section of the chapter focusses on his crumbling relationship with his father, who doesn’t outright scold the behavior, but whose disappointing looks  haunt David’s dreams and make the state of his that much more desperate. Before Wallace and his father can reconcile their differences, Wallace's father is killed on a railway platform right in front of him by an oncoming train.
Later on, while mourning the death of his father Wallace is introduced by a civics teacher to the idea of bureaucratic heroism, “routine, repetition, tedium, monotony, inconsequence, abstraction, disorder, boredom, angst -these are true hero’s enemies, and make no mistake, they are fearsome indeed. For they are real.”
The second section deals in large part with depression, and reads as a transcript of a conversation between Shane Drinion and Meredith Rand. Rands speaks about her relationship with her husband, who has a rare heart condition which keeps him always on the edge of death. She talks about her time in a mental hospital, where she stayed after several suicide attempts. The only person who can even remotely connect with her is her future husband, a nurse who aids her as she heals both physically and emotionally.
The Pale King’s uncouth narrative is partly due to it being unfinished and largely unaltered. Its pages are dense, and the dozens of characters and storylines make reading it a difficult task. While I wouldn't describe it as a “Beach Read” (Despite having read a reasonably large portion of it on a beach) the payoff of finishing it is worth the hours of concentration required to traverse its academic narrative. In retrospect, the 540 pages that make up the book are mostly made up of unexplored ideas, which Wallace was unfortunately unable to complete due to his death in 2008, and which if expanded would surely quadruple the size of the Pale King.
Like most Wallace books, The Pale King is less of a novel and more of an encyclopedic analyzation of its main themes and characters with no unifying plot connecting the story’s many moving parts. It's not a conventional page-turner since the outcomes of the characters remain deliberately inconsequential, but if you want to gain genuine insight into one of the greatest minds of the 21st century, then the book more than delivers.