Reception
Jonathan Segura, writing in Publishers Weekly, claimed that The Pale King "isn't the era-defining monumental work we've all been waiting for since Infinite Jest altered the landscape of American fiction" but added that it is “one hell of a document and a valiant tribute to the late Wallace.”
In Esquire, Benjamin Alsup wrote that The Pale King is an "incomplete and weirdly fractured pseudo memoir" that is "frustratingly difficult in places" and "potholed throughout by narrative false starts and dead ends." Despite that, Alsup stated, "you should read The Pale King." While conceding that the novel is not conventionally gripping in terms of narrative, the reviewer asserted, "If it keeps you up at night, it won't be because you've got to know what happens next. If you're up, you'll be up because DFW writes sentences and sometimes whole pages that make you feel like you can't breathe."
Lev Grossman, in Time, wrote that "if The Pale King isn't a finished work, it is, at the very least, a remarkable document, by no means a stunt or an attempt to cash in on Wallace's posthumous fame. Despite its shattered state and its unpromising subject matter, or possibly because of them, The Pale King represents Wallace's finest work as a novelist."
In The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani wrote that “ feels less like an incomplete manuscript than a rough-edged digest of the themes, preoccupations and narrative techniques that have distinguished work from the beginning.” She described the novel as both “breathtakingly brilliant and stupefying dull – funny, maddening and elegiac,” and predicted that “The Pale King will be minutely examined by longtime fans for the reflexive light it sheds on Wallace’s oeuvre and his life” and will also “snag the attention of newcomers, giving them a window – albeit a flawed window – into this immensely gifted writer’s vision of the human condition as lived out in the middle of the middle of America.” Kakutani claimed that it is Wallace’s “most emotionally immediate work.”
The novel was one of the three finalists for the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction; no award was given that year.
Read more about this topic: The Pale King
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind of reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it.”
—Jonathan Swift (1667–1745)
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“I gave a speech in Omaha. After the speech I went to a reception elsewhere in town. A sweet old lady came up to me, put her gloved hand in mine, and said, “I hear you spoke here tonight.” “Oh, it was nothing,” I replied modestly. “Yes,” the little old lady nodded, “that’s what I heard.””
—Gerald R. Ford (b. 1913)