Something to Do with Paying Attention

The Pale King was assembled from an extensive collection of papers and some floppy disks Wallace left behind that had accumulated for about ten years, since about 1996. According to Jon Baskin, the New Yorker's reviewer of this novella, Wallace "left a pile of papers, spiral notebooks, three-ring binders, and floppy disks on a table in his garage. The collection of notes, outlines, prose fragments, character sketches, and partial chapters reportedly ran to hundreds of thousands of words".[2]

In a 2022 review published by the Los Angeles Times, Jonathan Russel Clark writes that the novella "has the rhythm of waves on a beach as high tide approaches: forward movement before pulling back, all the while inching farther up the sand",[3] and "For all his virtuosity, Wallace specialized in erudite neurotics from Middle America who suffer from various degrees of mental illness. These are the characters he wrote best because they came from his own experience."[3]

In a 2023 article for the London Review of Books, Patricia Lockwood called the novella "enthralling" and wrote: "It is the first time his nostalgia sounded adult to me, looking back at childhood not just as the site of personal formation but as the primal experience of bureaucracy: queues, signs, your own name on the line, textures of waiting-room chairs. Waiting to become what, a person."[1]