New not-new DFW

An excerpt from David Foster Wallace’s The Pale King has been published by McNally Editions as Something To Do with Paying Attention. The excerpt, a section of the novel (§22), is indeed about paying attention, as is The Pale King itself. Someone who’s paying attention might notice that the McNally’s new paperback is more expensive than the paperback edition of The Pale King itself.

It’s not the first time §22 has appeared as a stand-alone piece of fiction: in 2013 Madras Press published §22 as The Awakening of My Interest in Advanced Tax, a modestly priced paperback, with the proceeds benefiting Granada House, where Wallace began living in sobriety in 1989.

§22 is an extraordinary piece of writing, a first-person account by “Irrelevant” Chris Fogle, a one-time college “wastoid,” of how he came to work for the IRS. The narrative bears an eerie (non-coincidental?) resemblance to Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, in which stepping into the wrong classroom changes a student’s life. With Merton, it was a class with Mark Van Doren at Columbia. With Fogle, it’s an accounting class with with a substitute faculty member, a pseudo-Jesuit who speaks of the work of the accountant as heroic:

“True heroism is minutes, hours, weeks, year upon year of the quiet, precise, judicious exercise of probity and care — with no one there to see or cheer. This is the world. Just you and the job, at your desk.”

On a lighter note, it’s §22 that transplants Los Angeles’s celebrated Foot Clinic sign to Chicago.

Related reading
All OCA DFW posts (Pinboard)