I often found myself putting the novel down, and I didn’t always want to pick it up again. Then I did. Because The Pale King, an unfinished manuscript that will be published this month by Little, Brown, is one of the saddest and most lovely books I’ve ever read. This sadness, of course, has something (or probably a lot) to do with David Foster Wallace’s suicide by hanging in 2008. With lots of exceptions, killing yourself is a bad idea. It’s a particularly bad idea for writers. First, you run the risk of turning all your prior efforts into one long suicide note. What’s worse, especially if you’re a writer as beloved as Wallace, is that you may be turned into some kind of icon. And, as D.F.W. himself once wrote, “to make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people”.
The Pale King Review - Esquire
[via Luke]
