Allow me to steal a page from David Foster Wallace's playbook and offer you two prolegomenous quotations. The first is from a 4th-century monk, the desert father Evagrius:

When he reads, the one afflicted with acedia yawns a lot and readily drifts into sleep; he rubs his eyes and stretches his arms; turning his eyes away from the book, he stares at the wall and again goes back to reading for awhile; leafing through the pages, he looks curiously for the end of texts, he counts the folios and calculates the number of gatherings. Later, he closes the book and puts it under his head and falls asleep, but not a very deep sleep, for hunger then rouses his soul and has him show concern for its needs.

The second is from an interview Wallace did with Larry McCaffery:

Fiction's about what it is to be a f______ human being. If you operate, which most of us do, from the premise that there are things about the contemporary U.S. that make it distinctively hard to be a real human being, then maybe half of fiction's job is to dramatize what it is that makes it tough. The other half is to dramatize the fact that we still "are" human beings, now. Or can be.

By now you've likely come across one of the myriad pieces recently penned on David Foster Wallace and his posthumously published unfinished novel The Pale King. The hype surrounding the book has been so relentless that one critic, exasperated, remarked that he was writing an essay called "On not writing about David Foster Wallace." Wallace, who hated the "hype-machine," offered the best diagnosis of the danger of such hype in an essay on Dostoevsky: "To make someone an icon is to make him an abstraction, and abstractions are incapable of vital communication with living people."

Wallace has become something of an icon, and his story is by now famous. But some quick backstory: He grew up in central Illinois, the son of a U of I philosophy professor and an English teacher. He attended Amherst, where he wrote both philosophy and English theses, both of which were lauded and eventually published as books. His first book, The Broom of the System, catapulted him into literary stardom while he was still working on his MFA at Arizona. He enrolled in a PhD program in philosophy at Harvard but dropped out after one year. All the while, Wallace suffered from drug and alcohol dependency and severe depression. He was hospitalized and eventually institutionalized, finally finding his way into a recovery home in Boston. His time there, along with his experience as a competitive youth tennis player, were the basis for Infinite Jest, a staggering work of 1,079 pages that is something akin to a complex mathematical proof—maddening, frustrating, elegant, beautiful, and ultimately breathtaking in the simplicity of the truth it conveys.

Infinite Jest is about America's obsession with entertainment and the hunger for distraction. The plot revolves around a film so enthralling that people lose all desire to do anything but watch it. After the success of Infinite Jest Wallace set out to write a book about boredom, which is the logical progression from entertainment in his attempt to capture the American experience. Speaking of his generation, Wallace told David Lipsky, "we're either gonna have to put away childish things and discipline ourself about how much time do I spend being passively entertained? And how much time do I spend doing stuff that actually isn't all that much fun minute by minute, but that builds certain muscles in me as a grown-up and a human being?"

Wallace chose as his new book's overt subject that which children associate with adults, and adults with boredom: taxes. Wallace wanted to write a book in which "something big threatens to happen but doesn't actually happen." Not surprisingly, Wallace had difficulty writing the book; it was like trying to "wrestle sheets of balsa wood in a high wind." He worked on the manuscript for years, even taking accounting classes as research, in the meantime publishing several books of nonfiction and short stories. He never finished the novel. When he lost his battle with depression and committed suicide in 2008, Wallace's wife, Karen, and his agent found the manuscript in his garage office, about 250 pages neatly polished, ready to be submitted to his publisher for an advance. And then there were notebooks, loose papers, disks, and hard drives—hundreds of pages. Infinite Jest editor Michael Pietsch returned from Wallace's house with two grocery sacks of materials. What he assembled is The Pale King.

Wallace couches the book as a memoir, telling readers that in 1985 he was suspended from college for writing essays for other students and subsequently spent several months working at a Regional IRS Examination office in Peoria, IL (where, thanks to a bureaucratic snafu, he's initially mistaken for another David Wallace, a high level accountant). "Author here," he reassures the reader. "Meaning the real author, the living human being holding the pencil, not some abstract narrative persona." But Wallace's character only narrates a few of the chapters. The book follows a group of IRS examiners tasked with examining what returns should be audited.

The Pale King is subtitled "An Unfinished Novel," but it reads more like a collection of stories and conversations of people linked by profession and place. The book opens with an inventory of an Illinois prairie, the first sentence a list of all the flowers. "Ale-colored sunshine and pale sky and whorls of cirrus so high they cast no shadow …. Very old land. Look around you. The horizon trembling, shapeless. We are all of us brothers." It is no accident that The Pale King is set in a town synonymous with mediocrity, in central Illinois, the landscape of which is singularly boring: "the yeasty heat, the lush desolation of limitless corn."

There are extended dialogues between characters, many of whom are introduced but never returned to, and there are brilliant vignettes, some of which were published as short stories. One chapter is simply an OSHA-type memo of ailments associated with the job of IRS examiner: localized anxiety, vascular headache, diplopia, hemorrhoids, formication, chronic paraplegia, etc. Several of the chapters are monologues, alleged interviews made for an IRS PR campaign, Your IRS Today. These interviews and Wallace's interludes make the book feel like an extended episode of The Office, the footage breaking from the (in)action to interview individual characters. The technique's effect is brilliant. Wallace was perhaps the most acrobatic of contemporary American writers, and in The Pale King he moves deftly from some of the most striking sentences in recent memory—"The sun overhead like a peephole into hell's own self-consuming heart"—to desiccated passages of tax explanations.

Because so many of us read books for diversion, the thought of a book on taxes is stupefying. And yet taxes are not just boring. They demand an incredible amount of attention if they are to be done right, which is the primary reason I pay my accountant cousin exorbitant non-family amounts of money to do mine. One of the book's characters calls the boredom "soul-murdering." Another dreams of rows of people at their desks, their faces displaying "The placid hoplessness of adulthood. The complex regret."

Even the IRS building itself induces terror. Located on the always-congested Self Storage Parkway, it has as a façade an enormous 1040; the color scheme of level 1 is "searing white and matte gray," which, if you have synesthesia, are the colors you'd probably see every time you read the word boredom. The evangelical Catholic character, Lane Dean, experiences a boredom so intense that it leads to despair. There's a wonderful passage in which a phantom, who appears on Dean's desk during a moment of despair, gives the history of the word. There was no English word for boredom before 1766, the phantom says, "No word for the Greek ακηδία. Also the hermits of third-century Egypt, the so-called daemon meridianus, when their prayers were stultified by pointlessness and tedium and a longing for violent death." Acedia, Evagrius warns, "makes it appear that the sun moves slowly or not at all, and that the day seems to be fifty hours long.

Discuss amongst yourselves: which is the more terrifying vocation to the American imagination—that of a desert hermit, or of an IRS bean-counter?

This book is about America. So, in the spirit of American pragmatism, what can be done to combat acedia? John Cassian, a disciple of Evagrius, recommends physical labor to keep acedia at bay. But this is not an option for The Pale King's cast, tied to their desks with endless stacks of returns to review. There is a certain irony in setting the story in the American heartland, placing a bunch of office drones in the middle of the fields and asking them not to farm but to do the least physical—but no less taxing—work possible. If the book was set in 1992, they might have had minesweeper to distract themselves; 1999, ICQ; 2010, this review has a word limit. In The Pale King, the accountants have no distractions besides despair.

Evagrius compiled lists of Scriptures that should be recited to counter acedia. Lane Dean attempts to pray the Jesus prayer but only experiences a vision of hell:

He felt in a position to say he knew now that hell had nothing to do with fires or frozen troops. Lock a fellow in a windowless room to perform rote tasks just tricky enough to make him have to think, but still rote, tasks involving numbers that connected to nothing he'd ever see or care about, a stack of tasks that never went down, and nail a clock to the wall where he can see it, and just leave the man there to his mind's own devices.

"Remember, too, the state that now exists in Hell," Evagrius tells his followers, intending to spur them to righteous thoughts. Dean's vision of hell leads him only to unwillingly consider ways to kill himself with Jell-O.

Lest you think I'm getting way off into left field here talking about monks, one of the book's most profound moments occurs when one character, Chris Fogle, experiences a conversion which leads him to join the IRS after he accidentally wanders into an advanced tax class at DePaul being taught by a substitute, an alleged Jesuit, which is close enough to a monk for our purposes. "True heroism," the Jesuit says, "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."

Wallace was always afraid to come across as pious or moralizing. He thought it was nigh-on impossible for a novelist to create the sort of speeches that Dostoevsky put in the mouth of his characters. A serious novelist who attempted this today, he said, "would be (and this is our own age's truest vision of hell) laughed out of town." And so Wallace places the story in the mouth of a character nicknamed "Irrelevant Chris Fogle" and makes the truths in the Jesuit's lengthy speech devolve into absurdities: accountants compared to cowboys, to give you an idea.

Wallace delivered the commencement address to the 2005 class of Kenyon College, which was posthumously if annoyingly—a kitschy graduation gift edition with one sentence per page—published in 2008 as This is Water. The speech is a sort of road-map to his Wallace's moral vision, and it offers a concise summary of some of the themes of The Pale King. Wallace offers students this solution for battling acedia: "But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars—compassion, love, the subsurface unity of all things." Fighting acedia, it would seem, is a matter of gritting it out, or trying to pay attention to the World.

Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss—a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious—lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom. [From the notes at the end of The Pale King]

The Kenyon speech has its dark moments, but in the end it is hopeful. The Pale King, however, is a tragic book, in part because nothing is resolved, but more so because it is very hard to separate it from Wallace's life and his tragic death. After all, Wallace himself is a character in the book. He tells the reader that because "sitting still and concentrating on just one task for an extended period of time is, as a practical matter, impossible," when you say you're spending the evening in the library writing an essay, you're only actually writing part of the time. The rest of the time you're "opening volumes at random and reading about, say, Durkheim's theories of suicide." In one of the longer chapters, a character talks about her time in a psychiatric hospital and her stay in solitary, in a pink room with nothing but a drain in the floor—a description almost identical to what Wallace told David Lipsky of his own experience.

This is generally the part in a positive review where the reviewer offers up some criticism. A bit of authorial honesty: The Pale King is hard to critique fairly because of its amorphous and unfinished nature. Pietsch has attached nine pages of notes Wallace had written for individual chapters, and these give the reader some idea of how Wallace thought the story might develop. But even in the notes, there is no plot development, per se. If we represent the story graphically using a standard freshman English plot diagram, it would be a bunch of little road bumps, hiccups in an otherwise flat line—not dissimilar to the fields of Illinois. If we must have a critique, it is at times a very boring book.

Perhaps Wallace meant to elicit boredom in his readers, to force them to understand the difficulty of paying attention. But maybe it's better to read about this sort of stuff from the Desert Fathers. To my generation, warding off despair with attention seems sexy and hip coming from the pen of David Foster Wallace. In reality, it's not. Attention—whether it is attention others, a task, or one's soul—is hard to cultivate. But as Wallace reminded his audience at Kenyon, "The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the rat race, the constant gnawing sense of having had, and lost, some infinite thing."

David J. Michael is the editor of Wunderkammer Magazine, a web-based journal of cultural criticism. He is currently pursuing a master's degree at Lund University, Sweden.

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