for this magazine), his former romantic partners , and his editors . These accounts filled in important blanks in Wallace’s personal history, including aspects of his decades-long battle with addiction and depression, and the grim details of his final weeks in California. They also produced a fairly consistent picture of a selfish friend, a manipulative—and likely abusive—boyfriend, and a jealous and self-mythologizing writer.
The transition, for Fogle and for the reader, is from seeing Fogle’s aimlessness as a generic product of adolescent apathy to understanding it as a symptom of a broader social and spiritual deficit. Wallace was an uncommonly philosophical novelist in part because he believed that cultural life was oriented by a set of dominant ideas and pictures, which were both older and more entrenched than any specific trend or technology.
On the level of narrative, all that is left is for Fogle to buy a wool suit and make his way to the I.R.S. regional recruiting office in southwest Chicago—a task that he completes in a subtly haunting scene set amid dazzlingly bright snowbanks left over from the infamous blizzard of 1979, and overlaid with heavy-handed comparisons between entering the Service and signing up for war.
That chapter is a masterpiece. I open the Pale King every now and then to go over certain passages.
Entertainment Entertainment Latest News, Entertainment Entertainment Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: NBCDFW - 🏆 288. / 63 Read more »