It’s about boredom, for God’s sake! Only an estimated one third finished at the time of Wallace’s death, The Pale King is about a group of IRS agents with jobs the crushing dullness of which “ultimately sets them free”[…]

The obvious problem — and the one that Wallace was apparently still struggling with before he died — was how to spin the premise into non-tedious narrative. According to his editor, Wallace “posed himself the task that is almost the opposite of how fiction works,” which — as every author who is not Stephenie Meyer knows — is “leaving out the things that are not of much interest.” So who the heck wants to read about a bunch of tax-processing bureaucrats filling out forms?

@ NY Mag

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Over 45 years ago Susan Sontag wrote that redundancy—an experience of joblessness or irrelevance—was the chief affliction of modern life, a verdict that has yet to fall out of date. Insignificance and redundancy make special problems for a writer. Speaking generally, what a novelist aims to do is to convey or impose meaning, and meaning is what redundancy undermines—precisely why irrelevance is one of the natural and insoluble terrors of writing. If you were looking for a neat expression for the awful sense of uselessness that anyone with a commitment to the written word must feel from time to time, then Philip Larkin’s phrase would be hard to better: “Books are a load of crap.” “Depressive realism” (a clinical term) becomes an occupational hazard for the author and reader.

@ The Point