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David Foster Wallace's unfinished novel, The Pale King is going to be released in 2010. Little, Brown - his publisher - said it runs 'several hundred thousand words.' (Regular-size novels usually weigh in at about 75,000 words or so, I think.) The finished edition of Infinite Jest had 479,198 words, and is apparently the tenth-longest novel ever written.

It's not so surprising that his stuff is so long, though, because I'm pretty sure the man

A)    Observed and remembered everything that was within the range of his eye, and
B)    Had X-Ray vision.

Which is a pretty lethal combination. There's a lot of information to dispel into fiction when your purview includes everything. Certainly there's something a little clinical about DFW's writing. In his attempts at precision - his style is at least partly about precision, right? - he sometimes might have dried up certain emotional elements of certain sentences. But his incisiveness led to profound questions that did more to stir readers' emotions than purple prose in any shade.

According to the New Yorker, the novel's about IRS agents in the Midwest. It was unfinished when the author died, and will be published with a bunch of supplementary notes, outlines, and other material. Which, for geeks like me, is as good as porno. Also in the New Yorker - in the same article, in fact! - which hasn't even officially been published, I don't think! - is D.T. Max's mini-biography of DFW. For the fiction nut, it's definitely worth a read. For the fiction nut, that was definitely a redundant sentence, that last one there.

Okay, now I'm thinking about other unfinished novels. Why are they always so good? Kafka - did Kafka ever finish a novel? The Castle and The Trial both come equipped with a couple alternate endings, and I think Amerika was also truncated. The Man Without Qualities - which is the 2nd longest book ever written - was never completed. The Canterbury Tales. Dead Souls by Gogol. You want a Minnesota connection? Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon. How about that? Eat it.

Really, though, what does it say when an author spends a few years - or a lot more than a few years - on a novel, and can't finish it? These guys are geniuses, some of them. If you think of a book as a way of trying to consolidate, or make sense of, the world, and then stack that up against an inability to complete it...what we're left with is what - a message about the absurdity/general entropy/meaninglessness of the universe? The impossibility of coaxing a coherent message from our lives? Man, that's heavy. Just sayin'. Does the action of not-completing a novel supercede any message of incompletion that an author might have written, anyway?

Still, if anyone could write clearly about the confusion of the universe, it would probably have been, and probably was, David Foster Wallace. Once in a while I'll pick up one of his shorter books - Oblivion, usually, or Consider the Lobster - and I find a good deal of comfort in them, not because he writes about comforting things (just the opposite), but because he is able to describe so completely a normally intangible sort of chaos that everything seems, for a little bit, to be a little less chaotic.

(image ripped from the new yorker, philip burke)