The first is as a coherent, if incomplete, portrayal of our age unfolding on an epic scale: a grand parable of postindustrial culture or “late capitalism,” and an anguished examination of the lot of the poor (that is, white-collar) individual who finds himself caught in this system’s mesh. The setting that Wallace has chosen as his background (and foreground, and pretty much everything in between) could not be more systematic: the innards of the Internal Revenue Service — the sheer, overwhelming heft of its protocols and procedures. If, as one of Wallace’s characters asserts, “the world of men as it exists today is a bureaucracy,” then the I.R.S., “a system composed of many systems,” not only represents that world but also furnishes the ultimate stage on which its moral dramas are enacted. In the words of Midwest Regional Examination Center Director DeWitt Glendenning Jr., one of the more shadowy (or pale) presences in this multicharactered and multivoiced book, “The tax code, once you get to know it, embodies all the essence of [human] life: greed, politics, power, goodness, charity.”
To its own agents and enforcers, the I.R.S. even offers a role and status akin to that of the lone, righteous gunslinger in the Wild West or the caped crusader in Gotham. “Enduring tedium over real time in a confined space is what real courage is,” accounting students are informed with evangelical zeal by their instructor. “To retain care and scrupulosity about each detail from within the teeming wormball of data and rule and exception and contingency which constitutes real-world accounting — this is heroism.” The proposition is comic (one of the novel’s would-be heroes practices saying “Freeze! Treasury!” in front of his mirror) but sincere as well: the instructor is a Jesuit priest, and the scene is redacted with a genuinely epiphanic air. In a universe of veiled and veiling numbers, the task of drawing the true ones out into the light and holding them up for inspection, clear and remainder- less, really is a sacred one. “Gentlemen,” the instructor rounds off his sermon by saying, “you are called to account.”
The problem, as I.R.S. recruits soon discover, is that neither moral nor heroic codes hold true anymore. The bulk of “The Pale King” takes place in the mid-1980s, as the Spackman Initiative is being implemented. Pure invention (as far as I can tell) on Wallace’s part, the initiative nonetheless describes an all too recognizable shift in administrative culture, with the supplanting of a public service ethos (tax enforcement is an affirmation of all citizens’ duties toward others) by a free- market one: the I.R.S. is a revenue- generating business and, as such, should audit only those returns that promise the highest yield-to-man-hour-spent- investigating ratio. Post-Spackman, the tax agency is a godless space whose commandments are simply those of the profit motive, and whose driving logic is being automated at an alarming pace thanks to emerging software. “It was frightening,” writes David Wallace (a character who shares his name not only with the author but also with another David Wallace at the I.R.S., causing yet further blurring of identities and voices), “like watching an enormous machine come to consciousness and start trying to think and feel like a real human.” Machines will never feel, of course; nor do they allow for human agency and its offshoots (free will, ethics, compassion, love) to unfold and blossom in their arid data fields. By the time the software’s up and running, those high up in the I.R.S. are questioning the very need for humans to administer its programs at all.
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