Masterpieces in Some Other World: Mac Miller’s Circles and D.F.W.’s The Pale King

I finished reading The Pale King by David Foster Wallace yesterday. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since. For those of you who don’t know, The Pale King is an unfinished novel. David Foster Wallace had been working on it off and on for about ten years, and while he had hundreds of thousands of polished and publish-ready words set aside in a neat stack, it remained incomplete when he succumbed to his depression and killed himself in September of 2008.

His longtime editor, Michael Pietsch, was given the task of putting the book together using the stack of manuscript Wallace had set aside, other chapters and notes found in his study whose pages numbered well into the thousands, and his own knowledge of Wallace himself. I thought about that a lot as I read the book. How it must have felt for Pietsch to stand in his friend’s study, alone and quiet and probably still in the shock-stage of grief, and begin to try to finish the thing the man himself couldn’t. I wonder if it felt like a violation or an attempt to communicate or if it was too complicated to be put into words.

Just the very basic synopsis of The Pale King–a bunch of strange and damaged people arrive at and work in a fictionalized version of the Peoria branch of the IRS in 1985–must have been a cause for worry. Wallace had enrolled in accounting classes as background info for the novel and there are pages of specific tax formulas, direct sections of tax code, and IRS jargon throughout the book. I have and will always believe that while books should challenge the reader in how they see the world and themselves, they should also provide that reader pleasure in one way or another. A dense 550 page novel about tax accountants, what boredom truly means in modern America, and how to find satisfaction and meaning in everyday life does not in any way sound like a recipe for literary success as I have described it.

And yet, Pietsch, through what he called greatest editorial challenge of his career, in combination with DFW’s incredible ability to believably imagine almost anyone or thing, managed to wrangle together something gorgeous. The Pale King has single conversations as enthralling and moving as anything you’ve seen on TV this last month. It has a hundred page biography of a druggie discovering himself through the IRS that somehow tells you about six different things about the way people react to confusion and purposelessness while still being hilarious.

The whole book is hilarious, actually. There’s a guy who gets ‘sweat attacks’ and lives in constant fear of them, to the point that he becomes afraid of his own fear of his ‘sweat attacks’, which of course causes them to come on more frequently. There’s a ‘fact psychic’ who cannot control what facts he receives or when or if they are ever actually helpful. There’s an aside about a man who finds himself in thrall to an infant with a ‘fierce’ expression. At one point, the adjective used to describe the rapidity and motion of an act of fellatio is: ‘Woodpeckerish’. A word choice that may be the pinnacle of American prose to date.

But it is also inescapably unfinished. Plot strands don’t tie together (although DFW was never too big on tying plots together how you think they should), sometimes characters will contradict themselves, and it comes to a close just when the reader begins to get the sense of the mammoth, ridiculous plot about to kick into motion. The notes at the end of the book show you everything Wallace was trying to understand and put in the novel. You get the sense that this thing was going to be so much bigger and weirder and more hilarious than what you got.

About twenty minutes after I finished The Pale King, I found myself listening to Mac Miller’s posthumous album, Circles, for about the seventh time since it was released. Similar to the assemblage of The Pale King, Circles came about mostly after it’s creator departed, this time via an accidental drug overdose in September of 2018. Almost exactly 10 years after DFW. Jon Brion, a veteran producer and composer who worked very closely with Mac Miller throughout Swimming and the beginning stages of Circles, was placed in Pietsch’s role and tasked with putting the thing together. It took over a year of work with master-tapes and old conversations as guidance for him to come out with the album.

I very much enjoy it. From all Miller’s crooning, to the plucked strings of “Good News”, to the ch-ch-ch sound under his bars on “Blue World”. There’s an odd sense to the whole album, pleasant but melancholy. It feels like something meant to be listened to while watching the rain hit your bedroom window, or through headphones on a long summer roadtrip to someplace you’ve never been before, or when you’re walking home along empty pre-dawn city streets after a long night in which things didn’t quite go as you’d hoped.

But there’s also a sense of blankness to the album. Like the whole thing had been thoroughly sketched before Mac Miller passed but little more. There’s this feeling like everything has yet to be filled in. That if he’d been alive to complete it, there would have been a few more rap verses, a few less repeated sung choruses. You realize the production probably would have been a little more fluid, with a little more energy. There would have been more specificity to the lyrics, more jokes. The music would feel like life instead of a graceful eulogy.

Circles could hypothetically stand on it’s own without the ‘posthumous’ label as a piece of music worth appreciating, just as The Pale King could function as a gorgeous and meaningful novel even ignoring the tragedy behind its production. But in reality, in both the novel and the album, the reading/listening experience is inextricable from their creators passing and from the fact that both are conspicuously missing something.

So why have I now listened to Circles for the eighth time as I type this? Why, in the two-and-a-half weeks I worked my way through The Pale King, did I find it more important than any other piece of narrative fiction (other books, movies, TV shows, YouTube series, etc…) that entered my vision?

The short answer is that I love both David Foster Wallace and Mac Miller. This is gonna sound like ridiculous, pretentious bullshit, but Infinite Jest changed my life. I hadn’t known a novel could create a world like that, could make you look around at what you see with new eyes, could absorb your entire being for six weeks the way Infinite Jest did mine. Swimming is, in my opinion, the best rap/hip hop album of the last decade. It’s not just bars over beats, it’s music. No one raps like Mac Miller, the words just slip out of his mouth, perfectly timed, perfectly formed. It’s about the constant trials and failures of being human. In this way, I think both DFW and Mac Miller were talking about the same thing.

But that’s just a part of it. I think the reason both these works lodge so firmly in their reader’s/listener’s minds (Circles debuted to the best sales numbers of Mac’s career and The Pale King is often considered among the best of DFW’s work) comes down to one word: Potential.

In a lot of ways, listening to Circles for either the first time or the eighth is an act of imagination just as much as it is appreciation. You listen to the music and you enjoy it, but the music in your head of what the album was really going to be is what interests you. You find yourself trying to construct the verse that just had to go in the blank spaces of “Everyday”. Or imagining the varied instrumentation Miller would have come up with, so much so that the sudden and all-encompassing electric guitar in “Surf” would just be another cool choice instead of the most musically interesting moment in the whole package. You imagine seeing him perform some of these songs live, or maybe just wish he could do another Tiny Desk Concert with this new material. The album functions as a springboard for you, for all that it could have been, for all that you wanted it to be, just as much as it works as a genuinely pretty piece of music.

The Pale King works on its audience in a similar way. It is more than enthralling in the moment, and the lessons and insights it imparts stick with you even when your nose isn’t buried in the book; but after you close it for the final time you’re hit with this wistful sense of what could have been. The Pale King sticks with you after you place it in your bookcase not just as a solid and resonant piece of fiction, but as this translucent web of stories and connections you can almost but not quite make out. The feeling that you’ve watched someone lay incredible and hilarious foundation for a structure that will never fully stand.

But that makes it live longer in you. Because the finished book in your head is yours. It’s yours in a way no other piece of fiction written by anyone but yourself can be yours. You get to decide if the phantoms in the wrigglers room are real. If Shane Drinion really was levitating in his conversation with Meredith Rand. If ‘Irrelevant’ Chris Fogle really does have access to a secret string of numbers that can induce perfect concentration. If the ‘Initiative’ is a good thing or a bad thing or if it actually happens at all.

The unfinished back-half of The Pale King is yours as a reader to play with. Just as the real and complete version of Circles is yours to create, yours to listen to in your head. You get to imagine exactly how these masterpieces might exist as finished works in some other parallel world where Mac Miller decided to stay sober that one night, where DFW found a reason to face one more day, and then the one after. You get to create and you get to finish.

It’s not as good as it would be in ideal circumstances. It will never be the Circles Mac Miller envisioned, just as it will never be the full Pale King that DFW pictured while he worked in his study. But it’s very far from nothing.

David Foster Wallace once said “Fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human being.” I can think of few things more human than unfinished potential and wishing for what could have been.