David Foster Wallace [from Wikimedia Commons]
After wading through
David Foster Wallace’s writings for the past year, I’m finally ready for the ultimately challenge: reading
The Pale King. Believe it or not,
The Pale King is about accounting, and I’m sure much to the chagrin of my friend
Adrienne Gonzalez over at
Going Concern, Foster delves into how terminally boring accounting is, asking (in what I’m sure will be very long sentences) why anyone would ever go into accounting.
So far, there are long and obscure ruminations on tax codes, the CPA exam, and the bitter consequences of hiding a backlog of unfinished working papers in air ducts. I’m only at the beginning, and already one accountant died in the bull-pen, but no one noticed for four days.
BTW, The Pale King is unfinished; before he could complete it, Wallace committed suicide.
You can buy the book here. Wallace is an acquired taste. You might want to start off with some of his easier works, like A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again or The Broom of the System before jumping into this one.
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About Mark P. Holtzman
Chair of Accounting Department at Seton Hall University. PhD from The University of Texas at Austin. Worked at Deloitte's New York Office. BSBA from Hofstra University.
Hello, Mark. I don’t have the courage to read this. Why don’t you tell me all about it when we meet up in Washington in August.
Will do, Dave. If this novel is as good as it looks, it might be the most prominent mention of accountants in literature since A Christmas Carol.
there are poems, original, that deal with accounting! Including mine! perhaps his suicide was related to accounting!
i should have mentioned in the comment above, those poems are in the journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting.
i also recall a paper that talked about accounting in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Regarding Foster’s suicide, his writing about obsession, depression, and addiction seems so explicit that it’s hard to imagine that these didn’t reflect some personal experience. According to an article in Rolling Stone, towards the end of his life, he was having trouble with anti-depressants. Wikipedia references some of the articles about it here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Foster_Wallace. So yes, I guess it’s possible that he got so bored and depressed writing a novel about accounting that he could not be medicated out of it.
Thanks Art.