The Pale King.

• Author: Zelenak, Lawrence
• Position: Book review

THE PALE KING. By David Foster Wallace. Edited by Michael Pietsch. New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown and Company. 2011. Pp. x, 548. $27.99.

INTRODUCTION

David Foster Wallace--author of the celebrated novel Infinite Jest (1) and among the most acclaimed American fiction writers of his generation--killed himself in 2008 at the age of forty-six. (2) He left in his office hundreds of pages of The Pale King, an unfinished novel set in the fictional Peoria, Illinois regional examination center ("REC") of the Internal Revenue Service ("IRS" or "the Service") in 1985. (3) Although many chapters of the novel were seemingly complete, Wallace left no indication (other than what could be gleaned from the chapters themselves) of the order of the chapters (pp. vi-vii). Michael Pietsch, who had served as the editor of Infinite Jest, assembled the chapters into a surprisingly coherent--although more or less plotless--novel, and the book was published to considerable critical acclaim in early 2011. (4)

As assembled by Pietsch, The Pale King focuses on a dozen or so income tax examiners--including a fictional David Foster Wallace--working at the Peoria REC. The examiner's job is to decide whether income tax returns (selected for the examiner's consideration by computers) should be referred for audit (Chapter Twenty-Seven). The novel describes how the featured employees came to work for "the Service," as it is generally referred to by its employees (p. 244), and how they deal with the boredom of their jobs, as well as their attitudes toward the Service and toward the tax system itself. Although some of the chapters can stand on their own as self-contained stories, the book as a whole has no real plot. Some of Wallace's notes, included by Pietsch as "Notes and Asides" at the end of the book, suggest Wallace had plans for an overarching plot, based on a power struggle between IRS traditionalists favoring the continued use of human examiners and reformers wanting to replace human examiners with computers, (5) but only a few hints of this conflict appear in the published novel. It is possible that even a completed version of The Pale King would have been essentially plotless. As Pietsch points out in his "Editor's Note," one of Wallace's notes describes the book as "a series of setups for things to happen but nothing ever happens." (6)

If the unfinished novel lacks a plot, it certainly does not lack themes. Three of the major themes, all of which are themes not commonly explored in fiction (to put it mildly), are the philosophies of tax administration, taxpaying as a civic responsibility, and boredom in the workplace. Cultural commentary on the income tax is, of course, nothing new. There have been, for example, close to 100 tax-related radio and television sitcom episodes from the 1940s to the present, (7) and about twice that many tax-related New Yorker cartoons from 1925 to the present. (8) To the best of my knowledge, however, the income tax has never received anything comparable to the sustained attention from a major artist that it has now received in The Pale King. (9) To anyone interested in the cultural significance of the federal income tax, the book's publication is a unique and remarkable event.

Like the tax-related sitcoms and cartoons, The Pale King owes its existence to the character of the federal income tax as a return-based mass tax. Because the vast majority of adult Americans are required to file a federal income tax return each year, the income tax captures the public's attention-for better or worse--to an extent unmatched by any other tax. For most households, the burden of the federal payroll tax is greater than the burden of the federal income tax. (10) Nevertheless, in popular culture the income tax is very much the tax because of the taxpayer involvement mandated by the return-filing requirement. It is no accident that Wallace set his novel in a facility for the administration of the income tax, rather than in a facility focused on the payroll tax.

Part I of this Review examines the novel's treatment of the three major themes previously mentioned--the struggle between proponents of competing philosophies of tax administration, the understanding of taxpaying as a fundamental duty of citizenship, and the problem of boredom in the modern workplace. Part II considers Wallace's creative mixture of fact and fiction in his descriptions of the workings of the tax system. Part III offers a tentative explanation of the novel's rather obscure title.

But first, a disclaimer: I am not a literary scholar or critic, nor am I pretending to be one in this Review. Rather, I am an academic tax lawyer (and a former temporary employee of the Internal Revenue Service), and the Review is written from that perspective. For many creative works, a review of this sort would be inappropriate. It does not much matter, for example, whether the film version of The Wizard of Oz accurately depicts life on a Kansas farm in the 1930s. But The Pale King is different. The book devotes a significant percentage of its pages to detailed explanations and discussions of tax civics, tax policy, and tax administration, and it is every bit as serious about those topics as Moby-Dick is about whaling. The Pale King is not merely set in a tax administration facility; it is also, in very significant part, about taxes and tax administration. It is a Moby-Dick of taxes, aiming to educate its readers about a highly specialized field of endeavor, and using that field of endeavor to explore some of the profoundest themes. On the assumption that a whaler's review of Moby-Dick would have served a useful purpose, I offer this tax lawyer's review of The Pale King.

1. THREE BIG THEMES

   1. Dueling Philosophies of Tax Administration

      The fictional Wallace who narrates portions of The Pale King describes 1985 as the year when efficiency-oriented policymakers gained the upper hand in a bureaucratic battle

      between traditional or 'conservative' officials who saw tax and its administration as an arena of social justice and civic virtue, on the one hand, and those more progressive, 'pragmatic' policymakers who prized the market model, efficiency, and a maximum return on the investment of the Service's annual budget. (11) Wallace (the nonfictional Wallace) demonstrates a serious interest in real-world philosophies of tax administration. Although the struggles of 1985 are fictionalized, it is clear that Wallace intended those struggles to reflect the actual battles for the soul of the IRS.

      Wallace's fictional year of crisis seems to have been inspired by two actual periods of crisis for the IRS. First, 1985 really was a terrible year for the Service. Overwhelmed employees at the Philadelphia Service Center threw away unprocessed returns and checks, (12) and millions of refund checks were delayed because of computer problems. (13) (The Pale King describes events similar to those occurring in Philadelphia in 1985 as having occurred in 1982 in the fictional Rome, New York REC (pp. 7-8).) The problems were so severe that Commissioner Roscoe Egger included his personal apology with the 1985 tax forms sent to taxpayers at the beginning of 1986. (14) The real 1985 crisis, however, was merely operational; it did not involve a struggle over the philosophical underpinnings of tax administration.

      The crisis of 1997-98 more closely resembled the 1985 crisis described by the fictional Wallace, in that it truly was a crisis of tax administration philosophy. In September 1997, the Senate Finance Committee held three days of heavily publicized hearings on alleged abuses of taxpayers by the Service, culminating in a remarkable public apology by the acting commissioner. (15) In the aftermath of the hearings, Congress enacted the Internal Revenue Service Restructuring and Reform Act of 1998, (16) aimed at producing a "kinder, gentler IRS." (17) Along with a host of more substantive provisions, the Act required the Service to "review and restate its mission to place a greater emphasis on serving the public and meeting taxpayers' needs." (18) A chastened IRS complied by declaring that its mission was "to provide America's taxpayers top quality service by helping them understand and meet their tax responsibilities and by applying the tax law with integrity and fairness to all." (19) Serving the public had also been featured in the discarded mission statement, but (shockingly enough) only after the collection of taxes:

      The purpose of the Internal Revenue Service is to collect the proper amount of tax revenue at the least cost; serve the public by continually improving the quality of our products and services; and perform in a manner warranting the highest degree of public confidence in our integrity, efficiency and fairness. (20) Assuming The Pale King's 1985 competition between philosophies of tax administration is intended as a fictionalized version of the actual crisis of 1997-98, it misses the mark. The 1997-98 conflict was between traditionalists focused on revenue collection and reformers focused on "customer" satisfaction. In both the real world and The Pale King, the approaches advocated by the reformers could be described as business models, but the two approaches are business models in very different senses. The real-world reformers borrowed from business the model of taxpayers as customers, but they did not adopt the revenue-maximizing goal of the reformers of The Pale King.

      The real-world reformers rejected revenue maximization for several reasons. First, they objected to the police-state qualities inherent in a serious attempt to maximize net tax revenues. (21) Second, they argued that from a broader societal perspective (as contrasted with a focus solely on the government's net tax revenues), high levels of enforcement were inefficient; the transfer of tax dollars from taxpayers to the government did not increase societal wealth, while the enforcement costs...