Jenny Turner reviews David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King":

And the entire subject could scarcely be more of a political hot potato: most of these drafts were being written in the years of the George W. Bush tax cuts. 'There’s something very interesting about civics and selfishness, and we get to ride the crest of it. Here in the US, we expect government and law to be our conscience. Our superego, you could say ... Americans are in a way crazy. We infantilise ourselves. We don’t think of ourselves as citizens.' Or, a more WikiLeaksy approach: 'Consider ... the advantages of the dull, the arcane, the mind-numbingly complex. The IRS was one of the very first government agencies to learn that ... abstruse dullness is actually a much more effective shield than is secrecy.'

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Wallace ironised the tendency, somewhat, through narrative refraction and recursion; but the problem must have worried him, and perhaps explains why he tried to interest himself in low-level fiscal bureaucrats, surely one of the least romanticisable social groupings imaginable on this earth. He may also have liked the element of self-mortification involved in this choice, or perhaps it was the challenge he found exciting: 'To function effectively in an environment that precludes everything vital and human,' he has a nameless character say at one point, 'is the key to modern life. If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish.'