Pretty Random

Stranger than The Pale King

I just watched Stranger than Fiction (which is a really good movie!) for the first time since the release of David Foster Wallace’s posthumous novel The Pale King, and I started thinking about some similarities. Well, I mean, there’s one really obvious similarity, which is that Harold Crick, Will Farrell’s character, is an IRS agent, like pretty much everyone in TPK. In a way, Crick starts out the movie exemplifying what TPK is about: he is extremely bored, and extremely attentive to the little monotonous facts of his life. He’s sort of like the Drinion character we meet towards the end of TPK, maybe. But rather than being somehow in a Nirvana-like state of transcendence-through-attention-to-the-boring, or whatever counterintuitive ideal DFW was suggesting was his point in TPK, Crick is miserable. It’s only when he stops being bored and starts “living life” that his story moves forward. So, maybe not that alike.

Though, wait, maybe it’s the whole idea of “plot” that’s the problem here, making this comparison. Because TPK, as many have noted, is basically a book without plot: the story never really moves. In Stranger than Fiction Dustin Hoffman plays an English professor who tells Crick that he needs to figure out what kind of plot his story is: comedy or tragedy. It would be pretty hard to argue that TPK is either, right? Infinite Jest, on the other hand, abounds with plot, however non-confluential. I think it’s safe to say, however funny IJ is, plotwise it seems to tend in the tragedy direction.

Of course there are other, more interesting things about Stranger than Fiction; it’s just that now, whenever I see anything about the IRS, I think Pale King.