Peter Suderman from the August/September 2011 issue
The
Pale King (Little, Brown), a posthumously published novel
that David Foster Wallace left unfinished before his 2008 suicide,
is set largely in the offices of a regional branch of the Internal
Revenue Service (IRS). Much of the book concerns a fictional 1985
reform designed to refocus IRS auditing procedures strictly on
revenue collection. Wallace depicts the resulting transformation of
the IRS into a profit-maximizing business as dehumanizing.
The book also serves as a powerful illustration of the tax code’s brutalizing complexity. Several chapters are structured around the code, with auditors unable to understand any aspect of their own lives without considering related tax code provisions. Wallace offers a compelling picture of a tax system so far-reaching that it reflects, and complicates, every choice an individual makes. —Peter Suderman
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