Truth in Fiction: More thoughts on the Pale King by David Foster Wallace

How important is a "real" setting in fiction?

In Infinite Jest, the world is almost completely fabricated from the mind of Wallace. Sure there is the true life descriptions of Boston that is a part of the conversation. As a person who grew up outside of Boston, I personally love the description of where Don Gately heads out to the grocery store to get food for dinner.

"He likes to make a stately left onto Commonwealth and wait to get out of view of the House's bay window and then produce what he imagines is a Rebel Yell and open her up down the sertentine tree-lined boulevard of the Ave. as it slithers through bleak parts of Brighton and Allston and past Boston U. and toward the big triangular CITGO neon sign and the Back Bay."
-David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

But the locations where much of the action occurs in Infinite Jest are not "real" places. How different would Infinite Jest be if Hal Incandenza was for example a fictional elite tennis player at a true life tennis academy like Ross Academy in East Hampton, NY.  Enfield Tennis Academy is a made up place.  Enfield the town was flooded to make for the Quabbin reservoir.  The Academy is technically in the Brighton area of Boston.  But is completely fabricated.   What if Don Gately was a fictional resident at McLean Mental Hospital in Belmont, MA instead of the completely made up Ennet House? How this effect our reading of the novel?

In the Pale King, David Foster Wallace is using a true life place (Preoria, IL) and a real organization (the IRS). Of course the characters (even the fictional Dave Wallace Social Security no. 975-04-2012) are fictional. Infinite Jest was so ambitious and challenging because the reader had to piece together much about the setting, place and plot through a seemingly random nonlinear presentation of data. Even the timing of the years were ambiguous and disputable.  Time was not measured in a realistic way.  The years were held by corporate naming rights.  The tax recovery world of the Pale King is very foreign to many of us. I am sure that Wallace will also provide some quirks that make it beyond the realistic agency. However, there is a basic framework that he has to adhere to. It isn't as easy for him to bend the rules of the setting.

The fact that David Foster Wallace decided to go back in time with the Pale King instead of forward in time as in Infinite Jest is also particularly interesting and relevant. There were a lot of things that he could get away with because he was writing the story in a projected future. When Wallace is writing using true events that happened there is a certain level of accountability with the reader.