David Wallace - The Pale King - An Unfinished Novel

Sylvanshine has a different take on Blumquist. Sylvanshine has educed that some of the very best Examiners — most attentive, most thorough — are those with some kind of trauma or abandonment in their past. He’s there to intuit which are the best so that they can be auditioned for the test against A/NADA. Blumquist, it turns out, had had brutal Fundamentalist parents — the kind for whom fans and mattresses were luxuries. They had a special punishment: they made him face the wall in the parlor — blank wall — stand there facing it for hours at a time. This was the trauma. There had been a mirror on the other wall behind him; it showed only his back. This is the image Sylvanshine gets for Blumquist: a view of his childhood back, very still, with a scrolled wooden frame around it. Blumquist had had productivity numbers that were much, much higher than anyone else’s, though he had declined offers to be promoted to higher civil service grade and managerial job. Sylvanshine looking for similarly great rote examiner, to do the series of tests against the A/NADA program and digital computer. Several of the recently transferred Examiners are among the very best tested rote examiners left at national RECs. Lehrl’s Systems boys want a fair test, the computer and A/NADA against the very finest rote examiners they can get… so that when the A/NADA crushes them, the test’ll be all that much more definitive.

§ 30 LEHRL & PRO-TECH VS. GLENDENNING & DISTRICT DIRECTORS: Project is replacing human Examiners with computers the way Lehrl invented Automated Collection Systems — the District Directors don’t want it, because they’re Old School IRS-as-Civics believers, whereas the new school has a corporate philosophy: maximize revenue while minimizing costs. Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one.

Charles Lehrl preparing to computerize Exams the way he computerized Automated Collection System in Collections — the experiments there were in Rome and Philadelphia. Invented the IRP that compares W2s and 1099s to Returns — made Examiners’ jobs otiose.

Reynolds & Sylvanshine (lovers? roomies?) vie for Lehrl’s attention & favor like courtiers or children — it’s how they pass the time in the dullness of IRS intrigue.

Reynolds & Sylvanshine live together — sort of like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern in Hamlet . They have an incredibly nice reproduction of Gerard ter Borch’s Parental Admonition (28 x 29 in., Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam) that they hang wherever they live — or else an incredibly good forgery, done by one of the great painter-imitators of the modern US.

§ 38 DW, because of snafu, favors upgrading IRS computer systems — Stecyk wants to preserve human examiners?

§ 43 There is no bomb. It turned out that an actual load of nitrate fertilizer had been blown up. Again, something big threatens to happen but doesn’t actually happen.

This becomes disaster — the scanners are viewed as able to replace examiners — their jobs are threatened: contest between Drinion + scanner set up.

§ 46 Rand works in Problem Resolution, not Exams? Because her prettiness helps defuse appellants and keep them from making as much trouble as they would otherwise? Another Personnel coup from X, the talent-arrangement genius?

Drinion came home as child to find whole family gone — at least that’s the rumor. A lot of stuff about Drinion, his manner of paying attention, should be implicit, or should unfold over a much longer time.

IRS rap on Meredith Rand: She’s pretty but a yammerer of the most dire kind, on and on, excruciating to be around — they speculate that her husband must have some kind of hearing aid that he can turn off at will.

At Rand and Drinion’s last meeting, in book, Drinion asks: “Would you prefer it intense, or casual?” Rand breaks into tears.

Rand gets obsessed with Drinion (as type of “savior”?) in the same way she’d been obsessed with Ed Rand in hospital?

REC Center in outlying Peoria district called “Anthony, Illinois”? Who is Saint Anthony? The tornado continues…

End pt. 1. In pt. 2 (forthcoming?) Rand describes, quickly, how they got romantically involved (or Rath or someone else does, or it gets out through summary mediated by several different tellers): M.R. felt she needed Rand, or rather she felt sorry for him because he was sick and unattractive (additional repulsive symptoms in private) and going to die soon. Always expecting him to die in the near future. And she saw how lonely and sad his life was, his apartment was. So she married him, at just age 19… But he didn’t die, hasn’t died; and now M.R. is trapped, miserable, especially because Ed isn’t grateful to her, and would laugh spitefully at her if she ever tried to say to him that he should be grateful, that she’d taken pity — Rand would say that the real person she’d pitied was herself, and that marrying someone always on the edge of possible death was a great way to let herself feel both safe and heroic.

Every day at day’s end they have the same exchange:

“How was your day?”

“I work in a mental hospital. How do you think my day was?”

It’s not funny or intimate, no shared joke — they’ve been in the same basic relationship for 6 years, w/o growth or change, and Rand is looking for someone to save her, extract her from it.

* * *

Big issue is human examiners or machines. Sylvanshine is after the best human examiners he can find.

Embryonic outline:

2 Broad arcs:

1. Paying attention, boredom, ADD, Machines vs. people at performing mindless jobs.

2. Being individual vs. being part of larger things — paying taxes, being “lone gun” in IRS vs. team player.

David Wallace disappears 100 pp in.

Central Deal: Realism, monotony. Plot a series of set-ups for stuff happening, but nothing actually happens.

David Wallace disappears — becomes creature of the system.

Overall movement: Old IRS guard are driven by self-righteousness, tax cheats as deadbeats, tax payment as virtue, or to work out their own psych stuff like anger, resentment, subservience to authority, etc. Or else they’re drab civil servants in it for security, standard government workers. New IRS guard are not only good accountants but good strategic and business planners: whole point is to maximize revenue — disregard civic virtue, disregard moral warrior aspect of being in tax collection. New Peoria REC Personnel guy is new guard: his whole deal is finding employees and organizing stuff so that examiners maximize the revenue that auditors/collections can yield. His willingness to experiment/think in fresh new ways leads, paradoxically, to deep mysticism: a certain set of numbers that lets examiners concentrate better, etc. The ultimate point is the question whether humans or machines can do exams better, can maximize efficiency in spotting which returns might need auditing and will produce revenue.

Drinion is happy . Ability to pay attention. It turns out that bliss — a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you’ve never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it’s like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom.

STECYK?

There is a counterpart to Sylvanshine. This is a high-end Personnel person for the REC (for the side that advocates human examiners over computers and the DIF). He searches for immersives. Ringers who can be brought in and examine complex returns without the sort of boredom that numbs you. (Or it’s Stecyk, an examiner totally devoted to his job — hated, an abstract application of probity and virtue — constantly on the lookout for ways to help. It’s he who goes to Meckstroth’s office with the idea of how to send receipts directly to bank, save money and time.) Stecyk now in Personnel and Personnel Training?