The Pale King
I came to The Pale King with the same skepticism I brought to Infinite Jest — for different reasons. With Infinite Jest, it was that book's thick popular place in the zeitgeist as a quote-unquote bro book. With this one, it was that it is posthumous, and famously unfinished. And not unfinished in the Eyes Wide Shut sense, where the only tasks left were polish and assemblage (as Pietsch makes explicitly clear in the introduction).
So one version of this review is an impossible hypothetical: if it had been finished, I think it probably would have been a greater work than Infinite Jest. Which — again, I stress — is one of my favorite books of all time.
But it wasn't and it's not. So what is it? It's impossible to really talk about the themes or the choices made in this book unless you want to do so as theorycrafting. Many of its deeper meanings are left mostly submerged: available for examination, but not for excavation.
Instead, I think a reader should consider The Pale King as if it were a collection of short stories, all set in the same place, and see how it sits with them then. In that light. it's bizarre and atonal and sloppy and really, really terrific.