The Pale King is the bones of the novel Wallace was working on when he died (and gigantic bones they are too, some 550 pages). For a novel intended to be about boredom and tax returns, David Foster Wallace, the consummate professional, went all the way, taking an accountancy course as research.

The mission impossible aspect of The Pale King might be very alluring for a novelist who wants to show off: you set yourself almost insurmountable, lethal difficulties by locating the story in an IRS office in Peoria and you make the central character an auditor.

It's like watching Houdini hog-tied in a tank full of water: can the novelist escape from conditions of terminal drudgery? With a triumphant bow to the crowd, bewildered and delighted by his magical powers?

Not on this evidence. I can understand that Wallace's family and his editor might have sanctioned The Pale King out of affection and the best possible motives, and we are warned this is an "unfinished novel", but to suggest this is in any way a novel is tantamount to fraud. There are some great lines and great paragraphs, but they are few and far between and bear little relation to each other. To garner any pleasure from this you either have to be a truly obsessive Wallace obsessive, writing a dissertation on him or someone who gets off on reading disjointed snippets of prose.

Michael Pietsch, Wallace's editor, tells us in the introduction that "the entire mass of material" from which The Pale King is shaped will be available online, courtesy of the University of Texas. That's what should have been done in the first place. Bouvard and Pécuchet this ain't.