Conspiracy and the novel: The Pale King

As we move along in fits and starts with David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King," the plot, such as it is, begins to take shape: a series of interviews with employees of the Peoria Regional Center of the IRS circa 1980 reveals that the IRS has a new major initiative, based on what I think he calls the Spackman Reports, or something like that, but a clear dig at David Stockman, Reagan's idiotic economics advisor who came up with the idea that tax cuts, especially for the wealthy, would produce sufficient prosperity to more than pay for themselves, an obviously self-service, right-wing bit of fantasy and ideology that still haunts us today - anyway, Spackman plan is to change the mission of the IRS to focus on collection of revenue - and employees would be recognized, promoted, etc., not for the # of forms processed but for the amount of revenue they generate. Awesome - so weird that it's possibly even true. Assuming otherwise, you can see that The Pale King is taking shape as one of those vast, encompassing novels that posits some kind of enormous and almost indiscernible, sinister conspiracy - not like a political sect or a coup, those are more likely materials for a fast-paced thriller or a political novel, but some form of mind control or thought control exercised by government agents or others who are largely anonymous. DFW's style is perfectly suited to this kind of material, which is most often the subject of vast novels, very often disjointed, in which other than perhaps a central protagonist trying to survive the system or even turn it over, are generally not driven by character but rather by mood, detail, language, and sometimes experiments with form: Kafka is the first exemplar, though not quite typical - more recent writers in this vein are, obviously, De Lillo, but also Pynchon, Gaddis, maybe Heller, Murikama at times - and definitely Musil. Might be worth thinking about why the maximal form is so well suited to this kind of material, or world view - something in the character of the author? Or the very idea that you're thinking about a tremendous conspiracy that's largely unseen requires coming at your subject through indirect and through many courses: fragments, changes in style, sections and scenes that at least initially do not cohere. Note that one exception is Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, one of the few conspiracy novels that is compact and efficient.