Is The Pale King readable?

They weren't kidding, apparently David Foster Wallace's final (unfinished) novel, "The Pale King," is about an IRS inspector heading for Peoria, Illinois. Thought this had to be a joke, but not, Wallace did spend many years and thousands of words on this topic. OK, anything and anyone can be a great topic for fiction, and I should be grateful that here's a protagonist who's not a 20-something bond trader or media mogul or software genius - but and it's kind of a bi-coastal snobbism that makes me skeptical about even the premises of this novel - and of course Joyce wrote one of the greatest novels of all time about a guy selling ad space in newspapers (I think) - but Wallace set himself almost an impossible task here, in some perverse way, and, though I know he was an Illinoisan himself, there's also a certain perversity about setting this novel (at least initially) in Peoria. Does he love his characters? Is he contemptuous of them, holding himself above them and examining them as if they're larvae under a scope? Can't say yet - but I do know this from first pages of novel: Joyce developed the character of L.Bloom through a great deal of interaction among people and detailed and loving observation of society and culture - not just through language experiment, though of course there's plenty of that in Ulysses; DFW exhibits none of the above in the opening pages - we're totally locked in the IRS inspector's head as he worries about his pay grade, his bumpy flight, etc. - how long can DFW sustain this? Oddly, the novel actually begins with a short and way over the top lyrical passage (those who balked at the atypically lyrical opening paragraph of Exiles, see this) that leads to a weirdly sophomoric sentimental outburst - more striking to me after reading for weeks the completely non-sentimental Chekhov - and I don't know whom to blame for this - my guess it was a found fragment, not meant to open this novel but placed there by the editors of this posthumous publication, and that DFW would have had the sense to disregard. I'll keep reading, at least for a while, but suspect this is heading toward the territory of novels that may be great but are largely unreadable except for scholars and true believers (Gravity's Rainbow, Finnegans Wake, anything by David Mitchell, qv).