The failure of The Pale King

Beginning to feel very concerned about David Foster Wallace's novel "The Pale King." Take chapter 24 - one of the longest in the novel (so far, other than the unreadable chapter 22): reverting to the author's voice, as DFW rather preposterously re-asserts that we are reading a memoir about his experiences working for an IRS audit center in Peoria in about 1980. In this section, DFW recounts his first day on the job - and I've read about 40 pages of this section, and in all this - he has not yet arrived at the job! He starts as he's waiting for a (Greyhound?) bus, in his small midwestern city - an opportunity to riff on the incredible strip-mall dreariness of such cities, including a really smart observation about sunrise in the Midwest being like someone flicking on a light in a darkened room - sudden and intense. Long description of miserable bus ride, all the odors and sticky misery and scrofulous fellow passengers. Then the long ride in a van to the IRS center - describing the unpleasant people in the van with him and the terrible and needless traffic jams along Self Storage Parkway. Need I go on? First of all, this writing is very funny and engaging - all of DFW's journalistic skills well in play here; however, it's also disturbing that the only mood he can evoke is contempt - there's a certain unrelenting aloofness about his writing - he's smarter, more athletic, more aware than anyone and everyone else in his pitiable surroundings (though admittedly DFW as a character in the novel is self-deprecating). I can imagine him reading some of these passages and getting huge guffaws and applause - from others who look on the sadness around us and feel no pity, only scorn. I'm being tough on the late DFW here, and I do feel sadness, too, for him and his family and friends - he was a great talent and his death is a great loss - but unfortunately you can see him coming unhinged in this novel, it's sad but true. He took on the theme of the most massive and possibly boring bureaucracy in the world and is trying to build an epic from this dross. He can't do it, despite all his talent. Exactly half-way through the novel - and there's no point to it - you could write about the IRS as a behemoth if you'd actually develop characters, or even a single character, and have some conflict, some issue or crisis that needs resolution, that opens eyes, changes people, puts them in opposition to one another, engages. Despite many, many promising starts - this is not happening in TPK. Did DFW know he was wasting his time and his talent? It's as if Mozart decided to spend the last ten years of his life writing a symphony for kazoos, just to show he could make art out of anything. Maybe he could, and maybe DFW could, too - but this isn't it, and I think he knew that.