The Pale King - an unfinished (by me) novel

Like the author, I am leaving David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King" unfinished. It's really a shame - as noted in previous posts DFW was obviously a writer of super-abundant talent, much of it evident in parts of The Pale King: his eye for detail, his sense of humor, his sense of status details and cultural markers. Had he never written fiction in his life-cut-short, he still could have been remembered as one of our best essayists and journalists. But what happened to him in The Pale King? How could a novel with such great promise go so terribly wrong? The pressure of great expectations, too much on the shoulders of a still-young, heralded novelist? Or did his own great talent run him afoul? Because DFW could build the most fabulous set pieces out of the mundane and the diurnal, because he could make almost any scenes vivid and memorable - it's almost as if he pushed his talent to the limit, and in the process pushed his readers' patience (mine, anyway) to the limit and beyond. I finally bailed in the long Chapter 24; I thought this would be the chapter that finally brings us into the heart of the novel, the secretive inner workings of the IRS, as seen through the eyes of a young IRS recruit, DFW himself, if the author is to be believed. This long chapter, as noted yesterday, chronicles his arrival at the IRS auditing center. To a degree, I was able to tolerate the lengthy description of his journey by bus to Peoria, and by crowded van to the center itself, complete with descriptions of the scrofula on the boy's leg across the bus aisle and the profuse perspiration of seatmate in van and even of DFW's terrible roseate complexion - but do we in any way shape form need five dense pages of description of the traffic patterns in the parking lots outside the center? What is the point here? Is it some kind of defiance of convention - I simply refuse to dabble in the niceties of character and plot? Is it a parody of memoirs and biographies (think of Caro's long digressions in his bio of LBJ - but the digressions at least serve a higher purpose in Caro's grand scheme, whereas these seem to just be meanderings, uncensored outpourings)? Or is DFW attacking the patience of his readers for some reason? Or, what I feel and what I fear, did DFW just literally get lost in his material - so deeply into the details and so carried off by his own ability to riff on anything - that he no longer had any sense of design or direction for this novel at all? Readers of TPK will no doubt enjoy some passages here and there, even some chapters - notably, the couple on the picnic table discussing their relation and her pregnancy, excerpted in The New Yorker, I think - good choice - though the couple does not appear in the next 205 pages, BTW - but I think few will finish this novel, sadly. Reviews were kind, I think, out of respect for DFW's talent and our loss, but it's a book I think he knew he'd never be able to finish and would have abandoned or changed it drastically.