WE LOST a great, if tragically writer's-blocked, American
novelist when David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008.
But this year we found out what great American novel Mr Wallace
was working on at the time: "The Pale King", which turns out to
be about the IRS. The subject is perfectly suited to Mr
Wallace's logorrheic, footnote-laden style. And Jennifer
Schuessler writes in the New York Times Book Review that Mr
Wallace's research for the book included a long and provocative
correspondence with Stephen Lacy, a philosophically-minded tax
accountant in Evanston, Illinois:  “Our tax system, as it
currently exists, faces challenges,” Lacy wrote, before offering
a “philosophical analogy”: “Imagine someone who wants to have a
purely realistic and Aristotelian outlook and metaphysic and
wants to avoid thinking of how some of the radical insights of
Gödel, Wittgenstein, Davidson, Derrida and Deleuze might chip
away at his system. The complexity of language and its nature of
being contradictory and deconstructing