Michiko Kakutani reviews The Pale King.

David Foster Wallace’s magnum opus “Infinite Jest” depicted an America so distracted and obsessed with entertainment that a mesmerizing movie becomes a potential terrorist weapon — capable of making viewers die of pleasure.

His posthumous unfinished novel, “The Pale King” — which is set largely in an I.R.S. office in the Midwest — depicts an America so plagued by tedium, monotony and meaningless bureaucratic rules and regulations that its citizens are in danger of dying of boredom.

Would you read this?