"Wallace's finest work as a novelist...when Wallace steers the tanker back to its theme–the struggle to extract meaning from each second that passes, no matter how empty or lonely or indistinguishable from the second that came before it–The Pale King achieves power levels that Wallace never reached in his first two novels....His ability to render the fine finials and fractals and flourishes of a mind acting upon itself, from moment to moment, using only the blunt, numb instruments of language, has few if any equals in American literature."–Lev Grossman, TIME