When David Foster Wallace committed suicide in 2008, the writer's devotees both mourned his loss and, more selfishly, hoped that new work might yet appear — uncollected or abandoned stories and essays rescued from desk drawers or computer hard drives.

In the years since Wallace's death, publishers have offered a few morsels: "This Is Water," a thin volume containing a 2005 commencement speech delivered to Kenyon College grads; "Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself," a book-length interview with David Lipsky dating from the 1996 "Infinite Jest" book tour; and "Fate, Time, and Language," a mid-'80s Amherst College undergraduate philosophy thesis.

Those appetizers failed to sate, however, requiring famished readers to wait patiently for a more substantial meal: the unfinished novel on the Internal Revenue Service that Wallace had been slow-cooking for more than a decade. On April 15 — tax day — "The Pale King" officially arrived, and Wallace fans are digesting its overstuffed contents.

At 548 pages, "The Pale King" remains dwarfed by Wallace's towering "Infinite Jest" — roughly double the length — but the new book, even in its incomplete state, is a dense and at times forbidding read. The principal subject, after all, is boredom.

Set for the most part in the IRS' Midwest Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Ill., circa 1985, "The Pale King" chronicles, in terrifyingly precise and numbing detail, the 'soul-murdering eight daily hours" — the "boredom beyond any boredom" — of the tinglers, immersives, turdnagels, cart boys and other less colorfully monikered bureaucrats of IRS Post 047.

However bleak that sounds, readers needn't abandon hope on entry: Although "The Pale King" limns a version of hell, Wallace also provides plenty of devilish fun. We're occasionally forced to muck through long, swampy sections of IRS arcana — not dissimilar to the baffling market-research terminology used in Wallace's short story "Mr. Squishy" — but the book never stays mired for long, and it frequently flies unfettered to breathtaking comic heights.

Wallace manages to move easily between these poles because the unconventional structure of "The Pale King" alternates chapters that amuse, horrify and purposely bore (e.g., a three-page sequence in which characters do little other than turn pages of IRS returns).

The book's stylistic approach also mutates constantly, offering another form of variety, and readers familiar with Wallace's work will recognize several characteristic approaches: the microscopically observed, heavily footnoted descriptions of his essays; the Q&A structure of the "Brief Interviews With Hideous Men" cycle; the grim brutality of his short story "Incarnations of Burned Children" (reminiscent here, in the chapters on future IRS employee Toni Ware's ghastly childhood, of Cormac McCarthy).

Individual chapters feature many eventful tales — subway deaths, shop-class accidents, grossly misfired pranks, picnic poisonings — but there's little in the way of traditional plot, although two key story strands thread their meandering way through the book.

In one, David Wallace — the author, shorn of his familiar middle name — offers a faux memoir of his own arrival to the Peoria REC. The chapters recording Wallace's purported memories are among the book's most lively and purely entertaining, and in one — an "Author's Foreword" that amusingly doesn't appear until the book's ninth chapter — he makes the outrageous assertion that "The Pale King" is entirely true. In typical Wallace fashion, this also allows for postmodern ruminations on the first-person genre and its questionable trustworthiness.

In addition to the Wallace-centric material, several REC co-workers receive multiple chapters that reveal their own illuminating and frequently humiliating back stories. Still other employees are given a single great swath of the book's real estate: a more than 100-page monologue by "Irrelevant" Chris Fogle, whose name is belatedly revealed in a footnote to another chapter, and a 65-page (un)happy-hour conversation between Meredith Rand and Shane Drinion, who don't even surface as characters of importance until page 444.

In "The Pale King's" second overarching narrative, opposing forces battle over the direction (and soul) of the IRS, with Midwest REC District Director DeWitt Glendenning representing a humanist viewpoint (collecting taxes supports the greater civic good) and unseen Human Resources Systems Deputy Merrill Errol Lehrl and his Peoria emissary Claude Sylvanshine taking a capitalist position (generating maximum revenue is the sole goal).

In a concluding section of "Notes and Asides" — included by the editor to provide insight into the author's still developing thoughts on major issues — Wallace helpfully summarizes this struggle: "Big Q is whether IRS is to be essentially a corporate entity or a moral one."

"The Pale King" thus uses the seemingly mundane goings-on at the Midwest REC in 1985 to grapple with vast, difficult themes, including the efficacy of bureaucracy, the role of government and the responsibilities of citizenship. And in exploring boredom so thoroughly, Wallace drills to the existential core: Given the dysfunction of so many families and the painfully repetitive nature of most jobs — with IRS rote examiner serving as extreme example — what makes life meaningful?

Wallace doesn't provide an answer to that eternal question, but occasional otherworldly irruptions at least hint at the possibility of transcendence, of escape from the quotidian.

Of course, the book's conclusions are necessarily provisional because of its incomplete nature. Confronted with a mass of extraordinary material but no clear outline, editor Michael Pietsch was compelled to make major structural decisions for Wallace, and we can only guess at what clarifying material might have been added and what sentences, sections or entire characters would have been pruned or altered.

Tidy endings were never a Wallace hallmark, and the book's collagelike design was clearly deliberate, but some of the book's puzzlements would surely have been resolved.

"The Pale King" sounds dauntingly complicated; that's because it is. But there's real joy in confronting its sorrows, clarity to be found in wrestling with its complexities. In his notes on one dull character, Wallace offers words that might apply to the difficult stretches of "The Pale King":

"It turns out bliss — a second-by-second joy + gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious — lies on the other side of crushing boredom. Pay close attention to the most tedious thing you can find (tax returns, televised golf), and, in waves, a boredom like you've never known will wash over you and just about kill you. Ride these out, and it's like stepping from black and white into color. Like water after days in the desert. Constant bliss in every atom."

Even in its incomplete, necessarily compromised form, "The Pale King" delivers many such moments of bliss. Sadly, the book's pleasures also magnify the pain we feel on reading Wallace's final words and realizing that one of American literature's most vivid, challenging and exciting voices is now silenced.

Cliff Froehlich is executive director of Cinema St. Louis, presenter of "Vincentennial: The Vincent Price 100th Birthday Celebration," which takes place from May 19-28.

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'The Pale King'

A novel by David Foster Wallace

Published by Little, Brown, 548 pages, $27.99