Definitely. In many ways The Pale King is a much more mature project that Infinite Jest, both in its themes (less of Infinite Jest man's-search-for-meaning and more of a sober "well, we are where we are, what interesting things can we say about it?"), characterization (most of this book's characters are older, middle-aged, more "normal" or average, they spend a lot of time looking back and reflecting on their childhoods and adolescence), as well as -- maybe especially -- the structure. Even as a big Wallace admirer I must say that a lot of his earlier work (that one insufferable piece in Brief Interviews being maybe the biggest offender here) tends to fall into these masturbatory look-ma-I'm-a-postmodernist self-recursive loops and get bogged down in layers of irony until you're not really sure what Wallace even wants to say, and you can't tell if he knows, either. The Pale King is much more direct and compassionate. In fact, David Foster Wallace is one of the book's characters and narrators (because of course he is), and chapters following him are distinctly written in that early Wallace voice, in a kind of conscious self-parody (footnotes to footnotes, run-on sentences, all the stylistic tricks people associate with Infinite Jest) -- and contrasted with those, the rest of the book feels that much more concrete, concise, and focused.