David Foster Wallace was a writer with whom I was determined, out of principle, not to fall in love.
The hype! The fandom! All that geeking out! The angsty 18-year old girls with severe haircuts and ironic t-shirts toting around Infinite Jest like the goddamned Rosetta Stone! The whole thing smacked of hipsterism and zeitgeist in a way that I wanted to distance myself from. No, sir! No 1,000-plus page schizoid novel for this reader; I’ll take Proust for $800, Alex. Besides, he couldn’t be worth his salt—this multiple-named longhaired dude whom I occasionally mixed up with Jonathan Franzen.
But after my boyfriend finished Infinite Jest, rapturous and feverishly babbling about acronyms, I took a stab at it and fell hard—fell flat on my face in the way that feels like heaven when you’re crazy in love and running through a pine forest at dusk somewhere in New England. It was probably the only novel I’ve ever read that got me out of my depth in terrifying ways, but all the same left me laughing for full hours at a time— the only novel that altered my entire perception of what comic writing can do. To this day, I can’t say I’ve downright missed, longed for a novel the way I yearn for Infinite Jest.
This is exactly why I was so fearful of picking up the earlier-published The Broom of the System; it’s the only other novel Wallace wrote (forthcoming Pale King aside). While I was hungry to be in his thrall once more, in some ways, the journey would end here.
Reading The Broom of the System offers the chance to travel through time to meet the aged teacher/writer/historical figure you’ve idolized back when they were young and foolish and open to possibility. Which is probably why I don’t entirely disagree with Wallace’s complaint that the novel seems written by “a very smart fourteen-year-old”— it does lack the world-weary urgency of his later work. It’s Wallace when he was youthful enough to make stoner jokes, but already so entrenched in his desire to take language somewhere new that neither he nor his characters can see past its confines. To put it a little more succinctly: reading 20-year old DFW is like listening to an eight-year old violinist play Vivaldi with tears streaming down her cheeks. Beautiful, but disturbing as hell.
Broom concerns Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman of Shaker Heights, Ohio—a fairly unambitious Amherst graduate in an unfulfilling relationship with her impotent boss, Rick. Rick runs an equally impotent publishing firm; Lenore answers the phones. Aside from some zany, if forgettable capers (Lenore’s grandmother disappears from her nursing home and brings a gang of geriatrics to the man-made “Great Ohio Desert;” Lenore’s pet bird mysteriously acquires the ability to quote the Bible on command and ends up on Christian broadcast television), in typical Wallace fashion, not much “actually happens.” What we read, mainly, are a bunch of disparate but interconnected discourses—transcripts of Lenore’s and Rick’s individual therapy sessions, stories ostensibly submitted to Rick’s literary journal in which the dominant theme is abject misery, and Rick’s own (fantasies? memoirs?) notebook musings, which suggest the extremes to which we’ll go in order to keep believing the lies we tell ourselves, about ourselves.
Broom is a journey into the metaphysics of discourse—the stuff we communicate with our lovers; the crap we invent about our family; the way we use language to be in the world—or in Lenore’s case, to escape it. (She constantly feels like she’s a character in a novel who’s being manipulated by the writer; good one, DFW.) Reading a single page of Broom, you’re likely to run into at least four or five different linguistic registers—Lenore’s corn-fed-but-too-smart-for-her-own-good Midwesternness; Rick’s unbearably pretentious literary-babble; “Wang-Dang” Lang’s Texan frat-boy drivel; the list goes on. This is Wallace in the nascent stage of his literary powers, attempting to reconcile his interest in Wittgenstein and language with his desire to speak of something urgent and true about us and our beautiful messes. As one might guess, the novel ends with no resolution—if we haven’t “gotten” that Wallace’s fiction isn’t about plot or character development, we get it now with the last sentence, spoken by Rick—“I’m a man of my”—which breaks off mid-sentence. What delicious irony!
The ending Wallace couldn’t have seen coming is the ending in which we sit and agonize over the loss of a writer who, in just twenty years of writing, contributed more—not just to arts and letters, but to what it means to be human and attempting to make some sense of this terrifying world—than so many others who have been heaped with awards and special perks and had decades more to perfect their art. The irony there is inescapable, and it doesn’t taste quite as nice.
10 responses
I absolutely love this book but I hated the ending. Infinite Jest is better because it loops but I do think the ending of The Broom of the System is a weakness.
Your review makes me want to read Infinite Jest more than Broom. That said, I have read Broom (and not IJ) and thought it was rather difficult to review (see for yourself: http://www.deadendfollies.com/2010/10/david-foster-wallace-broom-of-system.html).
I think it needs to be taken into perspective that Wallace was really into postmodern fiction (and into Thomas Pynchon) when he wrote Broom. I think it’s the work of Wallace I like the least (althought it’s not bad at all), because it’s the most impregnated of academic thinking.
he was 20 when he wrote for freck’s sake. wow, i say.
i read Broom a few months ago, before attempting IJ. this is the reverse order compared to most people, but i had a choice, and i chose it. i think Broom is a great read, but it’s a ripple compared to the tsunami of IJ. but all the same stuff from IJ is in Broom, and that is exciting. and the way DFW gets inside Lenore’s head shows that no matter if you’re all over Wittgenstein or Frankenstein or Rick Stein, a good story writer is a damn good story writer.
this is a great review, Tori. i absolutely laughed for hours at IJ too.
have you read DFW’s short stories? you gotta, man, you gotta.
I had exactly the same sentiment about being determined not to love DFW out of principal, and ventured to cautiously read a short story of his (Brief interviews with hideous men) online, just to be able to say that I have read him, and was left smacking myself for all the time wasted not reading his stuff. I am often left wondering, he speaks English, I speak English, but why do i feel like a toddler who has no words for my feelings the way he has?
Thanks for this review. It definitely makes we want to pick up both books!
I absolutely loved this book! I’m 16 for crying out loud and I totally connected with the story (don’t ask how or why)! 🙂
I love The Broom of the System, as I do all of Wallace’s books. But is that your actual surname? I also have a German surname, and can speak German, and have spent time in Austria and Germany, but have never come across that name. It’s an incredible coincidence, if this is legit, that you have the same surname as one of the characters from Infinite Jest.
Did you actually read Broom because there are more than a few factual mistakes about happenings in the book…seems like you may be reviewing a summary of it…..
Just one small quibble: Lenore went to Oberlin, not Amherst.
I’m surprised by the number of factual errors about the content of DFW’s The Broom of the System in this otherwise engaging commentary. For example, it was Lenore’s great-grandmother, not her grandmother, who disappeared from her nursing home; and though more than one character suspected that Lenore senior and her fellow geriatrics had escaped to the Great Ohio Desert, there was an inescapably strong hint (think: 98.6 degrees) that she was in fact hidden in the tunnel of the Bombardini Building. Lenore’s bird, Vlad, does not quote the Bible on command (he scarcely quotes the Bible at all–one wonders whether it is the Bible, or The Broom, or both, with which the reviewer is unfamiliar), but rather spouts TV evangelist slogans intermingled with Lenore’s housemate’s impassioned and frequently off-color utterances emitted whilst in the throes of passion with one Clint. Another reviewer has already touched upon the Oberlin/Amherst mistake.
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