Customer Reviews

The Broom of the System

5 star:		(22)
4 star:		(19)
3 star:		(16)
2 star:		(6)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

When I was in my early twenties, I read a lot of works by emerging young writers like Jay McInerney, Bret Ellis, and others. Looking back on it now, it seems unfair to put David Foster Wallace in the same category as those writers, as he is far more talented and imaginative.

"The Broom of the System" is Wallace's debut, and like most first-borns, it received the most love and attention. It's more accessible than "Infinite Jest" and can be read more easily in smaller chunks without having to figure out, for example, when the events being narrated actually took place.

There isn't much of a plot in "Broom," which is remarkable when one considers that the novel runs over 500 pages. Loosely speaking, it's about the travails of Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a 24 year old woman who works as a telephone switch operator for a magazine edited by her lover, Rick Vigorous, who is anything but. Her grandmother (also named Lenore) has disappeared from her nursing home, and Lenore is the only one who seems worried. But that's only a fraction of what the book is about.

It's full of stories within stories, some the sad submissions that Vigorous derides (but that are far better than his limp and self-indulgent attempts at writing), others little asides that seem irrelevant but aren't. Mostly, "Broom" is an exploration of language and ideas -- some chapters involve highly detailed descriptions of, for example, the Goldberg-like trail of a pebble; other chapters are entirely dialogue, with no description of who is speaking (but which is clear from context).

In other words, this is not a novel about sex and drugs (although there are sex and drugs), and it's not a shallow, Gen-Ex picture of excess. The nearest comparison I can think of, in a loose way, is Neal Stephenson's "Cryptonomicon."

Well, did you like "Infinite Jest"? If so, then yes. "Broom of the System" may not be more of the same, but it's at least less of the same: shorter and less convoluted but with a similar meandering structure and Douglas-Adams-as-grad-student sensibility. "The Broom of the System" is a solid piece of highbrow comedy that stands on its own, though it's hard for "Infinite Jest" fans not to approach it as a warmup. Here's where DFW takes his first crack at many of the themes that wind up in Infinite Book: the (I guess unsurprising) obsession with prodigies, particularly adolescent males who do well in school, the fearless embrace of pretension, and a weakness for glib patter that nicely sets off the occasional jab of sincerity that manages to peek through. The prose is loopy, though more conventionally so. DFW had not yet worked out the collision of stoner-speak and dissertationese that gave "Infinite Jest" its distinctive voice, but the seeds are there. Even plotwise there are echoes: like "Infinite Jest", "Broom of the System" ends in medias res, and it's interesting to see version 1.0 of this neat trick. BotS may not be a re-reader, but it's definitely a reader, and an enjoyable one, assuming you like this sort of thing.

And if you don't? Specifically, what if you disliked "Infinite Jest"? Then the question becomes: how much did you dislike "Infinite Jest"? Say you found it annoying from the word go, think DFW is an insufferable smartypants, and hurled (or more like shotputted) the book across the room soon after the chapter that begins "Where was the woman who said she'd come. She said she would come" and continues in that vein for a good ten pages? Well, obviously you're going to hate "Broom of the System" too. If you're more of a middling Wallace non-fan, however, someone who finds him pretty good but too self-indulgent, made it about halfway through IJ, and can chuckle good naturedly at the Onion headline "Girlfriend Stops Reading David Foster Wallace Breakup Letter At Page 20", then BotS might be for you. It's DFW before he had developed either the courage or the inclination to go completely nuts. And there's not a footnote in sight.

Curious and wonderful to see what someone as (obviously insane?) as DFW did back when he was still in a grad program for creative writing -- back when he was just a cunning tyke of 26, before (presumably) the MacArthur Fellowship had given him an oversized novelty cheque just for being really really smart --- before he started writing 1100 page behemoths and incalculably inscrutable short stories. Broom Of The System is, in a way, as straightforward a narrative as DFW ever has written (although there are plenty of POV shifts and a huge, steaming plate of metafictional story-on-story action)... It is a jumping off point, certainly, and you can see some of his fabulous textual obsessions of later books (fathers and dysfunctional families and drugs and addictions) in their earlier forms, here. DFW is to fiction what the band Rush was to music: he is a prog-rock artist, switching POVs and the like with a merciless disregard for tradition, and it's probably best to view his work-- esp. something like Infinite Jest -- as experiments, and not "stories." But with Broom of the System you get a little bit of both -- the first chapter in particular, I think, is one of the most flat-out charming bits of DFW's that I've read.

This is a wild, zany ride, not totally under control, occasionally hilarious, offering glimpses of something larger. This is my first (and probably last) DFW novel, so I'm new to his shtick, but I've now read a few reviews and we can all agree on the elements: prolix, manic, hilarious, absurd, packed full of pop culture tidbits and philosophy tidbits, mightily self-indulgent. Honestly, this sounds right up my alley, but it just didn't add up. The smartest kid at Choate just reenacted a Saturday Night Live skit ad nauseam for 3 hours -- some folks just laughed and laughed the whole time, but me, I got bored for substantial bits and was just waiting for the next gag. That said, some of the gags are great, and although he doesn't go deep, he has read just enough philosophy to keep me tantalized (at least for the first half of the book or so, before my sinking realization that this wouldn't go anywhere).

I also must speak to DFW's literary ancestors. Many reviews make the connection to Pynchon, but honestly I've never read a (published) author whose writing style screamed out so baldly: "I want to be So-and-So". DFW just reads like a desperately wannabe Pynchon so much I almost feel for the guy. He ain't Pynchon, but he's modelled himself so closely that it hurts and, for this reader, really undercut his own creativity. There are other writers who have stood on the shoulders of Pynchon (Neal Stephenson comes to mind first, there are others of course), but DFW is just trying to ape him. Too bad that he hasn't found his own authorial voice. This is his first novel, though, so perhaps he matures in later work? Not sure if I'm going to bother finding out.

Funny, clever as hell, and a little bit precious, "The Broom of the System" is an examination of our postmodern culture from the inside out. Wallace looks at the cultural artifacts of our world, explodes them, and reassembles the pieces to create a kind of narrative arc from the chaotic blizzard of information - it's like watching cable TV, only everything means something, and adds up to some larger purpose. And if Wallace weren't such a teriffic writer, the thing wouldn't hold together; he is, though, and it does, and while there's a lot of intellectual depth to the work, it's also a ton of fun to read, funny and affecting, and Wallace's prose is some kind of inspiration, giving us, as someone said somewhere, THE literary voice of this decade (a feat all the more impressive given that the book came out in '87). It's not a flawless book: Wallce tends to go overboard and get a little self-congratulatory, and the thing isn't quite as focused as his later "Infinite Jest" (an even better novel, though more difficult), but it's more than made up for by the sheer innovation of the book. It may even be a metafictive dissection of the state of metafiction - it's that good, and it bears out that level of thought.

..and if you didn't like IJ, you'll hate this one, though it is a shorter read. In Broom, we see the precursors of everything that's in IJ -- a wacky, fanciful alternate universe (Cleveland shaped like Jayne Mansfield, linguistic booster hormones in baby food, the G.O.D.), disjointed storylines told from multiple points of view, crackling and whip-smart dialog, absurd but still believeable characters (Rex Metalman who thinks his lawn is a WWI trench, Wang Dang Lang, the narcissist who thinks he's still in a rowdy frat, Wanda the imperious supervisor, and the inscrutable, machinating grandmother, whom we never really meet, Lenore Beadsman the first), outrageous plot occurrences (Vlad the Impaler, the irritable Cockatiel who becomes Ugolino the Significant, a Christian News Channel Anchor), and best of all (from my point of view) a whole bunch of frequently incoherent fun. This book was almost as much fun to read as IJ, and it has more narrative unity so I think it's a bit easier to follow, but at the same time I thought the ending was even more abrupt, and more difficult to figure out how things are intended to end up.

I agree with the reviews that consider this book a pretentious, self-indulgent, ego-fest. Wallace is obviously highly intelligent, and every minute of this book seems designed to remind us of that.

It all starts off well enough. The characters are quirky and interesting. At first. And Wallace does a good enough job of setting up a curious chain of events to keep the reader reading and wondering what's going to happen. But nothing ever really happens. And at some point I just grew sick of the characters and their weird little lives.

Ultimately, this just felt like what happens when a really smart person decides to write something as a way to experiment with and exhibit his own intellect. And while that exercise may have been rewarding for Wallace, it wasn't so terribly rewarding for the reader.

This book will keep you laughing and baffled at its absurdities. From Vlad the Impaler (a talking cockatiel with hyper-stimulated speech) to Norman Bombardini (a Cleveland mogul trying to grow infinitely large) to LaVache Beadsman (a super-genius junkie with one leg). The plot begins with Lenore Beadsman's cold-blooded great-grandmother disappearing with an entire crew of geriatric misfits. It only gets weirder. This book is not Infinite Jest, but it's sure as hell entertaining. One reviewer said that this book is a mediocre attempt at trying to be Pynchon, Gaddis, Gass, et all. I disagree. What I see here is a young writer (I think Wallace was in his late twenties at the time) having some irrevrant fun. I had a blast reading it. It is not the type of book you will be banging your head against the wall because of. It is simply non-linear goodness from one of America's greatest imaginations. I found it fitting that Wallace pays tribute to Barthalme (one of his biggest influences) with the character Candy Mandible. All in all, not brain-busting metafiction, but a fine surreal diversion.

I'm not going to go into the story much because a) who am I? and b) there are plenty of people here and elsewhere who have. What I want to talk about it the Kindle format of this book.

To put it simply: I feel like this might have been a book that Amazon first used to experiment with Kindle formatting. There are all kinds of weird things, but two specific ones showed up all the time.

Most notably, almost any time the character 'r' is followed by the character 'n' in the actual text, the Kindle version reads those two characters together an a 'm'. So instead of 'torn' you get 'tom.' Instead of 'Vern' you get 'Vem.' I think I found one instance in which this didn't happen, otherwise I had to 'translate' in my head.

Secondly, on many occasions the quotation marks ending a line of dialog were preceded with a space. So you have something like this: "Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, ". What often happens then is that the final quotation mark ends up on the next line all by itself. Which isn't a big deal but looks really weird.

There are other, less-frequently-occurring oddities, but none were as pervasive as the ones listed above. And even these aren't a huge concern except that they yank you out of the narrative experience - make you aware of the fact of reading, which, ironically, Wallace would have smiled at I think. But this is why editors & typesetters for centuries have been careful about spelling and formatting and all that goes with it. My Kindle has quickly become one of my favorite devices, and I wish Amazon (or whoever it is that actually makes the Kindle editions) would apply the same level of care, concern and commitment to their formatting that traditional editors & typesetters have done for a long time.

I hate DFW. I love DFW. And so it goes. This appears to be the tenor of the reviews as well as the general reaction that David Foster Wallaces writing seems to induce. I became interested in reading the late 20th century "greats" and began with Infinite Jest. One hundred pages later, I was sufficiently confused and decided to back off and read some early or shorter works by my authors of interest. Thus, I read Delillo's Body Artist and DFWs Broom of the System. Despite the fact that DFW is clearly more intelligent than me, I managed to finish the Broom of the System. It is more approachable than Infinite Jest, funny, and entertaining. If you are new to DFW, I would say that this book has a similar "feel" as the films The Royal Tenenbaums or I Heart Huckabees. Is this a perfect book? No. Is the writing outstanding? Yes - but not completely perfected. Is the plot compelling? No - then The Historian and DaVinci Code are compelling but thats all they offer. What is it that makes this book worth 4 stars? It is simply DFWs ability to capture the irony and lassitude that characterized the youth zeitgeist of the late 20th century. He does this with humor and zest that are rarely matched. It may be DFWs lack of driving plot that makes people so frustrated. However, recall that the "Greatest American Novel," Moby Dick was panned commercially and critically when first published. Was Melville ahead of the collective curve? Probably. Is DFW also ahead of the curve? Given the equal number of people who dislike or love his writing, it is not unlikely. Either way, The Broom of the System offers an approachable starting point to one of the great writers of our time. March onward, Delillo, Wallace, and Pynchon.