I have been obsessed with David Foster Wallace because his writing is audacious, unique, and so linguistically creative. His dialogue rings true, although no one has any idea why because not all of his characters ring true (or are even supposed to). He has certain writing tics that we recognize with affection whenever we run into them. He is no longer with us, biologically speaking, but he is not gone either.
I have managed to read DFW backwards for no reason that I am conscious of. I started with The Pale King, put together posthumously from notes and chapters found in his files after his untimely death. I have read through most of his work but not The Broom of the System. So last month, I finally downloaded The Broom of the System, that fateful first novel that Mr. Wallace published when he was just 24. And I can see that it is much less sophisticated than his later work but that signature audacity is there and perhaps is even stronger because not backed up by as much craft and life experience. It’s a bit of a heavy-handed light-hearted novel and although I have read the Wittgenstein comments from the critics and the Pynchon comparisons, and the post-modernist arguments, I did not come up when those writers or philosophies were the keys to literature, so I cannot look at DFW’s books in that way except through the eyes of others.
I can see that the characters in The Broom of the System do tend to be a bit two dimensional and cartoonish but I don’t really mind; they still involve me. I swim my own way into and out of the various membranes that populate the novel, right down to the cellular level, the self and the other, the membranes essential to female virginity and the piercing of membranes necessary for pregnancy. Even the phones seem membranous. This is pure Wallace; biology is always going awry and even objects like buildings are biological. The phones in “Broom” are a nervous system; there are “lungs” under the tennis courts in Infinite Jest.
Lenore Beadsman is our heroine and she has lost her paternal grandmother, also named Lenore Beadsman, who seems to have fostered a certain mindset in her granddaughter (brainwashed her) who visits her regularly in the nursing home. But Senior Lenore and about 25 residents and staff from the nursing home have disappeared and no one can find them. How will Grandma survive when she is so sensitive to cold that she can only exist in an environment that is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit? (There’s that biology again.) Is there a parental separation story here perhaps?
We make several digressions into Lenore (Juniors) past. In one we follow her to Mount Holyoke College where she goes to visit her older sister Claire and meets Wang Dang Lang and Biff Diggerance, whose gauche behavior makes her chose a more sheltered college to attend. We follow her to her job at Frequent and Vigorous, a publishing company where her boss, Rick Vigorous, quite a bit older than Lenore, is also her boyfriend, a boyfriend who cannot consummate the relationship, who tells odd stories to Lenore instead of making love to her, and who, even so, is very jealous. We visit her bird Vlad the Impaler with her when he, once a silent pet, becomes quite talkative. She learns from her father, owner of Stonecipheco Baby Food – competitor to Gerber – that there is a connection between the missing Senior Lenore and the newly precocious bird.
Wallace loves to put in landscape features that are either ridiculous man-made constructs or that have resulted from our abuse of the environment, so we find that, although we are in Cleveland (Wallace has a Midwest connection), Lake Erie is filled with a brown, sort of gelatinous, sludge occasionally showing sort of brown waves with white tops. Another area of Cleveland has been turned into the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a touristy invitation to walk the black sands and eyeball carefully designed desert landscapes, and to perhaps meditate (it isn’t supposed to make literal sense).
Then we find the political David Foster Wallace who had strong liberal leanings and who gives us the giant voracious Capitalist, Norman Bombardini, who is already grossly fat and yet wants to expand further and eat everything (especially Lenore Beadsman, the younger, who also happens to be one of DFW’s impossibly beautiful women who don’t know they are beautiful). The play of light and shadow has a role in this story and there is a “broom of the system”, but I will not elucidate.
The excesses of DFW are given to us by him on purpose and are part of what makes my brain wake up just thinking about any one of his books. If you read The Broom of the System you can also meet Lenore’s younger brother, the Antichrist and you can learn to play “Hi Bob”, a killer college drinking game. David and I are probably done for now, but I could, given time, read these books again and find many new and interesting little baubles and I just might do that whenever I need to get my adrenalin flowing (which great literature always does).
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Top reviews from other countries
Fergal
A most compelling story.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 11, 2020
