''The Broom of the System'' is the first novel by the American writer
David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace (February 21, 1962 – September 12, 2008) was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, and university professor of English and creative writing. Wallace is widely known for his 1996 novel '' Infinite Jest'', whi ...
, published in 1987.
Background
Wallace submitted the novel as one of two undergraduate honors theses at
Amherst College, the other being a paper on
Richard Taylor's
fatalism
Fatalism is a family of related philosophical doctrines that stress the subjugation of all events or actions to fate or destiny, and is commonly associated with the consequent attitude of resignation in the face of future events which are tho ...
. He had begun study in philosophy at Amherst, interested in math and logic, and developed an interest in
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is con ...
before beginning the novel. A professor commented that Wallace's philosophy writing tended to have the quality of an unfolding story, leading Wallace to explore literature. Having submitted ''Broom of the System'' to the Department of English, he decided to focus his career on fiction. ''Broom'' was published in 1987 as Wallace completed a
Master of Fine Arts in creative writing at the
University of Arizona
The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a public land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it was the first university in the Arizona Territory.
T ...
. He had also sold his first short-story collection ''
Girl with Curious Hair'', leaving him in an enviable position among MFA students.
Wallace stated that the initial idea for the novel sprang from a remark made by an old girlfriend. DT Max reported that, according to Wallace, she said "she would rather be a character in a piece of fiction than a real person. I got to wondering just what the difference was."
[.]
Wallace revealed in an interview that the novel was somewhat autobiographical: "the sensitive tale of a sensitive young
WASP
A wasp is any insect of the narrow-waisted suborder Apocrita of the order Hymenoptera which is neither a bee nor an ant; this excludes the broad-waisted sawflies (Symphyta), which look somewhat like wasps, but are in a separate suborder. ...
who's just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction... which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct."
Plot summary
The book centers on the comparatively normal Lenore Beadsman, a 24-year-old
telephone switchboard
A telephone switchboard was a device used to connect circuits of telephones to establish telephone calls between users or other switchboards, throughout the 20th century. The switchboard was an essential component of a manual telephone exchange, ...
operator who gets caught in the middle of a Cleveland-based character drama. In Wallace's typically offbeat style, Lenore navigates three separate crises: her great-grandmother's escape from a
nursing home
A nursing home is a facility for the residential care of elderly or disabled people. Nursing homes may also be referred to as skilled nursing facility (SNF) or long-term care facilities. Often, these terms have slightly different meanings to i ...
, a
neurotic boyfriend, and a suddenly vocal pet
cockatiel
The cockatiel (; ''Nymphicus hollandicus''), also known as weiro (also spelt weero), or quarrion, is a medium-sized parrot that is a member of its own branch of the cockatoo family endemic to Australia. They are prized as household pets and com ...
. The controlling idea surrounding all of these crises is the use of words and symbols to define a person. To illustrate this idea, Wallace uses different formats to build the story, including transcripts from television recordings and therapy sessions, as well as an accompanying fictional account written by one of the main characters, Rick Vigorous.
The manager of the nursing home, David Bloemker, repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate style, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form. For example, he tells Lenore that if they find her great-grandmother (also named Lenore), they will likely also find the other missing residents of the facility. Why? Because, she "enjoyed a status here — with the facility administration, the staff, and, through the force of her personality and her evident gifts, especially with the other residents
uch thatit would not be improper to posit the location and retrieval of Lenore as near assurance of retrieving the other misplaced parties." The younger Lenore says that she doesn't understand all of that. Bloemker tries again: "Your great-grandmother was more or less the ringleader around here." This contrast of
baroque with simple speech is employed to comic effect, as well as to advance the more serious contemplation of language at the heart of the plot.
Major characters
Many secondary characters are not included here.
* Lenore Beadsman: The story's protagonist.
* Rick Vigorous: Lenore's boyfriend, co-owner of the publishing house ''Frequent & Vigorous''
* Patrice LaVache Beadsman: Married to Stonecipher Beadsman III, with whom she has four children: John, Clarice, Lenore, and Stonecipher.
* Norman Bombardini: Owner of the ''Bombardini Building'' and the ''Bombardini Company''. He believes that he can encompass the entire universe by eating obscene quantities of food, and then everything else. He becomes infatuated with Lenore.
* Stonecipher Beadsman III: Married to Patrice Beadsman, with whom he has four children: John, Clarice, Lenore, and Stonecipher. He is in charge of the company ''Stonecipheco''.
* Vlad the Impaler, later Ugolino the Significant: Vlad is a cockatiel, and was a gift to Lenore Beadsman from Rick Vigorous. Vlad began frequently repeating phrases he heard others say, possibly after being given either an experimental baby food or LSD.
* David Bloemker: The director of The Shaker Heights Home when residents and staff go missing.
* Melinda Susan Metalman Lang, or Mindy Metalman, or Melinda-Sue: Childhood neighbour of Rick Vigorous. She was roommates with Clarice Beadsman at
Mount Holyoke College where she met her husband, Andrew Lang.
* Andrew Sealander Lang, Wang-Dang Lang, W.D.L., or Andy: Married to Mindy Metalman.
Themes
A recurring concept in ''The Broom of the System'' is psychology as relating to words; many of the theories discussed involve
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein ( ; ; 26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He is con ...
's ideas and principles.
Wallace himself has stated that the book can be viewed as a dialogue between Wittgenstein and
Derrida
Derrida is a surname shared by notable people listed below.
* Bernard Derrida (born 1952), French theoretical physicist
* Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), French philosopher
** ''Derrida'' (film), a 2002 American documentary film
* Marguerite Derri ...
.
Reception
The publication earned Wallace the
Whiting Award in 1987.
Caryn James
Caryn A. James (born Caryn A. Fuoroli) is an American film critic, journalist, university lecturer and writer.
Biography
James is one of at least three children born to James M. Fuoroli Sr. and Joan A. Ford. A native of Providence, Rhode Isla ...
of the ''
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...
'' criticized elements of the book, writing in her review:
The philosophical underpinnings of his novel are ..weak. ..There is too much flat-footed satire of Self
The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhoo ...
and Other
Other often refers to:
* Other (philosophy), a concept in psychology and philosophy
Other or The Other may also refer to:
Film and television
* ''The Other'' (1913 film), a German silent film directed by Max Mack
* ''The Other'' (1930 film), a ...
, too much reliance on Philosophy 101. ..And the novel falls off drastically at the end, when a tortured running joke turns into a contrived explanation and characters we expect to appear never show up.
Despite these perceived short-comings, she ultimately found strength in the writing:
But the author's narrative command carries him over the low spots. This is not, after all, a minimalist tightrope-walk where a few wrong choices can produce empty posturing instead of precisely understated fiction. A saving grace of excessive novels is that a few missteps hardly matter; ''The Broom of the System'' succeeds as a manic, human, flawed extravaganza.
In the same newspaper,
Michiko Kakutani
Michiko Kakutani (born January 9, 1955) is an American writer and retired literary critic, best known for reviewing books for ''The New York Times'' from 1983 to 2017. In that role, she won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 1998.
Early life ...
wrote a somewhat unfavorable review, calling it "an unwieldy, uneven work - by turns, hilarious and stultifying, daring and derivative". Praising the author's ambition and imagination, she wrote that "the reader intermittently feels that the author wants to use Lenore's story as a
Nabokovian armature on which to drape serious philosophical and literary discussions. The problem is that
..'The Broom of the System' is pock-marked with superfluous verbal riffs
..repetitious digressions, and nonsensical babbling that reads like out-takes from a stoned, late-night dormitory exchange." Kakutani claimed Wallace has a "story-telling gift" but recommended more "narrative discipline and the exchange of other writers's
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Robert Asahina of ''Los Angeles Times'' wrote a review that parodies the style of the book itself, and wrote that "writers have abdicated responsibility for ''meaning'' to readers
..the book essentially seems to be about itself, ‘a game consisting of involved attempts to find out the game’s own rules,’ and not about Lenore". Asahina suggested that coincidence is "an all-too-convenient plot device" in the book, and that those who were not fans of
metafiction would likely find it "consistently, off-puttingly pretentious".
A reviewer for ''
Kirkus Reviews'' argued that Wallace "is something of a puerile
Pynchon, a discount
Don DeLillo
Donald Richard DeLillo (born November 20, 1936) is an American novelist, short story writer, playwright, screenwriter and essayist. His works have covered subjects as diverse as television, nuclear war, sports, the complexities of language, perf ...
..Wallace dabbles in big ideas, with too many pseudo-
Wittgensteinian pauses
..and much callow satire on consumer/
evangelical
Evangelicalism (), also called evangelical Christianity or evangelical Protestantism, is a worldwide interdenominational movement within Protestant Christianity that affirms the centrality of being " born again", in which an individual expe ...
America. Despite flashes of real genius, it's a heady
Animal House
''National Lampoon's Animal House'' is a 1978 American comedy film directed by John Landis and written by Harold Ramis, Douglas Kenney and Chris Miller. It stars John Belushi, Peter Riegert, Tim Matheson, John Vernon, Verna Bloom, Thomas Hu ...
vision."
In 2011, Tori Schacht of ''
The Rumpus
''The Rumpus'' is an online literary magazine launched on January 20, 2009. The site features interviews, book reviews, essays, comics, and critiques of creative culture as well as original fiction and poetry. The site runs two subscription-base ...
'' praised the
irony of the ending and wrote, "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."
References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Broom Of The System, The
1987 American novels
Novels by David Foster Wallace
Postmodern novels
Black comedy books
American philosophical novels
Viking Press books
Novels set in Cleveland
Metafictional novels
1987 debut novels
Fiction set in 1990