Reviews for Broom of the System

The average rating for Broom of the System based on 2 reviews is 5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-01-18 00:00:00 Michael Searfass "I think I had kind of a mid-life crisis at twenty, which probably doesn't augur real well for my longevity. So what I did, I went back home for a term, planning to play solitaire and stare out the window, whatever you do in a crisis. And all of a sudden I found myself writing fiction." It was 1986 and he was 24 years old when it was published. He began writing it fresh out of a fairly tumultuous mental health crisis at age 22 (or as he put it "a young 22") while simultaneously writing a highly technical philosophy thesis at Amherst in order to graduate with a double major in philosophy and English. Regardless of any of its debut-novel flaws, these extra-textual facts should help to compel most who've read this unique, relentlessly funny and youthfully ambitious book. To echo some basic points made quite often'no, it doesn't pack the same punch as Infinite Jest, of course'pretty much nothing does. Yes, it has some debut-novel flaws, but incredibly minor ones and ones that I can't really name specifically'there's just a vague sense of a sort of green incompleteness that's absent from his other work, the exact source of which is hard to pin down. It may just have something to do with the competition; Infinite Jest comparisons haven't been escapable since '96 and it simply dwarfs most books and not merely on a scale measured by pages or centimeters. The book's harshest critic that I've encountered has been the author himself. In what is still probably the single most impressive interview with a writer that I've ever read (and re-read too many times to count) the following rapidfire, seemingly annoyed, self-slagging paragraph spills out of a yet still youthful (c. 1993) Wallace six years after Broom was published: DFW: Think of The Broom of the System as the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who's just had this mid-life crisis that's moved him from coldly cerebral analytic math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction and Austin-Wittgenstein-Derridean literary theory, 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. This WASP's written a lot of straight humor, and loves gags, so he decides to write a coded autobio that's also a funny little post-structural gag: so you get Lenore, a character in a story who's terribly afraid that she's really nothing more than a character in a story. And, sufficiently hidden under the sex-change and the gags and theoretical allusions, I got to write my sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman. The biggest cackle I got when the book came out was the way all the reviews, whether they stomped up and down on the overall book or not, all praised the fact that at least here was a first novel that wasn't yet another sensitive little bildungsroman. I disagree with the extent of his public, self-depricating take, but have a real soft spot for those helplessly under the spell of rigorous self-dissatisfaction, so we break even with a smile in my heart for ol' painfully self-conscious Dave. Plus, he just remains hilarious and entertaining even in these fits of seemingly unjustified or overly dismissive criticism. As is natural with any writer who developes a unique voice and point of view, one can easily see this as the precursor to his later works. The seedlings are all there in plain view: thematically, stylistically, structurally. One might be tempted to call this something like Infinite Jest Jr. if it didn't sound like something only a totally unthoughtful or phony or lazy critic might say, but the connections can rather effortlessly be made, that's the point. I actually think that this book is more consistently entertaining than his others. There are boring sections of Infinite Jest and The Pale King and anyone who says otherwise is a goddamn liar. But this book, to me, more or less has zero dips. It's also the most purely comedic novel of the three. There are some touching and intense scenes, but mostly I sense so much symbolic meaning behind much of the plot, action, dialogue and omniscient description that it's also his least harrowingly humane novel. This is all in comparison to two "pants-crapping-awesome" (to borrow a Kowalskian phrase) novels, so take each assessment with a grain of salt. And it just might be possible that perhaps one needs an interest in philosophy, psychology, linguistics or just a good ol' fashion liberal arts education for much of what I found funny to be seen as such, but nonetheless, this was my experience with it. So much of the "intellectual" content I took to be scathing satire of the failures of academia and largely influenced by the fact that he was still in college while writing this. All of the therapy scenes for instance, while simultaneously making some legitimately interesting points about human psychology, were just one long chuckle for me. Or the sort of mock-Lacanian, Self/Other stuff that Norman Bombardini pontificates about while stuffing his face and trying to become large enough to fill the universe. The introductory scene with this character had me laughing hysterically (hand over my mouth, high volume, zero control) on my bus ride to work one morning. I remember it fondly. Part of what's so funny about it is the same thing so many haterz find repulsive about books in the postmodern canon: a supposed lack of "realism." Why does everybody speak so unrealistically? would be the best way to sum up the charges. Wallace has a rather trademarked style of coupling baroque or academic language with slang and blunt utterances. This more often than not has a comedic effect, however, since it's used throughout a book so sub-textually concerned with language itself, it also makes for a beautiful pairing'styles and themes snugly juxtaposed, everything in its right place. To quote something further from the previously cited interview about "realism" that I think nails how I feel: DFW: Well, it depends whether you're talking little-r realistic or big-R. If you mean is my stuff in the Howells/Wharton/Updike school of U.S. Realism, clearly not. But to me the whole binary of realistic vs. unrealistic fiction is a canonical distinction set up by people with a vested interest in the big-R tradition. A way to marginalize stuff that isn't soothing and conservative. Even the goofiest avant-garde agenda, if it's got integrity, is never, "Let's eschew all realism," but more, "Let's try to countenance and render real aspects of real experiences that have previously been excluded from art." The result often seems "unrealistic" to the big-R devotees because it's not a recognizable part of the "ordinary experience" they're used to countenancing. Wallace goes on later in that interview to make some brilliant points about the need for fiction writing to have well-crafted elements that remind the reader that they're engaged in a form of communication with the author, which I think speaks to some complaints about the lack of variation or "realism" in the cast's ways of speaking in work such as Wallace's and other prime suspects like DeLillo et al. These points are also elegantly and cogently tied to the deeper ongoing agenda of his writing: to alleviate despair, loneliness, alienation, etc. Some of my favorite parts of this book are when Rick Vigorous, editor at a quarterly lit-mag, recounts some of the short fiction submissions to his undeserved girlfriend (and the book's ostensible center of narrative gravity) Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The tales are told often as they lay in bed together at the end of the day. The submissions are commented on as not being very good or being too weird or too sad, but again I disagree with Wallace's/"Rick's" judgments here. It occurred to me that this may've been a way for Wallace to covertly sneak in some short story ideas he'd had but previously self-critically knocked down as being subpar, without having to put them out there as legitimate efforts. But it's also possible that he was just making fun of a kind of story writing that he saw fellow writers turning out that annoyed or otherwise displeased him. Or some combination of the two motives. Regardless, I really enjoyed all of them. There are also layers of Wittgensteinian philosophy embedded in the thematic substrata of this book. I'll recommend this (which I've read and enjoyed) and this (which I haven't read yet but that I know has relevant essays in it) to those interested in seeing all the neat ways in which ideas about metaphysics and the nature of language and the written word are examined and promulgated in between the lines and occasionally are the lines. Outside of these loftier sub-agendas there's really just a delicious bulk of hilarious, absurdist, and lovingly-detailed storytelling and world-building at the helm of this relatively stunning freshmen effort. I'd like to see a better novel written by a 22 year-old, but it seems pretty unlikely. Bring it on, whippersnappers. ____________________________________________ As I mention in my original non-review review-like thing from a few years ago, now seated a paragraph below and spared from deletion out of sentimentality: This was the last fictional work of Wallace's that I made my way to along my ravenous "Why helloooooo there, Mr. Wallace" readerly journey. It also just so happens to be the first book he ever published. Firsts and lasts and births and deaths. Get it? It felt meaningful and weighty at the time when I struggled to turn feelings into preserved keystrokes while feeling particularly sad about his all-too-final bow: I find it fitting in a initially intuitive and deeply, personally meaningful way that the one DFW book I've yet to read is his novelistic beginning and is going to be read last by myself; considering the horrible events of September 12th, 2008; considering the nature of things beginning and ending; considering the near-constant ruminations on such things being heightened in new and more profound ways all of the time; considering that the successive passage of time implicitly involves more and more bearing witness to myriad beginnings and endings; considering my love for what I've come to understand The Author to "be" via his writing and talking; considering the ways in which we long to reverse the march of history, the fundamental law of entropy, the physical constant known to science as the rate of decay; considering that this dead man was once a little bit younger than myself when he officially kicked off what would be a body of work that will long surpass his own working body; considering, just considering...

Review # 2 was written on 2020-03-23 00:00:00 Robert Bodowski SECOND READING UPDATE Decided to bump this up to 5 stars for the simple reason that I've now read it twice and generally any book I read more than once is one I call an outstanding read. More than that basic reasoning though, I really enjoy the playful language, the many puns, the clever juvenalia of the symbolism, and the gently mocking metafictional stories-within-stories. Also I've got a vested personal interest in anything pineal gland (Hail Eris!) which gland features significantly here as a jokey MacGuffin. Beyond the fun, of which there is plenty, Wallace raises significant questions regarding language and whether and how it is always/only a proxy for experience. The many crises of Self vs Other, sometimes funny and sometimes distressing, are at the root of essentially all our real-world human interactions. The advanced-level tricks Wallace pulls off with everything are really impressive: sentences are cut off but we can still extrapolate their meaning, speakers aren't identified but we can still determine who is who enough to follow the conversations, holes are left in the plot but we can fill them in for ourselves... The form of the novel both models and becomes its function, which is really cool and a lot harder to pull off than would seem at first glance. So, 5 stars - highly recommended to linguistic geeks and word nerds. * It feels weird calling DFW playful, but it's very hard not to get caught up in his linguistic acrobatics here. This is really good writing. It's a strange but effervescent balance of casual formality and rule-following goofiness. It also feels quite a lot sharper than Infinite Jest and The Pale King - like Wallace was writing with the intent to entertain first, edify second. Early enough in his craft that he was still eager to please, perhaps? Hadn't fully come into that pretentious image of the intellectually burdened artiste? Maybe. This is an iffy time to be exploring DFW's wider works, here in the context of the #MeToo movement as allegations against him rise to the surface. Wallace is dead, so attacking or defending him specifically feels half-hearted; there are bigger (living) fish to fry. But Pandora's box is open and there's no escaping the questions that now darken his legacy: Can I still enjoy his writing? Large swathes of it speak to me personally. What does that mean? Should I worry about my own character? Because honestly I do worry about his, now. What does it say about me if I still read him, but don't like him, but do relate to him? Is it all as simple as "take what you want and leave the rest?" I believe great art prompts deep reflection, and I have found that in reading this man's books. 4 stars, and certainly verging towards 5, but surpassed by his later work.