Book The First

The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace

My first book completed in this new year (though begun in 2007) was by David Foster Wallace, who is still one of my favorite non-fiction authors. Unfortunately, this book was his first novel, The Broom of the System. I'd love to be able to explain the title, but I can't; I have no idea what it refers to. Ditto for most of the book's themes, characters, motifs, and its plot. It was beautifully written at times; he has a real flair for dialogue as well as the same descriptive zing that makes me enjoy his essays, but since it was "Picaresque," according to the blurbs on the cover, it jumped all over the place, often from page to page. Which wouldn't have bothered me too much, except most of the story lines don't end. The main character breaks up with her psychotic boyfriend after he loses it and handcuffs them together in the middle of the desert -- but then she effectively vanishes, as the last three sequences refer to the ex-boyfriend with his new lover, presumably the now-ex-wife of the guy who rescued the main character, Lenore, from her boyfriend's handcuff madness. Oh, and also to Lenore's former pet, the hilarious cockatiel formerly named Vlad the Impaler and then rechristened Ugolino the Significant once he got a spot on a televangelist show. But we don't actually learn what becomes of Lenore, which means that the whole novel has no point: her great-grandmother dies, again for no discernible reason, and though she breaks up with Rick, we don't know if it is because of his psychosis or because of his freakishly small genitalia -- and the possibility of the latter casts doubt on the positive uplift of the former reason. She may be off fooling around with Wang-Dang Lang, a remarkably distasteful character, who is not redeemed in the reader's eyes by his more impressive endowment. If Lenore ended up with him, it is because she still, even after all of this, cannot make her own choices but goes where she is told and does what she is told, just like a character in a book. And if that is the point, that all of these people are just characters in a book, then they just weren't amusing enough to make it worth my while.

So I'll be sticking to Wallace's essays from now on. Though it's a shame, because judging by the incredibly convoluted and wacked out plot lines that this book follows (until they peter out in a puff of dust, that is) and the ones described in the stories-within-the-story, he has a great flair for absurdist story telling. I sort of wish he'd come down a literary step or two and just write something wacky. It would be fun to read.