Wallaceblogging: All too brief on THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

First, and this is in no way meant as a slight, but I expected this book to be much more arcane given my experience with INFINITE JEST. But compared to that undertaking, BROOM is relatively straightforward. Sort of. In that it has one true main character, absolutely.

We meet Lenore Beadsman as a slightly withdrawn high school student visiting her older sister at college; when we get back to her, she's 2 years out of college, working as a switchboard operator in Cleveland without much in the way of ambition. Lenore comes from a prominent local family but doesn't want to have anything to do with her parents, refusing to accept their help to get a better job or apartment. Most of her days are spent putting up with the spiteful admin with whom she shares her office, hanging out at a "Gilligan's Isle"-themed bar(1) and seeing her obsessive, twitchy boyfriend Rick Vigorous, who is pressing her to commit to him more fully. Lenore's world is jolted by a phone call from the nursing home where her beloved great-grandmother, also Lenore, lives; the elder Lenore has apparently escaped, along with a busful of her neighbors. Lenore's father is a corporate big-shoulder, her mother in a mental institution in Wisconsin, so it's up to her... or so she decides.

In capturing that post-college unwillingness to stir BROOM is startlingly pointed, but in its details, sometimes a little sketchy. It isn't clear how Lenore became the only point of contact for her great-grandmother, except that they had always been close; nor do we get the backstory of how Lenore and Rick got together (2) as theirs is, shall we say, an unconventional workplace romance. THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM kind of rushes over these details to get to... more interesting details and it's only a mild spoiler to point out that we never really get an answer to the answer of where Great-Grandma Lenore has gone -- but I wouldn't even call that the central conflict. The central conflict, as I see it, is that Lenore (spoiler?) comes to realize that the life she has constructed, the limits that she has set for it, are not really working out for her.

DFW wrote BROOM as an philosophy major at Amherst, and a common theory or ideation of the book holds that it expresses his feelings toward the application of philosophy (or lack thereof) in life, or that it was his way with grappling with all those ideas. I have been trying to read up on these philosophical underpinnings and am in a maelstrom of information over it, but Section III of this Slate article was a great way to start. But briefly, Lenore The Original took classes from Wittgenstein and Lenore comes to believe that her great-grandmother's disappearance may even be in some way philosophically based. And we haven't even gotten into the talking bird yet! Well, too much about the talking bird already.

All of which is to say that when I put this book down it sort of made a whoosh! because the ending was slightly unsatisfying, and I wished that it was longer -- or rounder, because the end is much more of a play-type ending than one that makes sense of the strands the author has been playing with the whole time, only to just ball them up and throw them back at the reader. Oh, that's me! Like a lot of DFW, it can make a person extremely self-conscious about how her act of reading is shaping the book that she's reading.

Particularly when there's a publishing meta-game running at the same time. Lenore's boyfriend is the cofounder (and, really, most important employee) of a publishing firm titled Frequent and Vigorous(3), mostly publishing a literary magazine for which Rick Vigorous collects the submissions and sometimes reads them to Lenore. Or maybe... he's reading his own work to Lenore and asking for her comments on it, in the guise of "a submission to the magazine." The story samples range over the classic undergraduate clichés -- a lot of twist endings -- cruel twists of fate -- nothing you wouldn't recognize from a creative-writing class, should you have been in one. I am torn between "wow, those clichés were around in the '80s too!" and "ughhhhhhh," but you never get the feeling that DFW is grinding an axe against those classes -- just that, well, these are the Stories Of The Fiction Education Establishment, and so they are written in. (Don't forget, DFW and Dan Brown were in some of the same writing classes. This trivium will never not astound me.)

The blurring of that line between Rick's work and his editing work is, I assume, intentional, because as I heard from a friend it can be incredibly painful when someone you love doesn't love what you write. Lenore doesn't seem particularly blasé about his writing, only in that she is just as blasé about everything except her grandmother disappearing. Maybe it's her blasé-ness that caused me to, I think, latch onto her less than I initially expected. I was not blasé about this book, I think you should definitely give it a shot -- but if you haven't read any other David Foster Wallace before, prepare to meet the firehose. Give it three chapters.

(1) CAN SOMEONE MAKE THIS HAPPEN FOR REAL. I never even watched the show but I strongly feel this concept would take off in 20-something hispter New York.
(2) Or at least I don't remember the backstory, and I'm sure someone will correct me if it was mentioned. But that's damning in its own way, isn't it?
(3) Keep in mind this was a college-aged male writing this. Because I am writing this after half a glass of Bordeaux(4) I actually think it's funny, but I am not saying that is a stable judgment.
(4) But I wrote 80 percent of this entry this morning, before Wine Happened At Work, just so we're clear.