The Broom Of The System
by David Foster Wallace
[Please note that this review does include spoilers.]
Look at this painting.
It is “The Slave Market With Disappearing Bust Of Voltaire” by Salvador Dali. Your eyes will most likely land on the bust of Voltaire that sits almost squarely in the middle of the painting and exists due to the negative space that is created prominently by the Pilgrim-looking women, and the open sky that the hole in the wall provides. This painting fits the definition of surrealism to a T: everything seems oddly out of place–extremely detailed elements (the head piece on the woman in the foreground, the interior walls) intermixed with blurry or uneven elements (the slaves up against the wall, the left hand on the table of the woman in the foreground), and, most importantly, the psychological nature of the overall piece. Why is there a bust of Voltaire prominently involved in a painting about a slave market? Was this born out of commentary or an opinion by Dali on Voltaire’s writing and/or philosophy? Why is the base of Voltaire’s statue cracked while the other base is unblemished? Is the woman in the foreground a slave, or a passive observant? What is the overall story of the piece–is it simply a commentary railing against slavery, or is it a more developed commentary railing against (at the time) modern European policy?
The long answer is multi-splintered; the short answer is that I suppose everything you see about it is correct and that is that. If you think it is about slaves or the undermining of Voltaire’s work or how the cracked ceiling allows the world’s evils to subsist you are technically not incorrect. The main thing though is the context, the storyteller. If anyone other than Dali had painted this piece, would we care as much? Would we spend less or more extra time looking for more meaning to it? Maybe, maybe not. The point is that most of us would give a Dali painting an extra viewing simply because it is Dali who is the creator. If anything, he earned our trust with “The Persistence Of Memory.”
But this is an artistic metaphor to explain why we pick and choose which (and whose) context to follow. And I bring this up because, to me, this idea is central to David Foster Wallace’s debut novel.
The Broom Of The System may be the most coldly logical, surreal, and meta-referential book I have ever read. I am sure too that to most people this book simply falls into the “Post-modern” category but I am emphatically positive that that label will do this book no justice. It is not simply post-modern (though I have a problem with that label anyway), but rather almost like something that transcends a dream. Not unlike a painting about slave trades and Voltaire.
Reading this book is a little like a combination of the feelings you would have in the following situations: seeing a Salvador Dali painting for the first time, hearing your friend tell someone a story and you know that they are telling it completely wrong (possibly even blatantly making up parts of it) but you do not want to interject, and having a dream wherein everyone around you is either much faster or more intelligent than you are. Like entering a room with people you have known for years but there is an overwhelming cloud of distrust that looms of everyone. I will expand on this shortly but first a summary of the novel.
The Broom Of The System takes place in an alternate Ohio–one in which much of the state was purposely destroyed to make room for a man-made Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a suburb that was designed specifically in mind to mirror the likeness of Jayne Mansfield’s profile (thus, the cover of the book), and one in which the city’s phone infrastructure is so wonky that calls are routinely routed incorrectly. (The phone system is so badly mangled that Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, the main female character of the novel and an operator at her boyfriend’s publishing firm, routinely has to tell people who are calling for businesses like Bambi’s Den Of Discipline that, sorry, please hold while I xfer you.) Lenore works at the publishing firm Frequent & Vigorous and her boyfriend is Rick Vigorous, a man so consumed with Lenore that his jealousy is practically off the charts.
The book starts in 1981 with a teenaged Lenore spending a weekend in her sister’s dorm at Amherst. Lenore, her sister, and her sister’s friends are all deciding whether to go to a mixer or not when they are interrupted by two frat guys, Andy “Wang Dang” Lang and Biff Diggerence, who are looking for all of the girls to sign their butts as part of some frat-related bet or scavenger hunt-type thing. “Wang Dang” and Biff eventually refuse to leave until they have received their signatures and the situation reaches a boiling point in which Lenore becomes so frustrated that she forces her way in between them and leaves.
From here, the rest of the novel pretty much takes place in 1990 with a couple of exceptions; most notably, the brilliant flashback to 1972 in which the transcripts are provided for the meeting that took place between all parties to approve the construction of the Great Ohio Desert. (“…Gentlemen may I present Mr. Ed Roy Yancey, of Industrial Desert Design, Dallas. They did Kuwait.”) The overall scope of the novel can be summarized as such: Lenore’s great-grandmother Lenore and twenty five of her friends escaped from their nursing home, which may or may not have something to do with her father’s baby food company. Lenore’s father Stonecipher owns Stonecipheco and they have developed such things as food that will help babies read and speak way earlier than normal. Stonecipheco is also feeling a lot of heat from rival Gerber as Gerber inked a sponsorship deal with a world famous Russian gymnast. While searching for her great-grandmother, Lenore finds that her bird, Vlad The Impaler, can suddenly speak (again, possibly because of Stonecipheco because of the formulas they are working on) and becomes a celebrity on a nationally televised evangelist show. Additionally, Lenore and Rick Vigorous take a trip to Amherst to visit Lenore’s brother LaVache as he may know the whereabouts of Lenore, the great-grandmother. While at Amherst (Rick’s alma mater), Rick runs into “Wang Dang” Lang and discovers that not only does Lang know who Lenore (his girlfriend, not the great-grandmother) is from their meeting when Lenore was a teenager, but that Lang is married to Mindy Metalman–a woman who was friends with Lenore’s sister and whom Lenore met when she stayed there in 1981 but, more importantly, grew up next door to Rick and who, when she was thirteen and Rick was much older, was the first object of lust for Rick. (Rick would watch her outside from inside his house and still has a crystal-clear memory of her outside one day in the summer wearing a white bikini playing near a sprinkler.)
And now, to bring everything back around, this is why I wrote at the beginning that this novel may be the most coldly logical and surreal thing I have read. Because in between all of what is contained in the last paragraph (which does not really scratch the surface, by the way), you have interspersed throughout the novel the stories that Rick tells Lenore–the submitted stories he receives as part of his job as editor, Lenore likes to hear them while cuddling after sex–as well as excerpts from a story about Monroe Fieldbinder (presumably written by Rick himself), and an ending in which a character is looking to mimic the ending from the book McTeague. You would be excused if you have not heard of McTeague before–it was published in 1899 and its place in American literary canon is mostly at cult level–but the end of the novel involves a murder in Death Valley in which the moment before a character dies he handcuffs himself to his murderer so that the murderer will then die in the desert too.
The stories that Rick tells Lenore throughout The Broom Of The System all wreak of literal references too. For instance, both Rick and Lenore see a Dr. Jay separately for therapy. Except that Rick, because of his jealousy and desire to have Lenore in every respect, is able to obtain all pertinent information from Dr. Jay about Lenore and her sessions with him. And Dr. Jay, in his sessions with both of them, always refers to their problems as being hygiene-based. That said, one of the stories Rick recalls to Lenore one night is about a therapist who hates big cities because a crime was committed against him in a big city and this in turn causes him to convince every one of his patients (regardless of what the issues are) to move out of the city and into a rural home in the woods. Except that the doctor is doing all of this because he owns all of the rural homes in the woods that he is sending his patients to. He is blatantly swindling them. The story ends with a really cruel twist of fate but then again almost all of Rick’s stories do.
Which begs the question: is the narrator of Broom Of The System trustworthy? What is real and what is made up for the sole purpose of making a contextual point within a surreal example?
I also mentioned earlier that this book is coldly logical. I do not know if that is the best description to use here but it will have to suffice. Because, how else can you describe a book that uses such an array of oddities–a great-grandmother who can only live in an environment that is exactly 98.7 degrees, a man-made desert being constructed for the sake of giving people a reminder that they need to wander alone from time to time, a man consumed by jealousy towards his beautiful girlfriend somehow stumbles upon a man who knew her when she was almost the same age as said jealous man’s first lustful encounter, a brother who has a synthetic leg that stores marijuana–yet it somehow all ties together rationally, even if the reader (along with the last woman being spoken to at the end) are left wondering what is the truth and what is a lie.
Wallace may be toying with us all throughout the novel but in the end it does not really matter. It is all about the context; what you want to see, what you want to hear, and what you want to say to others. Again, it is cold logic wrapped up in a surreal suit and all that is missing is the bust of Voltaire.
