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The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace
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The Broom of the System

by David Foster Wallace

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906134,605 (3.57)27
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very humorous and an interesting variety of forms (pure dialogue, pure narration with indirect discourse, transcripts, scraps of stories being written by a character) but it doesn't have the sort of depth or social insight of DFW's later works. Also, the whole metafiction thing didn't really come together for me, including the cheesy last sentence. ( )
  phette23 | Oct 19, 2009 |
I want to try Infinite Jest because I don't know its of my generation in a sense, but I felt this one was a bit winded and umm smart. he talk too smart. ( )
  stipe168 | Oct 28, 2008 |
Wallace's first novel is, like others in his class (Moody, et al), acutely aware of the foibles of humankind. It's the kind of writing that brings DIckens to mind. That sort of compassion and extraliterary social agenda. ( )
  EdwardC | Apr 2, 2008 |
The book seemed to be heading for a giant metaphorical ending. I was expecting to gain insight into contemporary America. However, in the end, the narrative was a metaphor only for itself, without implications for anything larger. ( )
1 vote petrojoh | Jan 3, 2008 |
My introduction to David Foster Wallace. I’d read about him a fair amount, and heard that he was great, so when I came across The Broom of the System in a used book shop on a trip, I snatched it up. An excellent novel. The characters are delightfully bizarre (though sometimes exasperatingly inconsistent). The ending, I both hated and loved. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. ( )
1 vote dmtmusic | Oct 23, 2007 |
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Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They're long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy's bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobe's opening a little, so there's some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenore's got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy's wet washed shampooed head is coming undone and a wisp of dark shiny hair has slithered out of a crack in the folds and curled down all demurely past the side of Mindy's face and under her chin. It smells like Flex shampoo in the room, and also pot, since Clarice and Sue Shaw are smoking a big thick j-bird Lenore got from Ed Creamer back at the Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.
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The Broom of the System

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Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0142002429, Paperback)

Published when Wallace was just twenty-four years old, The Broom of the System stunned critics and marked the emergence of an extraordinary new talent. At the center of this outlandishly funny, fiercely intelligent novel is the bewitching heroine, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman. The year is 1990 and the place is a slightly altered Cleveland, Ohio. Lenore’s great-grandmother has disappeared with twenty-five other inmates of the Shaker Heights Nursing Home. Her beau, and boss, Rick Vigorous, is insanely jealous, and her cockatiel, Vlad the Impaler, has suddenly started spouting a mixture of psycho- babble, Auden, and the King James Bible. Ingenious and entertaining, this debut from one of the most innovative writers of his generation brilliantly explores the paradoxes of language, storytelling, and reality.

(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:22 -0400)

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