A Review: The Broom of the System

Title of Work: The Broom of the System
Author: David Foster Wallace
Format:
Published: 1987
Started:
Finished: 2024-07-22\

Posted: Goodreads
Rating: 3/5

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High 3.

Long, often boring but sometimes very not-boring in ways that just about made up for the prevailing boringness. Little moments of witty humor, dumb sex puns and double entendre, and other more clever linguistic tricks. I like that kind of stuff.

Would really only recommend to fans of DFW or of this particular flavor of dense, experimental metafiction. You know, the type which wants-to-come-across-as-not-taking-itself-too-seriously-while-obviously-taking-itself-very-seriously postmodern lit which DFW was aspiring toward in this first novel, submitted as his undergraduate thesis when he was 24 years old…

The philosophical “subtext” (it’s typically pretty overt) within was not terribly interesting or thought provoking for me but I of course have to qualify this with the confession that I haven’t read a lick of Wittgenstein or Derrida. I do find the themes themselves interesting. Questions of identity, Self vs. Other, and linguistic relativity at best to linguistic determinism at worst. I just didn’t much care for how the narrative served to explore these questions.

As far as I understand, the novel served to demonstrate to DFW’s peers, his faculty, and the greater literary world that he was thinking very seriously about where a bright 24 year old approaching that insidious threshold between childhood and adulthood might find purpose after riding the developmental bus of individuation past nearly all meaningful stops, solidly into the land of solipsism. Once that cake is baked it can’t be unbaked.

More directly, he wrestles with: if our language determines our thoughts and our thoughts determine our actions, are we anything more than flat characters in a preconceived narrative? Is there anything holding it all up beyond the scaffolds of syntax?