Why I Stopped Reading David Foster Wallace's
A Broom to the System
And yes, she does pop and fly around the room like a deflating balloon.
When I first starting reading this book, it was under the misconception that this was David Foster Wallace's last book and was published posthumously in 2008. When I realized it was actually his first book published in 1987, I thought perhaps I should reevaluate my criticisms, but then I realized Gilligan's Island jokes and rubber girlfriends were probably hackneyed then, too. Wait, let me review the Tom Hanks film "Bachelor Party." Yeah... seems pretty outdated there, too.
As a whole, this work feels woefully outdated, like one an early 60s "collision course with wackiness" farce ala Myra Breckinridge (the film, not the book) or Casino Royale (the one with Woody Allen, not Daniel Craig)... and if you've ever tried to go back and watch those films, it really makes you wonder about the potency or the drugs being passed around. There's a city shaped like Jayne Mansfield, psychiatrist joke upon psychiatrist joke, and it's dialogue seems frankly ridiculous coming out real people in what is supposed to be 1990 and not a dirty joke book from the hazy pre-Kennedy days.
In fact, the book it most reminds me of is Terry Southern's Candy, the only other book I can remember ever being legitimately angry with. It shares the same griminess, ugliness, and feeling that the author sees every man in the world as a date-rapist and finds that both acceptable and hilarious. Granted, that book at least had the common decency to be short, while this book is nearly 500 pages with no ending.
Also, Candy Christian at least has a character. It's the character of a glove that feels its providing hands a valuable service that it gains no true enjoyment of, but it's still a personality of sorts. The protagonist of A Broom to the System, Lenore Beadsman, is more of a vague amorphous thing... that gets a line of dialogue when David Foster Wallace remembers we're meant to be following her story. She's introduced as a fifteen year old girl visiting her older sister's college dorm, there she's quickly shone in contrast to the older, more experienced girls to be somewhat confused and naive. A group of drunken frat boys (the first of our many date-rapist) bursts into the dorm and proceeds to tease, harass, and ultimately threaten the girls into signing their buttocks as a fraternity initiation stunt. All of the girls are bullied for several ugly pages until they finally capitulate except Lenore who, despite being the youngest and least experienced, repeatedly insisting on leaving until the boys give up and let her. It's a scene that really establishes
who Lenore is as a character.
It belongs in a different book.
Adult Lenore has no real personality, being completely dominated by every other character in the book, mostly men who in some way possess her, but also her own great-grandmother (who, in what I'm sure is meant to be a hilarious detail is literally cold-blooded), virtually every line of dialogue assigned to her is asking clarification. She even sleeps with the frat boy date-rapist at one point, and he has in no way reformed himself over the years, (far from it, having just thrown out his wife (one of the other girls he assaults in the opening chapter) because she has "run out of holes"). Now, this might be intentional. There's a recurring thread where she wonders about fictional characters and their ability to think and feel anything more than what's assigned to them, so perhaps I could be accused of missing the point... but on the other hand, I'm supposed to being willing to follow this character for 500 pages and the fact that she's utterly bland and uninteresting isn't made any easier by it being "on purpose."
The real protagonist is Lenore's boss/lover the hilarious named Rick Vigorous. Rick is like Humbert Humbert, but sleazier and less likable. Completely serious, Humbert is at least a master of the language and has the added benefit of the author being aware he's writing a monster. Every line coming out of Rick makes you
want to smack him, which is a problem since he also acts as the narrator. A frustrated publisher, Rick spends his time criticizing bad college fiction pieces, which, ironically, is exactly what it feels like he lives in. Riddled with inadequacies despite having a well-paying pet job and a much younger girlfriend that inexplicably adores him, Rick goes on long tangents about his ex-wife and his gay son (and, yes, they are very homophobic and, yes, we are meant to agree with him) and the thirteen year old neighbor he lusted after, that increasingly push Lenore out of her own book. As I got further into the book, I found myself skipping more and more of these segments, getting back to the plot-relevant sections about Lenore and her brother making bad jokes about the Bob Newhart Show.
Then I realized what I was doing and stopped reading all together.
So, I read one to three novels a week and I think I get in a fairly diverse reading list (I went from Garcia Marquez to the Quaran to Amy Tan one week), and I think I "get" at least most of what I'm reading. I understan
d that this is a deeply meta-textual work... but that doesn't make it any good. In fact, since meta is incredibly hard to do without seeming cheesy or contrived (and I grew up watching Tiny Toons, I learned bad meta-referencing before I learned the three act structure), it's almost a strike against it from the outset. The characters are alternately non-existent or completely unlikable, the dialogue universally makes me question if David Foster Wallace ever saw much less spoke to another human being, and the whole mess really just made me angry, like I was legitimately fighting the book.
I've read Nabokov, I've read Thomas Pynchon, this is neither of them. This is just a mess.
I do like that there was a character named Mindy Metalman.
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