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And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of domestics gathered; but that if we wanted the broom to sweep with, see for example the broken glass, sweep, sweep, the bristles were the thing’s essence. No?

–p. 150

I only took one class in English Literature as a college student. The course was called “Fairy Tales and Magic Fictions” and we studied a number of not-very-canonical pieces, including the first Harry Potter novel, and Alice in Wonderland. For my only A paper for the course, I hypothesized that wonderland, instead of being fantastical, was actually a perfectly rational alternative world, one based on different axioms of logic than our own. I borrowed generously, and not at all rigorously (very much in the style of an undergraduate), from Lewis Carroll’s biographical history as a logician, and controversial suggestions of pedophilia. The thesis was that wonderland imitated Lewis Carroll’s own desire for a self-consistent world different from our own, one that was accepting of his own sexual deviance.

In The Broom of the System, the motivation behind the alternate universe of David Foster Wallace isn’t some sort of entrenched deviance, but rather an exposed kind of normality. To DFW, the normal world is broken, and if only we could be made to see it that way, we could begin to do something about it. We are the broom that breaks windows, not the broom the sweeps broken glass.

[Aside, consider this quote:

Look, man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is?

]

The meta-fictional elements, the novel within the novel, the roughly Wittgensteinian tricks, were sufficient to confuse and alienate me early in the novel. Lenore’s brother, who exchanged exam answers for drugs at Amherst (which he hid in his artificial leg), was the only character not rendered unrecognizable by the edits to the reality of the novel’s world.

By the end of the book, as more and more elements of brokeness are exposed, the heroine, Lenore Beadsman, sits unresponsive in the lobby of an office building as all the major and minor characters, for a variety of farcical reasons, decend upon and surround her. Then, an enigmatic change of scene follows that both denies and enrages. The book turns into a mystery with no mystery, a farce with nothing to satirize, a tradegy where all the deaths are left to the page after the final printed word. We’re left with a broom handle and a bunch of broken glass.