The Broom of the System, by David Foster Wallace: ***1/4

Wallace's first book reads like a lot like Infinite Jest lite, with similarly strange but not quite as outrageous characters and scenarios. It also changes modes of narrative presentation without seeming hokey or forced. Most enjoyably for me, the relationship between the lead character, Lenore Beadsman, and her publisher boyfriend allows Wallace to inject strangely hilarious short stories into the narrative under the guise of the boyfriend picking the strangest and most entertaining stories to share with Lenore. (I love stories within stories. One of the reasons I love Gene Wolfe so much is that there are these great little stories throughout his books that relate in some way to the main story, but are really just separate little stories. I love that. Wallace does that extremely well in this book.)

Ultimately, it's a great read, with lots of humor, zaniness, hard-to-believe lines of thought, and poignant social commentary, though it is hard not to think of this book in relation to Wallace's IJ because of their similarity in style and approach. And IJ is better - everything reaches more absurd peaks. But the prose here is still great and extremely funny. It would stand completely on its own if Wallace didn't write something similar and better only a few years later. In retrospect, this book feels like a trial run and IJ the finals. These two books in combination also show how brilliant Wallace is - by itself, this book would be an impressive achievement for any novelist, reaching levels of bizarrity and absurdity only surpassed by his own novel a few years later. Good stuff.

Quotes:
pg. 59-60: "But what of Lenore, of Lenore's hair? Here is hair that is clearly within and of itself every color - blond and red and jet-black-blue and honeynut - but which effects and outward optical compromise with possibility that consists of appearing simply dull brown, save for brief teasing glimpses out of the corner of one's eye. The hair hangs in bangs, and the sides curve down past Lenore's cheeks and nearly meet in points below her chin, Like the brittle jaws of an insect of prey. Oh, the hair can bite. I've been bitten by the hair.
"And her eyes. I cannot say what color Lenore Beadsman's eyes are; I cannot look at them; they are the sun to me.
"They are blue. Her lips are full and red and tend to wetness and do not ask but rather demand, in a pout of liquid silk, to be kissed. I kiss them often, I admit it, it is what I do, I am a kisser, and a kiss with Lenore is, if I may indulge a bit for a moment here, not so much a kiss as it is a dislocation, a removal and rude transportation of essence from self to lip, so that it is not so much two human bodies coming together and doing the usual things with their lips as it is two sets of lips spawned together and joined in kind from the beginning of post-Scarsdale time, achieving full ontological status only in subsequent union and trailing behind and below them, as they join and become whole, two now utterly superfluous fleshly bodies, dropping outward and downward from the kiss like the tired stems of overblossomed flora, trailing shoes on the ground, husks. A kiss with Lenore is a scenario in which I skate with buttered soles over the moist rink of lower lip, sheltered from weathers by the wet warm overhang of upper, finally to crawl between lip and gum and pull the lip to me like a child's blanket and stare over it with beady, unfriendly eyes out at the world external to Lenore, of which I no longer wish to be part."
(winter 2002)

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