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Returnable | Yes |
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Return Window | 30 days from delivery |
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The Broom of the System: A Novel (Penguin Ink) (The Penguin Ink Series) Paperback – Deckle Edge, June 29, 2010
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Published when David Foster 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.
- Print length480 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPenguin Books
- Publication dateJune 29, 2010
- Dimensions5.1 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
- ISBN-100143116932
- ISBN-13978-0143116936
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"Wonderful... a cathartic experience with lots of laughs and lots of deeper meanings." —The Washington Post Book World
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
1981
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 Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.
What's going on is that Lenore Beadsman, who's fifteen, has just come all the way from home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, right near Cleveland, to visit her big sister, Clarice Beadsman, who's a fresh man at this women's college, called Mount Holyoke; and Lenore's staying with her sleeping bag in this room on the second floor of Rumpus Hall that Clarice shares with her roommates, Mindy Metal man and Sue Shaw. Lenore's also come to sort of check out this college, a little bit. This is because even though she's just fifteen she's supposedly quite intelligent and thus acceleratedand already a junior at Shaker School and thus thinking about college, application-wise, for next year. So she's visiting. Right now it's a Friday night in March.
Sue Shaw, who's not nearly as pretty as Mindy or Clarice, is bringing the joint over here to Mindy and Lenore, and Mindy takes it and lets her toe alone for a second and sucks the bird really hard, so it glows bright and a seed snaps loudly and bits of paper ash go flying and floating, which Clarice and Sue find super funny and start laughing at really hard, whooping and clutching at each other, and Mindy breathes it in really deep and holds it in and passes the bird to Lenore, but Lenore says no thank you.
"No thank you," says Lenore.
"Go ahead, you brought it, why not . . . ," croaks Mindy Metal man, talking the way people talk without breathing, holding on to the smoke.
"I know, but it's track season at school and I'm on the team and I don't smoke during the season, I can't, it kills me," Lenore says.
So Mindy shrugs and finally lets out a big breath of pale used-up smoke and coughs a deep little cough and gets up with the bird and takes it over across the room to Clarice and Sue Shaw, who are by a big wooden stereo speaker listening to this song, again, by Cat Stevens, for like the tenth time tonight. Mindy's robe's more or less open, now, and Lenore can see some pretty amazing stuff, but Mindy just walks across the room. Lenore can at this point divide all the girls she's known neatly into girls who think deep down they're pretty and girls who deep down think they're really not. Girls who think they're pretty don't care much about their bathrobes being undone and are good at makeup and like to walk when people are watching, and they act different when there are boys around; and girls like Lenore, who don't think they're too pretty, tend not to wear makeup, and run track, and wear black Converse sneakers, and keep their bathrobes pretty well fastened at all times. Mindy sure is pretty, though, except for her feet.
The Cat Stevens song is over again, and the needle goes up by itself, and obviously none of these three feel like moving all the way to start it again, so they're just sitting back in their hard wood desk chairs, Mindy in her faded pink terry robe with one shiny smooth leg all bare and sticking out; Clarice in her Desert boots and her dark blue jeans that Lenore calls her shoe-horn jeans, and that white western shirt she'd wore at the state fair the time she'd had her purse stolen, and her blond hair flooding all over the shirt, and her eyes very blue right now; Sue Shaw with her red hair and a green sweater and green tartan skirt and fat white legs with a bright red pimple just over one knee, legs crossed with one foot jiggling one of those boat shoes, with the sick white soles--Lenore dislikes that kind of shoe a lot.Clarice after a quiet bit lets out a long sigh and says, in whispers, "Cat . . . is . . . God," giggling a little at the end. The other two giggle too.
"God? How can Cat be God? Cat exists." Mindy's eyes are all red.
"That's offensive and completely blasphemous," says Sue Shaw, eyes wide and puffed and indignant.
"Blasphemous?" Clarice dies, looks at Lenore. "Blasphemous," she says. Her eyes aren't all that bad, really, just unusually cheerful, as if she's got a joke she's not telling.
"Blissphemous," says Mindy.
"Blossphemous. "
"Blousephemous. "
"Bluesphemous. "
"Boisterous. "
"Boisteronahalfshell. "
"Bucephalus. "
"Bamey Rubble."
"Baba Yaga."
"Bolshevik. "
"Blaphemous!"
They're dying, doubled over, and Lenore's laughing that weird sympathetic laugh you laugh when everybody else is laughing so hard they make you laugh too. The noise of the big party downstairs is coming through the floor and vibrating in Lenore's black sneakers and the arms of the chair. Now Mindy slides out of her desk chair all limp and shlomps down on Lenore's sleeping bag on the floor next to Clarice's pretend-Persian ruglet from Mooradian's in Cleveland, and Mindy modestly covers her crotch with a comer of her robe, but Lenore still can't help but see the way her breasts swell up into the worn pink towel cloth of the robe, all full and stuff, even lying down on her back, there, on the floor. Lenore unconsciously looks down a little at her own chest, under her flannel shirt.
"Hunger," Sue Shaw says after a minute. "Massive, immense, uncontrollable, consuming, uncontrollable, hunger."
"This is so," says Mindy.
"We will wait"--Clarice looks at her watch on the underside of her wrist--"one, that is one hour, before eating anything what soentirelyever."
"No we can't possibly possibly do that."
"But do it we shall. As per room discussions of not one week ago, when we explicitly agreed that we shall not gorge when utterly flapped, lest we get fat and repulsive, like Mindy, over there, you poor midge."
"Fart-blossom," Mindy says absently, she's not fat and she knows it, Lenore knows it, they all know it.
"A lady at all times, that Metalman," Clarice says. Then a minute, "Speaking of which, you might just maybe either fix your robe or get dressed or get up off your back in Lenore's stuff, I'm not really all up for giving you a gynecological exam, which is sort of what you're making us do, here, O Lesbia of Thebes."
"Stuff and bother," says Mindy, or rather, "Stuth and bozzer"; and she gets up swaying and reaching for solid things, goes over to the door that goes into her little single bedroom off the bathroom. She got there first in September and took it, Clarice had said in a letter, this Playboy-Playmatish JAP from Scarsdale, and she's shedding what's left of her bathrobe, battered into submission, leaving it all wet in Lenore's lap in the chair by the door, and going through the door with her long legs, deliberate steps. Shuts the door.
Product details
- Publisher : Penguin Books; Reprint edition (June 29, 2010)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 480 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0143116932
- ISBN-13 : 978-0143116936
- Item Weight : 14.8 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.1 x 1.1 x 7.8 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #802,764 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #6,371 in Psychological Fiction (Books)
- #6,467 in Humorous Fiction
- #39,334 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
David Foster Wallace wrote the acclaimed novels Infinite Jest and The Broom of the System and the story collections Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, and Girl With Curious Hair. His nonfiction includes the essay collections Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, and the full-length work Everything and More. He died in 2008.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the writing style beautiful, ringing true, and accessible. They also describe the plot as wickedly funny and intelligent. Opinions are mixed on the storyline, with some finding it moderately intriguing and others saying it's unfulfilling.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the writing style beautiful, intuitive, original, and free-minded. They also say the book is thoughtful, hilarious, and exceptionally accessible to readers of all. Readers also mention that the dialogue is great and makes for fun conversation. They say the writing is easy to read and paints amazing pictures.
"...it is much less sophisticated than his later work but that signature audacity is there and perhaps is even stronger because not backed up by as much..." Read more
"...and made this the totally hysterically funny but engaging and very serious work of art which evoke visuals which were screamingly funny and mental..." Read more
"...vibrant, kooky passages that add little to the plot, but are beautifully written...." Read more
"...Is that you? Are you highly open-minded and creative and very much highly intelligent ... then you should definitely read David Foster Wallace...." Read more
Customers find the plot irreverent, intelligent, and wickedly funny.
"...literary crafstmanship was GORGEOUS and made this the totally hysterically funny but engaging and very serious work of art which evoke visuals which..." Read more
"...If you admire expression, creativity, observation and humor, give it a go...." Read more
"...There's a lot of funny stuff, and interesting stuff, and some pretty goofy stuff...." Read more
"...His writings are post-everything, irreverent, intelligent and wickedly funny. He makes us, the readers, put in some effort...." Read more
Customers find the book very smart, clever in spots, and brilliant. They also say the author is extraordinarily intuitive, original, and free-minded.
"...saying, you'll really be able to tell this novel was written by a very smart, zany college student...." Read more
"...Read the book. It is clearly the product of genius and ushers the word `art' solidly back into the literary arts...." Read more
"...His writings are post-everything, irreverent, intelligent and wickedly funny. He makes us, the readers, put in some effort...." Read more
"Foster Wallace was an extraordinarily intuitivy, original and free-minded writer. This work only outlines that...." Read more
Customers find the characters in the book amazing.
"...The characters are amazing,and the protagonist, the young Lenore, is the ONLY REAL PERSON in a book of well-drawn but seriously flawed character..." Read more
"...points of view, crackling and whip-smart dialog, absurd but still believeable characters..." Read more
"...brilliance that followed, this is still a wonderful book, full of amazing characters, amazing situations, and is just plain an amazing read." Read more
"I absolutely loved this book. The characters are excellent. The setting is wonderfully absurd. The writing is excellent...." Read more
Customers are mixed about the storyline. Some find it intriguing, creative, and well written. They also appreciate the great characterization and brilliant word puzzle. However, others feel the ending is unfulfilling and the book lacks any sense of story.
"...his first novel, is a nice contrast in that it seems be more discernible as an actual story (with strong hints of magical realism) and also has his..." Read more
"...was GORGEOUS and made this the totally hysterically funny but engaging and very serious work of art which evoke visuals which were screamingly funny..." Read more
"...And even these aren't a huge concern except that they yank you out of the narrative experience - make you aware of the fact of reading, which,..." Read more
"...The characterization is great (with the exception of Bombardini who feels like he catapulted in from a cartoon)..." Read more
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I have managed to read DFW backwards for no reason that I am conscious of. I started with The Pale King, put together posthumously from notes and chapters found in his files after his untimely death. I have read through most of his work but not The Broom of the System. So last month, I finally downloaded The Broom of the System, that fateful first novel that Mr. Wallace published when he was just 24. And I can see that it is much less sophisticated than his later work but that signature audacity is there and perhaps is even stronger because not backed up by as much craft and life experience. It’s a bit of a heavy-handed light-hearted novel and although I have read the Wittgenstein comments from the critics and the Pynchon comparisons, and the post-modernist arguments, I did not come up when those writers or philosophies were the keys to literature, so I cannot look at DFW’s books in that way except through the eyes of others.
I can see that the characters in The Broom of the System do tend to be a bit two dimensional and cartoonish but I don’t really mind; they still involve me. I swim my own way into and out of the various membranes that populate the novel, right down to the cellular level, the self and the other, the membranes essential to female virginity and the piercing of membranes necessary for pregnancy. Even the phones seem membranous. This is pure Wallace; biology is always going awry and even objects like buildings are biological. The phones in “Broom” are a nervous system; there are “lungs” under the tennis courts in Infinite Jest.
Lenore Beadsman is our heroine and she has lost her paternal grandmother, also named Lenore Beadsman, who seems to have fostered a certain mindset in her granddaughter (brainwashed her) who visits her regularly in the nursing home. But Senior Lenore and about 25 residents and staff from the nursing home have disappeared and no one can find them. How will Grandma survive when she is so sensitive to cold that she can only exist in an environment that is 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit? (There’s that biology again.) Is there a parental separation story here perhaps?
We make several digressions into Lenore (Juniors) past. In one we follow her to Mount Holyoke College where she goes to visit her older sister Claire and meets Wang Dang Lang and Biff Diggerance, whose gauche behavior makes her chose a more sheltered college to attend. We follow her to her job at Frequent and Vigorous, a publishing company where her boss, Rick Vigorous, quite a bit older than Lenore, is also her boyfriend, a boyfriend who cannot consummate the relationship, who tells odd stories to Lenore instead of making love to her, and who, even so, is very jealous. We visit her bird Vlad the Impaler with her when he, once a silent pet, becomes quite talkative. She learns from her father, owner of Stonecipheco Baby Food – competitor to Gerber – that there is a connection between the missing Senior Lenore and the newly precocious bird.
Wallace loves to put in landscape features that are either ridiculous man-made constructs or that have resulted from our abuse of the environment, so we find that, although we are in Cleveland (Wallace has a Midwest connection), Lake Erie is filled with a brown, sort of gelatinous, sludge occasionally showing sort of brown waves with white tops. Another area of Cleveland has been turned into the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D.), a touristy invitation to walk the black sands and eyeball carefully designed desert landscapes, and to perhaps meditate (it isn’t supposed to make literal sense).
Then we find the political David Foster Wallace who had strong liberal leanings and who gives us the giant voracious Capitalist, Norman Bombardini, who is already grossly fat and yet wants to expand further and eat everything (especially Lenore Beadsman, the younger, who also happens to be one of DFW’s impossibly beautiful women who don’t know they are beautiful). The play of light and shadow has a role in this story and there is a “broom of the system”, but I will not elucidate.
The excesses of DFW are given to us by him on purpose and are part of what makes my brain wake up just thinking about any one of his books. If you read The Broom of the System you can also meet Lenore’s younger brother, the Antichrist and you can learn to play “Hi Bob”, a killer college drinking game. David and I are probably done for now, but I could, given time, read these books again and find many new and interesting little baubles and I just might do that whenever I need to get my adrenalin flowing (which great literature always does).
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