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. We visit her bird Vlad the Impaler with her when he, once a silent pet, becomes quite talkative. 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. 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 make several digressions into Lenore (Juniors) past. 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? But Senior Lenore and about 25 residents and staff from the nursing home have disappeared and no one can find them.
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. The phones in “Broom” are a nervous system there are “lungs” under the tennis courts in Infinite Jest. This is pure Wallace biology is always going awry and even objects like buildings are biological. 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. 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. 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. 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. So last month, I finally downloaded The Broom of the System, that fateful first novel that Mr. I have read through most of his work but not The Broom of the System. I started with The Pale King, put together posthumously from notes and chapters found in his files after his untimely death. I have managed to read DFW backwards for no reason that I am conscious of. He is no longer with us, biologically speaking, but he is not gone either. He has certain writing tics that we recognize with affection whenever we run into them. His dialogue rings true, although no one has any idea why because not all of his characters ring true (or are even supposed to). I have been obsessed with David Foster Wallace because his writing is audacious, unique, and so linguistically creative.
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