Although La escoba del Sistema reached the table of new books in Spain in the middle of the last decade, it is a book published in 1987. It is also curious that it was a small publisher like Páligo Fuego (and not the Foster Wallace's Regular Random House) the one in charge of bringing it to us, with a very careful edition and up to the task.
The system broom: review-summary
David Foster Wallace's first novel is a tour de force. I think in the last year I have read the expression tour de force in reviews, back flaps and covers of all kinds of books at a rate of five times a day. In Postposmo we do not want to be less.
The first work of fiction published by DFW, at the age of 25 (as a final thesis for his studies in Philosophy and English), is a complex mass with many windows, pipes and wiring. I think of the first novels of…I don't know…Vladimir Nabokov, Don Delillo or Ernest Hemingway, and none was even close to ambitious as much as The broom of the system, with its multiple readings, plots, characters and interpretations.
- David Foster Wallace (Writer)
Exorbitant frame volume
Shortly after looking at the book one can get carried away, not without entertaining wonder, by the multitude of plots that begin to emerge. Namely:
- The love relationship between Lenore Beadsman, an existentially confused young woman who is always bewildered, with her much older boss, Rick Vigorous, head of a publisher.
- The disappearance/escape of the Lenore's great-grandmother (also named Lenore) and 20 other grandparents from the nursing home where they live.
- The life and miracles of Norman Bombardini, owner of the building where Lenore works (with whom he falls in love), and a man who, in his vital anguish, has decided to eat obscene amounts of food to fatten himself up to occupy the entire universe.
- The rivalry between two baby food companies and the discovery by one of them of a miraculous product that makes babies learn to speak long before their turn.
- the story of a cockatoo reciting bible verses, and his subsequent signing-kidnapping by a religious television network.
- Lenore's Complete Family History, including a gifted camel brother with a prosthetic leg and another that nothing is known about.
DFW Complexity
To the formula we must add a multitude of stories inserted in the middle of the novel that have nothing to do with the story and that, even so, we read in its entirety, like a book of stories by David Foster Wallace.
There are also love triangles, psychotherapists crazier than their own clients…well, a festival.
The merit of knowing how to credibly link all this tangle is undeniable. But David Foster Wallace's game it goes far beyond a bizarre parade of stories in search of an easy laugh. The aspect in which The Broom of the System does fulfill its role as a first novel is in the self-referential nature of the main character, Lenore, who is built in the image and likeness of the writer. Even though he is a man and Lenore is a woman.
Lenore Beadsman Wallace
Five years after its publication, David Foster Wallace recognized that The Broom of the System was an “autobiography written in code”. Lenore is many things but perhaps the aspect that best defines her and makes her such a charismatic and atypical character is that feeling that haunts you of not being the owner of your life, “with the intuition that his own perceptions and actions and personal wills are not under his control” (p. 87).
Lenore is a person capable of rejecting the plug of her millionaire father and choosing to work as a telephone operator in order to feel that she has some room for maneuver in her life, and that she is not simply being dragged by circumstances.
Lenore is the nexus with all the bizarre events that occur in The system broom because each and every one of them constitute conflicts that reinforce in her this distressing idea of the inexistence of will and the margin of maneuver for their actions.
The broken phone from The System Broom
Perhaps the best exponent or metaphor of this feeling of helplessness in the face of adversity is found in the breakdown of something as fundamental in the exercise of communication as the telephone: the system in charge of connecting the lines in his workplace does not work (fault that lasts throughout the pages and weeks (the entire book)), causing only calls addressed to other people to arrive (a sex shop, a mechanical workshop…).
If we raise the vantage point and look at the whole thing, we see that what Foster Wallace set out to do in The system broom is a metafictional game where the reader himself is infected by that feeling of not knowing very well what is happening in the book (a feeling that is confirmed with each page, especially in the last ones and THAT end).
writing style
In addition to the growing bizarre, David Foster Wallace makes use of a germ of the style that will fully exploit in his next novel, The infinite joke, characterized by the excess, overabundance, excess. Melopea.
In the syntax, in the descriptions, in the dialogues... round and round the same, apparently useless pages with the sole objective of enduring and giving credibility to what is going to be told later (such as the two and a half page enumeration at the beginning of chapter seven of all the objects present in Lenore's apartment to finish focusing on the cockatoo).
Foster Wallace ❤️ Wittgenstein
And the title? What do you mean? To explain the broom thing, the road becomes paved and uphill. Here comes Wittgenstein, the great German philosopher of the first half of the XNUMXth century who devoted himself to studying the relationship between language and our world. The idea that interests us here is that which refers to the understanding of a thing through the analysis of its use or function.
“I can think of a chair only on the basis of the facts in which it can appear, such as for someone to sit on it, or to be placed next to a table” (To expand on Wittgenstein I recommend this short episode of the documentary The adventure of thought presented by Fernando Savater which I have quoted).
The reference to the German thinker is made explicit on page 177, where Lenore recalls that her great-grandmother (a fan of the philosopher) used to grab a broom to ask her what she (at eight years old) thought was the most important part of the broom, the handle or the bristles, to which the girl responded with whimpers, to which the great-grandmother replied that it depends on what you want to use the broom for: if it is to break a window, the handle, and if it is to sweep the broken glass, bristles.
If we extrapolate this speech and apply it instead of a thing to a person (Lenore great-granddaughter) we get the crux of the matter: Lenore and her existential nightmares due to the inability to determine her role in life, and the certainty of feeling like a story, a fictional character because, as he puts it to his psychotherapist on page 177:
Suppose the [great]grandmother tells me really convincingly that all that really exists in my life is what can be told about it (...) it is not really as if a life that is told is a life not lived ; it's just that living is telling, that there is nothing that happens to me that is not narrated or narratable, and if so, what is the difference, why do we live?
At the beginning of the entry I wrote that David Foster Wallace studied philosophy. You were warned.
- David Foster Wallace (Writer)
The System BroomDavid Foster Wallace, The System Broom
pale fire, Malaga 2013 (Originally published in 1987)
521 pages | 22 euros