Hello again. I’ve come to you with another installment of DFW Mania: The Broom of the System Edition. 1st off: The covers of the book. You know how they say Don’t judge a book by its cover? I really judge books by their covers. If the cover has some shirtless guy or some cliché nature scenery or some even if the book cover feels cheap, it probably means (ostensibly; in my opinion) that the book isn’t that great. So when I go book shopping either online (which is to say solely and religiously on local bookstore-ruining Amazon) or in the store (which is hardly ever Webster’s downtown since their books are used and sometimes ripped and strangely sticky, and mostly at Barnes & Noble whose books are totally overpriced and whose coffee shop attracts pop-lit reading hipsters) I always buy books with cool covers. Take, e.g., The Broom of the System‘s covers. I don’t own the one on the left but it depicts the city of Cleveland, Ohio—the city in which much of the book takes place— in profile of Jayne Mansfield, a picture of whom is placed below:
Wowee. So for some reason our great friend DFW decided to have the fictitious city planner of Cleveland—a great-great-grandfather of the main character Lenore Beadsman—design the city in the profile of the above woman. So that’s the story.
But so the second cover is an reflection of a upside-down cockatoo named Vlad the Impaler, a somewhat significant character who belongs to our Lenore Beadsman, whose initials are inscribed on the mirror.
And, of course, the piece de la resistance, our very own and beloved David Foster Wallace, the humble author.
DFW wrote this book while he was still in grad school and it is still today considered a very fine piece of writing. The Broom of the System concerns: Lenore Beadsman and her grandmother, whose (the grandmother’s) room temperature must be 98.6˚ since she can’t warm herself, and who has also gone missing; Rick Vigorous, a rather rich guy who is an editor at his own literary magazine firm “Frequent & Vigorous,” who loves Lenore to the point of obsession, and, despite his physical ineptitudes, is loved back, somewhat. The plot essentially concerns itself with the search for Lenore’s grandma, but thematically represents something totally unexpected.
DFW studied mathematical logic in grad school and was particularly obsessed with Ludwig Wittgenstein, a philosopher who specialized in logic and language. Through many clever means, DFW incorporates the abstractness, the arbitrariness, and the wonder of language into this text. A favorite antimony, or sort of paradox of Lenore’s grandma was this: if a barber shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves, then who shaves the barber? A picture of a barber’s head was found drawn on a mug in Lenore’s grandma’s room, one of the few hints as to why she left.
It really is a good book but I can’t give anything more away in fear of being a spoiler. And one of the worst sins in the whole world is spoiling a plot.
Jack
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