only teeny-tiny spoilers ahead, read at your own risk of spoilage
Anything lucid, intriguing, and not overly self conscious that manages to be completed and published by a 24 year old is impressive in my book. Written as one of his two theses at Amherst College, Wallace later voiced regrets about the The Broom of the System, stating that it was created to prove to everyone how smart he was. My opinion is that it worked; The Broom of the System is undeniably a brilliant work crafted by a sharp individual. The book was engineered to showcase the opposing ideals of two philosophers: Wittgenstein and Derrida, serving as a narrative between the two. This, of course, is all subtext, while the text itself deals with the unlikely coincidences surrounding the main character, Lenore Beadsman, as she begins to doubt the nature of her reality.
The not-so-subtle philosophy tucked in between the fiction of this novel adds a thought provoking nature to the book that would become customary for Wallace in all of his later work. Many people have scorned the book as “self-referential meta-fiction”, but for those of us who love to find easter eggs in our fiction, this lends to an immersive and impressive read. For readers still too intimidated to pick up Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System is a perfect introduction to David Foster Wallace’s fiction. For those who have read and enjoyed Infinite Jest, don’t expect the world weary wisdom that made you fall in love with that book in this one. You can, however, expect Wallace’s blind, nameless dialogue, subtle yet disconcerting changes to a familiar America, and hilarious, multi-dimensional characters along the wild trajectory of a winding plot.
My only matter of contention with the book is that it did leave me feeling slightly underwhelmed. David Foster Wallace is not an author who always spells things out plainly, often leaving the reader to find and put together the pieces of his fictional puzzle. If you are anything like me, notoriously devoted to closure, and enjoy explicitly stated definitive ends to the stories you read/watch/hear, then you may find yourself somewhat let down by The Broom of the System’s ending, which infamously ends in the middle of a sentence.