“That’s My Sad, It’s Not Your Sad”: Love, Loneliness, and Communication in The Broom of the System by David Foster Wallace

ABSTRACT

Wallace’s first novel remains critically neglected, due in part perhaps to his misrepresentation and disavowal of his early work after the success of Infinite Jest. His debut novel, The Broom of the System, is not merely “juvenilia” but in fact provides the foundations for understanding Wallace’s career-long thematic focus on loneliness and other dysphoric conditions such as depression and boredom. This essay challenges readings of the novel which posit Lenore as the vehicle for Wallace’s engagement with Wittgenstein’s philosophy, and demonstrates the centrality of Rick Vigorous as both the novel’s narrator and a manifestation of loneliness. This reading examines critically overlooked aspects of the novel, including metafictional elements and tragic members of the Beadsman family, demonstrating Wallace’s fundamental concern with love and loneliness and opening up new avenues of critical inquiry.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Wittgenstein’s Mistress is, of course, monologic by necessity – its narrator, Kate, is ostensibly the only living creature in the novel’s world.

2. This approach runs counter to many readings of the novel which posit Lenore as the novel’s primary character, but follows essays by Hayes-Brady, who unconventionally begins her reading of the novel with reference to Rick instead of Lenore, and Patrick O’Donnell, who prioritises “[t]he narrative of the disintegrating relationship” over “[t]he narrative of Lenore’s search for her great-grandmother”, Gramma Beadsman, in his list of the novel’s plot elements (Hayes-Brady, “The Book”; O’Donnell 10–5).

3. Max here cites Wallace’s college friend Charlie McLagan, who reached this dismissive understanding of The Broom of the System after reading only “a few pages”. The Pynchon comparisons have dogged the novel ever since, from the initial reviews by Michiko Kakutani and Caryn James to Marshall Boswell’s chapter on the novel.

4. The Cartesian subject is defined as “the self-transparent thinking subject”, a concept which “has dominated modern thought” and remains “a powerful and still active intellectual tradition” (Žižek 1–2).

5. Wallace’s image of his reader “marooned in her[/his] own skull” also calls to mind the famous philosophical thought experiment of the “brain in a vat”, a contemporary version of Plato’s allegory of the cave or Descartes’s “malicious demon”.

6. The fictional Great Ohio Desert in The Broom of the System is described as “[a]n Other for Ohio’s Self”, implying perhaps that the entire state subscribes to a Cartesian solipsism (54).

7. Wallace’s antagonism to trends in contemporary US fiction is insightfully explored in Kasia Boddy’s 2013 essay on Girl with Curious Hair. His distaste for Ellis’s American Psycho is vividly and memorably expressed in the 1993 McCaffery interview, and his scathing put-down of Hempel appears in a footnote to his review of David Markson’s Wittgenstein’s Mistress. (This appears specifically in the Both Flesh and Not version; the version included as an afterword to Wittgenstein’s Mistress itself merely refers to Hempel as a “young Carverian” instead of an “ignorant young Carverian”, and cites her review in a footnote without further comment.)

8. Boswell speculates that “[a]lthough Rick insists that all of the stories he tells Lenore actually come to him as unsolicited submissions at the Frequent Review, a literary quarterly he edits, in fact, he simply makes them up”, a view shared by O’Donnell. This interpretation is not entirely baseless, as Rick’s stories seem often to reflect his own neuroses concerning his relationship with Lenore. However, I cannot find any evidence in the novel to verify this reading; indeed, Rick avers that “the Review … really did, thank God, require real work”, implying that it genuinely does receive submissions in “scrawled stamped return envelopes and cover-letters signed ‘Aspiringly Yours,’” for him to assess (Broom 62, 74; Boswell 39; O’Donnell 7).

9. Boswell’s assertion that the characters are “clearly […] fictional version[s]” of Rick and Lenore is arguably reductive, motivated perhaps by his belief that Rick is the story’s sole author (39).

10. Boswell interprets the frog as a symbol of Lenore’s attachment to her family and the impediment which it poses to her relationship with Rick; while this is not implausible, I suggest it arguably more generally represents Lenore’s selfhood and whatever she considers intrinsic to it.

11. Shortly after critiquing the fiction which he produced in the 1980s, Wallace declares that his “vague and not very ambitious ambitions” for Infinite Jest included “want[ing] to do something really sad”. He also says that he had “done comedy before”, implying a clear (and inaccurate) distinction between the generic categorization of Infinite Jest and his earlier work (Silverblatt 15 40).

12. Cf. Iser’s concept of “Konkretisation”, wherein the reader “shade[s] in the many outlines suggested by the [text’s] given situations, so that these take on a reality of their own” and “in turn […] influence the effect of the written part of the text” (274–6).

13. This geographic reference identifies the location as Chicago, for a reader who is familiar with these local landmarks at least.

14. I suggest that this act of recall is unlikely for many readers, and that Rick’s exposition of Patrice’s history in chapter 12 is as much for the reader’s benefit as it is for Lang’s.

15. This line alludes to how Patrice was incarcerated by her husband and kept away from her children under the pretext of training her to be a professional bridge player (262–7). While the line may be considered “meaningful” insofar as it alludes to biographical information revealed over 100 pages later, it does not communicate any information beyond this.

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Rob Mayo

Rob Mayo completed his PhD thesis, titled “David Foster Wallace and Dysphoria”, at the University of Bristol in 2018. He has also published on Wallace in the Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies, and presented research at the International David Foster Wallace Conference. Other research outputs include papers and essays on Twin Peaks, 20th century science fiction, videogames and cinema.