Which is probably why I don’t entirely disagree with Wallace’s complaint that the novel seems written by “a very smart fourteen-year-old”- it does lack the world-weary urgency of his later work. Reading The Broom of the System offers the chance to travel through time to meet the aged teacher/writer/historical figure you’ve idolized back when they were young and foolish and open to possibility. While I was hungry to be in his thrall once more, in some ways, the journey would end here. This is exactly why I was so fearful of picking up the earlier-published The Broom of the System it’s the only other novel Wallace wrote (forthcoming Pale King aside). To this day, I can’t say I’ve downright missed, longed for a novel the way I yearn for Infinite Jest.
#The broom of the system full
It was probably the only novel I’ve ever read that got me out of my depth in terrifying ways, but all the same left me laughing for full hours at a time- the only novel that altered my entire perception of what comic writing can do. Besides, he couldn’t be worth his salt-this multiple-named longhaired dude whom I occasionally mixed up with Jonathan Franzen.īut after my boyfriend finished Infinite Jest, rapturous and feverishly babbling about acronyms, I took a stab at it and fell hard-fell flat on my face in the way that feels like heaven when you’re crazy in love and running through a pine forest at dusk somewhere in New England. No, sir! No 1,000-plus page schizoid novel for this reader I’ll take Proust for $800, Alex.
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The hype! The fandom! All that geeking out! The angsty 18-year old girls with severe haircuts and ironic t-shirts toting around Infinite Jest like the goddamned Rosetta Stone! The whole thing smacked of hipsterism and zeitgeist in a way that I wanted to distance myself from. Thanks.David Foster Wallace was a writer with whom I was determined, out of principle, not to fall in love. Anyway, the blog post in question was a respectful and respectable shot at reviewing the novel. It is too terrible to think about the literary and intellectual loss for all of us that DFW could not overcome his awful struggle. This is not hypocrisy but a writer struggling with himself, his art, his life. Like Salinger, a favorite author of Wallace's, Wallace was not ultimately able to live the advice he put forward in his writing. For one thing, Wallace wrestled terribly with the themes he put forth to that Kenyon audience. One would need to go an awfully long way to overthink Wallace, and using the Kenyon address as a lens through which to interpret Wallace's fiction is a mistake, I think. Very familiar with the brilliant Kenyon address. Read many of Wallace's essays and am half way through JEST. 90).Īnother anonymous disagreement with cflanagan except to say that I agree with him/her that it was an enjoyable book and well-written. To not be alone, such as how one character comes to realize that Weight Watchers sees itself as a warrior in
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Then there is how Wallaceĭraws connections between every facet of love and our fundamental need/desire It’s not that you love the person because ofĬertain things about the person anymore it’s that you love the things about
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But then if you get to where you, you know, love a person,Įverything sort of reverses. Look, or the way they act, or if they’re smart, or some combination or Some person on the basis of, you know, features of the person. One example of that is what VigorousĬomes to refer to as The Reversal after Lenore describes it to him, the way
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Wallace is the kind of writer that can draw the truth out of almost any Other great details and insights abound throughout the