the broom of the system by david foster wallace

) Many other potentially interesting narrative strands are left deliberately loose and unexplored (Lenore's mother, her brother John), and overall the book has a decidedly claustrophobic feel. (To further demonstrate the excellence of DFW's invention, we might note that Bombardini can also be interpreted as a satire of the dialectical movement of Hegel's Phenomenology Broom of the System is, among other things, very much a philosophy major's book, a Wittgensteinian comedy. Ohio was in fact ruled by a murderer in the '70s: Governor James Rhodes, the butcher of Kent State, who now, in an obscene irony that would've surprised Wallace not at all, has a community college in Lima, Ohio, named after him.) Bombardini is a wonderfully Swiftian invention, but although he haunts the entire novel, he only appears in one brief scene (probably the funniest scene in the book). Creosote-figure (see Monty Python's The Meaning of Life see it immediately) who personifies the all-consuming gaping maw of corporate capitalism, the force that has transformed the book's Cleveland, Ohio, into a commercialized, corporatized toxic waste dump (Yes, DFW's first novel is set in Cleveland it's the Not Really Great But Still Pretty Good Postmodern Cleveland Novel.) from which residents escape for weekends in the Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D., bien sur), an artificial wasteland constructed in eastern Ohio at the behest of a maniacal 1970s governor. Among the good stuff, I was especially impressed by the underutilized Norman Bombardini, a grotesquely obese Mr. There are some good scenes throughout, but too many of them are too long, extending several pages past the limit of readerly patience. The first hundred pages of The Broom of the System are pretty good, the next two hundred somewhat less so, and the last 167 a major league yawnfest. Of course, it's September 11, 1990, in the near-future of the novel's few early readers. In a truly creepy coincidence that every reader today will be unable to ignore, David Foster Wallace's 1987 novel The Broom of the System is brought to its pseudo-apocalyptic climax on-of all the 365 days DFW might have chosen-the eleventh of September.

The broom of the system by david foster wallace