The Bristles or the Handle

"Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden."

And so starts David Foster Wallace's first romp into the world of novel-sized metafiction. The Broom of the System is about a girl named Lenore Beadsman, who has a sneaking suspicion that she might be a character in a much larger story. But regardless of all that, things aren't going particularly well for Lenore. Her great-grandmother has gone missing from her nursing home, along with 24 other residents and staff members. Someone seems to have slipped her pet bird, Vlad the Impaler, a spoonful of genetically enhanced baby food, because all the bird does now is spat sexually ambiguous psychobabble ("Of course you satisfy me, Clinty. Don't think you don't.") and verses from the King James bible. Something's wrong with the phone lines at work, and Lenore's job as the switchboard operator for the flailing publishing company Frequent & Vigorous (which is really just an elaborate tax dodge) is insufferable. Her hygiene-obsessed therapist has taken to wearing gas masks during sessions and breaking everything down into membranes. The owner of her building, Mr. Bombardini, has decided that he'd like to consume the universe, and so he starts eating everything in his path. And added to all this, icing on top: the whole thing is set in a slightly-worse Cleveland, Ohio, a massive section of the state now being occupied by a huge black sandy wasteland known as the Great Ohio Desert, or G.O.D. when people are feeling lazy.

I really liked this book. There's not much of a plot that weaves through all the pieces, but that was okay. David Foster Wallace sets up this ridiculous, colorful, Looney-Tunes-esque (there's actually a really awesome mini-dissertation in here about the economics of Wile E. Coyote and his questionable Road Runner tactics) universe, and then holds you by the hand and takes you from place to place to show you all the different funny beautiful disturbing things that he's created. And so you just kind of let the book unpeel for you. And unpeel for you it does.

"and I got nervous, and finally when I said I supposed the bristles, because you could after a fashion sweep without the handle, by just holding on to the bristles, but couldn't sweep with just the handle, she tackled me, and knocked me out of my chair, and yelled into my ear something like, "Aha, that's because you want to sweep with the broom, isn't it? It's because of what you want the broom for, isn't it?" Et cetera. And that if what we wanted a broom for was to break windows, then the handle was clearly the fundamental essence of the broom, and she illustrated with the kitchen window, and a crowd of domestics gathered."