The Broom Of The System

highly recommend this as a starting point for DFW

lacks the scale and mastery of IJ (what doesn't?), but nonetheless an obscenely brilliant and clever book. insane that he wrote this at 24 - what a talent

lots of building blocks for IJ to be found here - you can tell IJ was the culmination and logical conclusion of what he was trying to do throughout his early work

The best part of the book, and by telling you this, I am not really giving anything away, at least nothing that is pertinent to the plot of the book, is that there is a man-made black sand desert in Ohio, near Caldwell, Ohio, the Great Ohio Desert, where people go wandering, hiking, hiding, resolving existential crises, sunbathing and fishing in the desert's lake. It is “a blasted region. Something to remind us of what we hewed out of. A place without malls.” It is often crowded and the best time to get there is early in the morning before the crowds gather. Once you come to terms with the G.O.D.,everything else falls into place.

The desert is the great jest in The Broom of the System and the existence of the desert sums up Wallace's sense of humor. You might, as you're reading, be tempted to identify with Wallace's view of the human condition that is so perfectly characterized by the G.O.D., but find your mind resistant to identifying, either for fear of where identifying with Wallace and his desert will take you, or because the strangeness of it all is simply too strange. This temptation to identify with the G.O.D. and the mental resistance to said temptation can be mentally taxing and exhausting and not something that you will find yourself wanting to put yourself through for very long periods of time. If you give in though, and allow yourself to accept the desert and what it implies, reading The Broom of the System and DFW in general can actually be, if not enjoyable, humorous and something you can appreciate very much at an intellectual and philosophical level.

As a huge DFW fan, I think “Broom of the Systems” is both a great look at the early work of a prolific author and a fun little novel by itself. As in”Girl with Curious Hair,” it's fun to see Wallace's early approach to interweaving character, story, philosophy, cultural commentary and the postmodern aesthetic that he would later master in “Infinite Jest.”

This book was... difficult? I don't think I entirely understood it, although I enjoyed the journey. Apparently it was written as a senior project about modal logic, and I don't really know what modal logic is, so... that's a problem.