Rating: 
Summary: If you loved Infinite Jest, you'll like this book
Review: ..and if you didn't like IJ, you'll hate this one, though it is a shorter read. In Broom, we see the precursors of everything that's in IJ -- a wacky, fanciful alternate universe (Cleveland shaped like Jayne Mansfield, linguistic booster hormones in baby food, the G.O.D.), disjointed storylines told from multiple points of view, crackling and whip-smart dialog, absurd but still believeable characters (Rex Metalman who thinks his lawn is a WWI trench, Wang Dang Lang, the narcissist who thinks he's still in a rowdy frat, Wanda the imperious supervisor, and the inscrutable, machinating grandmother, whom we never really meet, Lenore Beadsman the first), outrageous plot occurrences (Vlad the Impaler, the irritable Cockatiel who becomes Ugolino the Significant, a Christian News Channel Anchor), and best of all (from my point of view) a whole bunch of frequently incoherent fun. This book was almost as much fun to read as IJ, and it has more narrative unity so I think it's a bit easier to follow, but at the same time I thought the ending was even more abrupt, and more difficult to figure out how things are intended to end up.
Rating: 
Summary: Lovely piece of Meta-David
Review: Curious and wonderful to see what someone as (obviously insane?) as DFW did back when he was still in a grad program for creative writing -- back when he was just a cunning tyke of 26, before (presumably) the MacArthur Fellowship had given him an oversized novelty cheque just for being really really smart --- before he started writing 1100 page behemoths and incalculably inscrutable short stories. Broom Of The System is, in a way, as straightforward a narrative as DFW ever has written (although there are plenty of POV shifts and a huge, steaming plate of metafictional story-on-story action)... It is a jumping off point, certainly, and you can see some of his fabulous textual obsessions of later books (fathers and dysfunctional families and drugs and addictions) in their earlier forms, here. DFW is to fiction what the band Rush was to music: he is a prog-rock artist, switching POVs and the like with a merciless disregard for tradition, and it's probably best to view his work-- esp. something like Infinite Jest -- as experiments, and not "stories." But with Broom of the System you get a little bit of both -- the first chapter in particular, I think, is one of the most flat-out charming bits of DFW's that I've read.
Rating: 
Summary: Still Postmoderning
Review: Here's the reigning king of postmodernism, a writer who hasn't seemed to have heard that that movement is dead, yet whom nonetheless keeps on doing it. And I for one am thankful for that. There isn't anything David Foster Wallace has writen that I don't completely adore, and this novel--his first--is a great primer for any newcomers. Nothing I reccommend will be better.
Rating:
Summary: Not Infinite Jest, but pretty good
Review: I'll admit my bias first -- I'm a big fan of David Foster Wallace.
The Broom of the System can seem rather silly on the surface, but it's a pretty sharp social satire. The story is interesting as well... missing grandmother, wacky talking-cockatiel named Vlad the Impaler... the hilarity ensues.
What really makes this book a gem is Wallace's great writing style. This is is first novel and in some ways it shows in that I think he tries to get at things that he can't quite reach yet. There's a maturity that's in his book, Infinite Jest, that is lacking here. I found The Broom of the System to be very funny, but also very smart. There were points at which I had to put the book down and really think about something that Wallace had brought up.
This book also doesn't follow any usual plot-lines. There's no real ending... which is nice because in real life things don't just wrap up prefectly... they go on forever and Wallace ends the book in such a way as to leave the possibilities open for his characters.
If you like to read things that are more substancial that your run-of-the-mill paperback fiction, this is the book for you. It's an excellent introduction to David Foster Wallace's intellectual and funny style and it just might put you on the path to his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.
Rating: 
Summary: Mediocrity passing as Fabulous
Review: It is unfortunate that Wallace does not live up to any of the claims of the promotional quotes on the cover. Specifically the one claiming that Wallace is fit to be compared to the great unread American authors he borrows so heavily from. To compare a novel like this to William Gaddis's JR (from which Wallace admittedly borrows many things) is to compare an amature tracing of a van der Goes with the thing itself. While Broom is certainly a better read than much of contemporary fiction, it only makes more painful the lack of readership of the novelists who inspired Wallace and whose literature he has only barely begun to imitate.
Read Gaddis, Pynchon, Coover, Barth, Barthleme, Gass etc for the non-mediocre version.
Rating: 
Summary: really now
Review: read infinite jest, brief interviews, loved 'em, etc. man, what a first novel.. i really don't understand the positive reviews this book got. while wallace even then had a great ear for dialogue and the funny idea to repeat over and over and over again, this book and its characters and its entire mood are just so profoundly lacking substance, maybe? maybe not substance, but it just seemed very shallow. none of the passages of beauty, none of the brilliant characters found in his later books are present. i wished every character would have died halfway through the book. it is inventive, but its the inventiveness of a beginning author which is sort of depressing to experience when you've (i've) read all his other work first. all of wallace's inventiveness doesn't seem to have any function or to support anything.. and really now, what an awful ending....
Rating:
Summary: really now
Review: read infinite jest, brief interviews, loved 'em, etc. man, what a first novel.. i really don't understand the positive reviews this book got. while wallace even then had a great ear for dialogue and the funny idea to repeat over and over and over again, this book and its characters and its entire mood are just so profoundly lacking substance, maybe? maybe not substance, but it just seemed very shallow. none of the passages of beauty, none of the brilliant characters found in his later books are present. i wished every character would have died halfway through the book. it is inventive, but its the inventiveness of a beginning author which is sort of depressing to experience when you've (i've) read all his other work first. all of wallace's inventiveness doesn't seem to have any function or to support anything.. and really now, what an awful ending....
Rating:
Summary: Good for a few smiles
Review: Reading the other reviews for this book as well as for IJ, what perhaps impresses me most about DFW is his ability to polarize his readers. Never have I come across an author who evoked quite the adoration from some and seemingly intense personal hatred from others. Infinte Jest received the former from me; Broom of the System acts merely as a subtle reminder of what a genius this author is. It seems that DFW needs a thousand pages to create characters that one can sympathize and identify with. What you have in BotS is sort of a skeletal version of the grandeur of IJ: a similar plot structure (none?); interesting, intriguing characters; and that wonderful hint of surreality that keeps you reading, perhaps against your better judgement. Worth reading, but don't expect greatness in this one.
Rating:
Summary: DON'T BOTHER!!!!!
Review: Somebody told me that David Foster Wallace was smart, witty, and hilarious; his books make you laugh, his books make you think. The only thinking I did was about the mediocrity of this novel. Don't bother!There isn't really much direction, and every now and then Lenore will ask her boyfriend for a story. He summarizes short stories sent to his magazine by college kids, and this makes me think Wallace would be a better short story writer. For the most part, this book is just dialog. Sometimes his style will make you smile a bit, but it's nothing very clever. It was interesting ... not amusing, not intriguing. I was highly disappointed; for all the high praise he received, this book just wasn't worth it. It's long, and it doesn't go anywhere. Don't bother!
Rating:
Summary: what distinguishes a good joke from a bad joke?
Review: There might be a good idea for a joke - but it just does not come out funny. That's about all I can say about this amazingly overrated book. Seems to have all the ingredients to be good: Great Ohio Desert (G.O.D) - funny, the names of the people - funny, and so on. Came out to be - just boring. Pretentious dull dialogue. Pretentious dull characters. I was reading it in a morbid disbelief, that lasted for more than half of the book. It is very unusual for me to stop reading a book once I passed the halfbook mark - I usually want to know "what happened". It kept me going here for some more pages - and then I decided: nothing of it really happened, does not matter, waste of time. None of the characters, surroundings or events were in any way interesting.
|
