The Broom of the System

Table of Contents

 

 

 

More Praise for The Broom of the System and David Foster Wallace

 

 

“Wonderfully odd ... Mr. Wallace possesses a wealth of talents—a finely tuned ear for contemporary idioms; an old-fashioned storytelling gift; a seemingly endless capacity for invention and an energetic refusal to compromise.”—
The New York Times

 

“Gut splitting laughs ... runs the gamut from sex to TV preachers, from
Gilligan’s
Island to Wittgensteinian philosophy.... Beneath the poetry, beneath the bubbling humor, something sinister is cooking. Wallace has something to say about society, something heedful.”

 

“Remarkable ... hip but true ... emerging from the tradition of Thomas Pynchon’s V and John Irving’s The World According to Garp.”

—The New York Times Book Review

 

 

“Wonderful ... outlandish ... The Broom of the System stands apart from the pack. Offbeat and inventive, it’s filled with some of the most deadly accurate contemporary dialogue ever captured in print.... You’re in for a good time.”
—The Cleveland Plain Dealer

 

“Wallace, like Nabokov, the writer whom he most resembles, has a seemingly inexhaustible bag of literary tricks.”

 

“A prodigiously inventive, hugely funny writer whose best work challenges and reinvents the art of fiction.”

 

“Wallace is the real thing.... Beneath the fun and the verbal high jinks, there is a passionate and deeply serious writer at work.”

 

 

“Wallace can make you laugh out loud with his devilish wit.”

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE BROOM OF THE SYSTEM

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) is the award-winning author of several short story and essay collections; two novels; including the bestselling
Infinite Jest;
as well as
Everything
and More: A Compact
History of Infinity.
He is also the author of Girl with Curious Hair, A Supposedly Fun Thing
I’ll
Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and Consider the Lobster. His essays and short stories have appeared in Harper’s
Magazine,
The New Yorker, Rolling Stone and The Paris Review. David is the recipient of a McArthur Award, a Whiting Award, the National Magazine Award, and various other prizes.

PENGUIN BOOKS

 

Published by the Penguin Group

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England

 

First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin Inc. 1987 Published in Penguin Books 2004

 

Copyright © David Foster Wallace, 1987

All rights reserved

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-15353-6

 

Set in Goudy Old Style

 

 

The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

This project is dedicated to:

 

Mark Andrew
Costello
and Susan Jane Perkins and Amy Elizabeth Wallace

The author thanks the following for their help:

Most really pretty girls have pretty ugly feet, and so does Mindy Metalman, Lenore notices, all of a sudden. They’re long and thin and splay-toed, with buttons of yellow callus on the little toes and a thick stair-step of it on the back of the heel, and a few long black hairs are curling out of the skin at the tops of the feet, and the red nail polish is cracking and peeling in curls and candy-striped with decay. Lenore only notices because Mindy’s bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobe’s opening a little, so there’s some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenore’s got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindy’s wet washed shampooed head is coming undone and a wisp of dark shiny hair has slithered out of a crack in the folds and curled down all demurely past the side of Mindy’s face and under her chin. It smells like Flex shampoo in the room, and also pot, since Clarice and Sue Shaw are smoking a big thick j-bird Lenore got from Ed Creamer back at Shaker School and brought up with some other stuff for Clarice, here at school.

What’s going on is that Lenore Beadsman, who’s fifteen, has just come all the way from home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, right near Cleveland, to visit her big sister, Clarice Beadsman, who’s a freshman at this women’s college, called Mount Holyoke; and Lenore’s staying with her sleeping bag in this room on the second floor of Rumpus Hall that Clarice shares with her roommates, Mindy Metalman and Sue Shaw. Lenore’s also come to sort of check out this college, a little bit. This is because even though she’s just fifteen she’s supposedly quite intelligent and thus accelerated and already a junior at Shaker School and thus thinking about college, application-wise, for next year. So she’s visiting. Right now it’s a Friday night in March.

Sue Shaw, who’s not nearly as pretty as Mindy or Clarice, is bringing the joint over here to Mindy and Lenore, and Mindy takes it and lets her toe alone for a second and sucks the bird really hard, so it glows bright and a seed snaps loudly and bits of paper ash go flying and floating, which Clarice and Sue find super funny and start laughing at really hard, whooping and clutching at each other, and Mindy breathes it in really deep and holds it in and passes the bird to Lenore, but Lenore says no thank you.

“No thank you,” says Lenore.

“Go ahead, you brought it, why not ... ,” croaks Mindy Metalman, talking the way people talk without breathing, holding on to the smoke.

“I know, but it’s track season at school and I’m on the team and I don’t smoke during the season, I can‘t, it kills me,” Lenore says.

So Mindy shrugs and finally lets out a big breath of pale used-up smoke and coughs a deep little cough and gets up with the bird and takes it over across the room to Clarice and Sue Shaw, who are by a big wooden stereo speaker listening to this song, again, by Cat Stevens, for like the tenth time tonight. Mindy’s robe’s more or less open, now, and Lenore can see some pretty amazing stuff, but Mindy just walks across the room. Lenore can at this point divide all the girls she’s known neatly into girls who think deep down they’re pretty and girls who deep down think they’re really not. Girls who think they’re pretty don’t care much about their bathrobes being undone and are good at makeup and like to walk when people are watching, and they act different when there are boys around; and girls like Lenore, who don’t think they’re too pretty, tend not to wear makeup, and run track, and wear black Converse sneakers, and keep their bathrobes pretty well fastened at all times. Mindy sure is pretty, though, except for her feet.

The Cat Stevens song is over again, and the needle goes up by itself, and obviously none of these three feel like moving all the way to start it again, so they’re just sitting back in their hard wood desk chairs, Mindy in her faded pink terry robe with one shiny smooth leg all bare and sticking out; Clarice in her Desert boots and her dark blue jeans that Lenore calls her shoe-hom jeans, and that white western shirt she’d worn at the state fair the time she’d had her purse stolen, and her blond hair flooding all over the shirt, and her eyes very blue right now; Sue Shaw with her red hair and a green sweater and green tartan skirt and fat white legs with a bright red pimple just over one knee, legs crossed with one foot jiggling one of those boat shoes, with the sick white soles-Lenore dislikes that kind of shoe a lot.

Clarice after a quiet bit lets out a long sigh and says, in whispers, “Cat ... is ... God,” giggling a little at the end. The other two giggle too.

“God? How can Cat be God? Cat
exists.”
Mindy’s eyes are all red.

“That’s offensive and completely blaphemous,” says Sue Shaw, eyes wide and puffed and indignant.

“Blaphemous?” Clarice dies, looks at Lenore. “Blasphemous,” she says. Her eyes aren’t all that bad, really, just unusually cheerful, as if she’s got a joke she’s not telling.

“Blissphemous,” says Mindy.

“Blossphemous.”

“Blousephemous.”

“Bluesphemous.”

“Boisterous.”

“Boisteronahalfshell.”

“Bucephalus.”

“Barney Rubble.”

“Baba Yaga. ”

“Bolshevik.”

“Blaphe
mous
!”

They’re dying, doubled over, and Lenore’s laughing that weird sympathetic laugh you laugh when everybody else is laughing so hard they make you laugh too. The noise of the big party downstairs is coming through the floor and vibrating in Lenore’s black sneakers and the arms of the chair. Now Mindy slides out of her desk chair all limp and shlomps down on Lenore’s sleeping bag on the floor next to Clarice’s pretend-Persian ruglet from Mooradian’s in Cleveland, and Mindy modestly covers her crotch with a comer of her robe, but Lenore still can’t help but see the way her breasts swell up into the worn pink towel cloth of the robe, all full and stuff, even lying down on her back, there, on the floor. Lenore uncon siously looks down a little at her own chest, under her flannel shirt.