The Broom of the System is the first novel by the American writer David Foster Wallace, published in 1987. Wallace stated that the initial idea for the novel sprang from a remark made by an old girlfriend. DT Max reported that, according to Wallace, she said "she would rather be a character in a piece of fiction than a real person. I got to wondering just what the difference was." Wallace revealed in an interview that the novel was somewhat autobiographical: "the sensitive tale of a sensitive young WASP who's just had this midlife crisis that’s moved him from coldly cerebral analytic... math to a coldly cerebral take on fiction . . . which also shifted his existential dread from a fear that he was just a 98.6°F calculating machine to a fear that he was nothing but a linguistic construct." The book centers on the emotionally challenged Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator who questions her own reality. In Wallace's typically offbeat style, Lenore navigates three separate crises: her great-grandmother's escape from a nursing home, a neurotic boyfriend, and a suddenly vocal pet cockatiel.
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| Author: | David Foster Wallace |
| Genre: | Speculative fiction, Postmodernism |
| Year published: | 1987 |
| Number of editions: | 6 |