Novel: The Broom of the System

Overview
David Foster Wallace's debut novel follows Lenore Beadsman, a bright, linguistically sensitive young woman whose ordinary life in Cleveland begins to unravel when people important to her start behaving as if the names and stories that once defined them no longer mean the same things. The book pairs a comedic, satirical eye for institutional absurdity with sustained philosophical curiosity about how language structures human identity. The narrative spins a mystery of disappearance and miscommunication into a larger meditation on what it means to be an individual inside overlapping formal systems.

Plot
Lenore's troubles begin when her great-grandmother goes missing and a cascade of seemingly small miscommunications and bureaucratic snafus escalates into a series of crises. As the search for the missing elder intersects with corporate, medical, and media forces, Lenore confronts shifting definitions of autonomy, authorship, and reality. The novel moves through episodes of mistaken identity, rumor, and self-propagating narratives that repeatedly call into question whether characters are the authors of their own lives or merely nodes in larger systems of names and descriptions.

Main Characters
Lenore Beadsman anchors the book: curious, talkative, and at once skeptical about and haunted by the names people use for themselves. Surrounding her is an ensemble of eccentric relatives, romantic entanglements, and institutional figures whose motives are never far from organizational logic. Rather than relying on conventional villains, the novel treats bureaucratic structures, media personalities, and the inertia of language as antagonists, forcing individuals to negotiate authority and identity amid competing descriptions.

Themes and Ideas
The Broom of the System treats language not as a transparent medium but as a system that shapes and sometimes circumscribes human possibility. Wittgensteinian questions, about meaning as use, the slipperiness of reference, and the social construction of facts, permeate the book, turned into comic and occasionally unsettling situations. The text also interrogates the dynamics of family and institutional power, exploring how love, obligation, and narrative authority coexist with the impersonal logic of corporations, therapists, and media. Humor and anxiety interlock as the characters try to reclaim agency in a world where naming feels both creative and coercive.

Style and Legacy
Wallace's early voice is on full display: energetic, digressive, and attentive to the rhythms of spoken thought, with a susceptibility to both highbrow theory and pop-cultural detail. The prose mixes philosophical seriousness with slapstick absurdity, conjuring scenes that are simultaneously comic and vertiginous. As a debut, the novel announced themes and formal tendencies Wallace would develop more fully later: an interest in addiction and desire, institutional critique, and the ethical stakes of attention. The Broom of the System remains a compact, provocative study of how language, systems, and habit produce the selves people think they are.