David Foster Wallace - The Broom of the System

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

Wonderfully odd ... Mr. Wallace possesses a wealth of talentsa 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 Gilligans 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 Pynchons V and John Irvings 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, its filled with some of the most deadly accurate contemporary dialogue ever captured in print.... Youre 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 Ill Never Do Again, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Oblivion, and Consider the Lobster. His essays and short stories have appeared in Harpers 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.

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. Theyre 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 Mindys bent over in the chair by the fridge picking at some of the polish on her toes; her bathrobes opening a little, so theres some cleavage visible and everything, a lot more than Lenores got, and the thick white towel wrapped around Mindys 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 Mindys 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.

Whats going on is that Lenore Beadsman, whos fifteen, has just come all the way from home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, right near Cleveland, to visit her big sister, Clarice Beadsman, whos a freshman at this womens college, called Mount Holyoke; and Lenores 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. Lenores also come to sort of check out this college, a little bit. This is because even though shes just fifteen shes supposedly quite intelligent and thus accelerated and already a junior at Shaker School and thus thinking about college, application-wise, for next year. So shes visiting. Right now its a Friday night in March.

Sue Shaw, whos 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 its track season at school and Im on the team and I dont smoke during the season, I cant, 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. Mindys robes 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 shes known neatly into girls who think deep down theyre pretty and girls who deep down think theyre really not. Girls who think theyre pretty dont 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 dont think theyre 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 theyre 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 shed worn at the state fair the time shed 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.