These weird tales - of a woman who has a tree toad living in a small hollow in her neck, or of children who can die from uncontrollable crying jags - depict families in distress. Though such Chinese boxes are mere staples of metafiction, Rick's stories have a more interesting pattern, one Lenore can't see. Wallace seems to ask, between the real Lenore and the masked version in Rick's stories? And, by extension, what's the difference between the real-life reader and Lenore in ''The Broom of the System''? To her, those stories are the means by which Rick tries to control her given Gramma's theories, Lenore might as well be a character in Rick's thinly veiled autobiographical tales. Beyond the comic narration of her life, there are excerpts from Rick's journal, transcripts of Lenore and Rick's individual sessions with their mutual psychiatrist, the stories Rick tells Lenore. (''Women need space, too,'' squawks the bird.) The heart of the novel, though, is its verbal extravagance and formal variations, reflecting Lenore's belief that language creates and imprisons her. I think that's why his head's exploded, here.'' She also suspects a connection between Gramma's disappearance and the way Lenore's pet cockateel, Vlad the Impaler, has a new, enlarged vocabulary. is supposed to be whether the barber shaves himself.
(The family business is Gerber's top rival.) It depicts, Lenore guesses, ''the barber who shaves all and only those who do not shave themselves. Her precious notebook from Wittgenstein's class has vanished as well, but Gramma has left other clues behind, such as the ominous drawing scrawled on a label from a Stonecipheco Baby Food jar. When Gramma Lenore disappears from her room at the old folks' home, the search for her provides the book's flimsy plot. Her friends hang out at Gilligans Isle, a theme bar her grandfather designed a Cleveland suburb in the precise outline of Jayne Mansfield's body her brother Stonecipher Beadsman IV is nicknamed the Antichrist and her boyfriend, Rick Vigorous, half of the publishing firm of Frequent and Vigorous, is insane about Lenore but impotent when he's with her, so he tells her stories as a substitute for sex. The confused heroine is 24-year-old Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman who, despite her proximity to the sinister G.O.D., has a ridiculous life. So ''The Broom of the System'' is an enormous surprise, emerging straight from the excessive tradition of Stanley Elkin's ''Franchiser,'' Thomas Pynchon's ''V,'' John Irving''s ''World According to Garp.'' As in those novels, the charm and flaws of David Foster Wallace's book are due to its exuberance - cartoonish characters, stories within stories, impossible coincidences, a hip but true fondness for pop culture and above all the spirit of playfulness that has slipped away from so much recent fiction.Ĭleveland in 1990 - the setting for most of the story - borders the Great Ohio Desert (or G.O.D.), a man-made area filled with black sand, meant to restore a sense of the sinister to Midwestern life. I believe that less is less, fat fat, thin thin and enough is enough.'' Today, nearly a dozen years later, the very mention of a first novel by a 24-year-old barely out of college might make a reader say, ''enough is enough'' - enough pared down, world-weary creative writing projects. Elkin said, ''because I don't believe less is more.
''I had to fight him tooth and nail in the better restaurants to maintain excess,'' Mr. STANLEY ELKIN, an author never accused of being a minimalist, once recalled his defense when an editor advised, ''Stanley, less is more.''
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