The Broom of the System

Intelligent and hilarious

David Foster Wallace is at his best when he has a full novel's worth of space to develop characters and plotlines. Compared to Infinite Jest, The Broom of the System is remarkably easy to read, while still remaining intellectually stimulating. The characters are fraught with psychological issues (illuminated by a similarly disordered psychiatrist). Best of all, it has several stories within the story, all of which explore the unifying theme of the limitations of language and definition. Then, of course, there are the parts that made me laugh out loud, and the parts that I would remember months later and crack a smile.

2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

one for the ages

this is such a great book. the ending is so great it leaves you guessing. my advice is to grab anything by dfw!

1 out of 2 people found this review helpful.

The greatest book I've ever read

With The catcher in the rye,it's one of my favourite books.

Had to force myself to finish it

This book is more a study of personalities than a story. The plot is very thin, the characters are unbelievable, the setting is unrealistic. I've read absurdist literature before, so I kept on reading this book, hoping it would go somewhere, but even fairy tales have better plots than this did!

Odd and confusing, but not horrible.

This was another odd one, and I really don't know what to say about it. It was pretty good, but at times it made no sense whatsoever.

Lenore seemed to be a bit dense at times. She just didn't seem to grasp what was going on most of the time. Her boyfriend Rick was teetering on crazy! Her therapist was nuts himself. Her brother and Wang Dang Lang were the most down-to-earth people in the story. And with one being a genius and the other with the name Wang Dang Lang... how down-to-earth can they really be?

I don't know if my lack of connection with this one was because it was an audiobook or if it was because it was just a little to out there for me. I understood the basic theme to the book, but even with the "broom" sweeping the system the story was just plain odd. The characters were really not believable, and the short stories interlaced throughout were distracting. They did serve a purpose in giving insight into how Rick was thinking/feeling, but I think it could have been done much more effectively.

The narrator was ok in this one. A few of the voices he did were off as to how I had them in my head, but he wasn't monotonous to listen to and he did use voices to help differentiate who was talking.

A review copy of this book was provided by the publisher. This is not a paid review and is a truthful and honest review.

Perhaps better as a bound book rather than an audiobook?

Oh my. I really don't even know how to summarize this book. Uh...a woman's grandmother goes missing from a nursing home, her excessively verbose boyfriend becomes overly insecure with their relationship and problems existing within their relationship become evident, the past returns, a bird becomes an evangelist, phone lines are crossed, alternate dimensions discovered...uh...that's just a little taste of what is going on in this thing.

This audio book was like a story with ADD. It was so hard for me to follow what was going on. So many characters and times that went all over the place. I don't know how much of my difficulty in following the story was the fact that it was an audio book rather than the written word. There were a lot of one-sided conversations and recitation of old documents and transcripts, strange dialogue and rambling stories.

However, on a positive note, moments of the book exuded a quirky dialogue that I loved!

There were also outrageously named characters like (all spelled phonetically, since this was an audiobook, so I've never seen their names written):

Peter Abbit (Peter Rabbit?)
Judith Preeth (Judas Priest?)
Rick Vigorous

Do you have any idea how much I DISLIKE Rick Vigorous?! Jeez, his babbling stories drove me nuts. He is a very annoying man.

I had high hopes for this story, as I had heard such good things about it. But holy moley! To me this was just a babbling mess with about 5 different storylines wrapped up in one story. And not in a neat and brilliant sort of way, but in a mish-mash of confusion. And I don't even know what to make of the ending. It felt like everything was left open-ended with nothing resolved. It felt like there was NO ending-- it just broke midway through the storyline. Perhaps if I had read this story instead of listening to the audiobook I may have a different takeaway and it would make more sense to me. But as it is, the audiobook made absolutely NO sense to me at all!

So I was not a fan of this one, but that's just me. There are obviously plenty of people out there who disagree with me and feel that this was a brilliant story! But for me, it shone dimly.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.

No text was provided for this review.