Wallace’s fictional manuscript and the philosophy thesis were also of a piece: both asked whether language depicted the world or in some deeper way defined it and even altered it. Does our understanding of what we experience derive from objective reality or from cognitive limitations within us? Is language a window or a cage? Of course, Wallace, with his mental travails, wanted a real and truthful view, or at least a benign and playful illusion. There was a favorite example of the vibrant bond between language and objects that Wallace and his friends kicked around in Valentine. Which was the more important part of a broom, the brush or the handle? Most people would say the brush, but it really depended on what you needed the broom for. If you wanted to sweep, then indeed the bristles were the important part; but if you had to break a window, then it was the handle.
Wallace set his story in the near future, 1990, and to give these sorts of philosophical questions an airing, he created twenty-four-year-old Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman, a recent graduate of Oberlin College (though all her female relatives went to Mount Holyoke and all her male ones to Amherst). Like Wallace in college, Lenore is a switchboard operator. And like women in general to Wallace, she is a mystery, a cipher, an erotic object for the male eye. Dressed in a “uniform of white cotton dress and black Converse hightop sneakers,” she is “an unanalyzable and troubling constant,” an uncomfortable soul who “works in neurosis like a whaler in scrimshaw.” At root what worries her is whether she is real or made up. As her boyfriend, Rick Vigorous (Amherst, class of ’69), comments:
She simply felt — at times, mind you, not all the time, but at sharp and distinct intuitive moments — as if she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were, it seemed at such times, not really under her control.
Lenore comes by this anxiety through her genes: her great-grandmother and namesake, Lenore Beadsman, now in her nineties and in a local nursing home, studied with Wittgenstein, from whom she adopted his radically potent idea of the independence of language.12 Says Rick:
She has, from what little I can gather, convinced Lenore that she is in possession of some words of tremendous power. No, really, Not things, or concepts. Words. The woman is apparently obsessed with words. I neither am nor wish to be entirely clear on the matter, but apparently she was some sort of phenomenon in college and won a place in graduate study at Cambridge…. There she studied classics and philosophy and who knows what else under a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words. Really. If your car would not start, it was apparently to be understood as a language problem. If you were unable to love, you were lost in language. Being constipated equaled being clogged with linguistic sediment. To me, the whole thing smacks strongly of bullshit.
He adds, “Words and a book and a belief that the world is words and Lenore’s conviction that her own intimate personal world is only of, neither by nor for, her. Something is not right.”
At novel’s beginning, the older Lenore has disappeared from her nursing home, taking with her many of the other residents. She has left behind a clue, a drawing of a head bursting, as a guide to her whereabouts. Lenore pursues her forebear, Oedipa Maas — like, as she tries to figure out where her great-grandmother went and how this relates to her ontological unease. To accompany Lenore, Wallace gave her a parrot based on his thesis adviser Dale Peterson’s cockatiel, now reimagined as the horrible bird Vlad the Impaler, who quotes scripture and bits of dirty conversation he overhears.
There is another character of importance to Wallace, LaVache Stonecipher. Lenore’s brother, LaVache is a depressive and brilliant Amherst undergraduate, who helps other students with their schoolwork in return for drugs that he hides in his artificial leg. (Wallace claimed that he traded thesis help for pot in school.) LaVache is the cleverest character in the book, smart enough to put Wittgenstein to his own uses. He, for instance, calls his phone “a lymph node,” so that when his father, whom he wishes to avoid, asks if he has a phone, he can honestly say no. Unlike his sister, Lenore, LaVache is protected by his irony and his distance, but simultaneously he is trapped, marginal, without a center: he literally barely has a leg to stand on. He exudes what Wallace would later call “the ‘moral clarity’ of the immature.” “No one expects me to be anything other than what I am,” LaVache says, “which is a waste-product, slaving endlessly to support his leg.” It is hard not to see in him a foreshadowing of Wallace’s soon to be deepening problems. The novel’s title came from a phrase Sally Wallace remembered from her grandmother, who when she would encourage her children to eat an apple would say, “Come on, it’s the broom of the system.” With its overtones of Wittgenstein, the image delighted Wallace.
If Wittgenstein was the obvious philosophical point of departure for Wallace’s book, the literary influences were even clearer. Wallace had a technical mind, and in Broom he reverse-engineers the postmodern novels he was enjoying. The overwhelming influence is Pynchon: from him come the names, the ambience of low-level paranoia, and the sense of America as a toxic, media- and entertainment-saturated land. He took the flat, echoing tone of his dialogue from Don DeLillo, whose novels he had been reading while working on the book. (One night a friend who did part-time work as an Amherst security guard bumped into him at his switchboard working his way through Ratner’s Star.)13 The minute, flirtatious appraisal of women seems borrowed from Nabokov, himself a teacher of Pynchon. The farrago of forms — stories within stories, transcripts of meetings, duty logs, rock medleys, and madcap set pieces — comes from Pynchon too, as well as from other postmodernists like Barthelme and John Barth. When Lenore points out that East Corinth, the suburb of Cleveland she lives in, is meant to look like the outline of Jayne Mansfield seen from the air, it is hard not to think of Oedipa Maas getting her first look at San Narciso, the imaginary city near Los Angeles, which, she muses, resembles a transistor radio circuit board with its “intent to communicate.”14
Pynchon saturates the book’s DNA: he is in the atmosphere of not quite serious corporate intrigue, in the meetings in obscure bars, and the psychiatrists more in need of help than their patients (Dr. Jay shares Lot 49’s Dr. Hilarius’s “delightful lapses from orthodoxy”), so much so that when Wallace gave his manuscript to McLagan, he read a few pages and returned it; he did not have time for a Pynchon rip-off. And yet McLagan was too dismissive. The book is original. It differs from Pynchon in delicate but pervasive ways. Pynchon’s Oedipa Maas is emotionless, surfing above dysfunctional America with a light 1960s sense of indestructibility. By contrast Wallace’s Lenore—“a beautiful, bright, witty, largely joyful albeit troubled and anyway interestingly troubled” girl, as Dr. Jay describes her — strives for contact.15 There is an ache in Broom. If on the surface even lighter than the Pynchon novel, just a bit below it exudes discomfort and yearning. Wallace’s anxiety, his fear of a world in which nothing is rooted, and his intense attempts to understand what women want and how to form a relationship with them (“How do you know when you can kiss her?”) are apparent. The borderline between the self and the other preoccupies: Rick Vigorous’s penis is too small to have sex with Lenore; another character, Norman Bombardini, is so vast he literally tries to eat her, while Lenore herself almost seems as incorporeal as her great-grandmother. The bizarre up-and-down of Wallace’s Amherst life is there too, the school that for Wallace, as for Vigorous, was “a devourer of the emotional middle, a maker of psychic canyons, a whacker of the pendulum of mood with the paddle of Immoderation.” Wallace would in future years dismiss the book as written by “a very smart fourteen-year-old,” but that is unfair: this adolescent is not just smart; he is attempting to communicate.