Bruce[,] here I feel compelled to remind you that fiction therapy in order to be at all effective must locate itself and operate in a strenuously yes some might even say harshly limited defined structured space. It must be confronted as text which is to say fiction which is to say project.
Bruce, unrepentant, answers, “This kind of fiction doesn’t interest me,” and lays out his manifesto for a different sort of writing (and a new sort of relationship):
No more uni-object concepts, contemplations, arm clover breath, heaving bosoms, histories as symbol, colossi; no more man, fist to brow or palm to décolletage, understood in terms of a thumping, thudding, heated Nature, itself conceived as colored, shaped, invested with odor, lending meaning in virtue of qualities. No more qualities. No more metaphors. Gödel numbers, context-free grammars, finite automata, correlation functions and spectra. Not sensuously here, but causally, efficaciously here. Here in the most intimate way…. I admit to seeing myself as an aesthetician of the cold, the new, the right, the truly and spotlessly here.
As the miles roll by, Bruce struggles to hold on to his vision of a fiction whose “meaning will be clean” between the harangues of his ex and his writing teacher. The story finishes in a more traditional mode, when Bruce tries to rewire his relatives’ broken stove, only to discover that, despite his degree in engineering from MIT, he has no idea how the device works. But at this point the reader suspects another parody, a subversion of the MFA-perfect trope of the stove as symbol of hearth and family, of the tidy ending.
When Wallace presented “Here and There” for comment in Penner’s workshop, the students were impressed. They were struggling to fit themselves within the boundaries of the well-made story; he was struggling to get out of them. But Penner considered the story “talky, slow and boring.”12 Wallace next presented “Love,” a story within a story from Broom, about a conversation between characters named Donald and Evelyn Slotnik and their neighbor Fieldbinder about another neighbor who may have been stalking the Slotniks’ son. The third story was “Solomon Silverfish,” the tale of a lawyer whose wife is dying of cancer. For most of its nearly thirty pages, the story adheres closely — even mockingly — to the rules of narrative. Points of view alternate obediently among the characters; each one speaks in an identifiable voice: “Sophie is Solomon’s life and vice-versa, Mrs. Solomon thinks, Thirty-two years of such luck and happiness she did not even know how to begin thanking God on her knees.” But the last scene erupts into a Malamud-like moment of magic, a rapturous lovemaking in a cemetery as witnessed by Too Pretty, a pimp, high on heroin, who happens to drive by:
I be sittin up straight in my ride, and she be doin my man standin up, they be doin each other like children, too clean, too happy, my mans ass on marble, and theres no noise I can hear but my breathin and…this high thin whine of the burnin gate and the stones that be flashin a fire of they own light in the sun.
“There’s a fine and moving story here, David,” Penner wrote his student in response. “It’s about half this long.”13 A conservative Jew himself, Penner found Wallace’s idea of Jews as targets of comedy “mildly offensive” and remembers wondering why Wallace kept submitting stories about people of his own religion to him. Other students assumed it was Wallace’s attempt to get under the skin of a professor who was not giving him the praise he expected. If so, it may have worked. Penner saw the talent that Wallace possessed and felt he was misusing it. At one point, he took Wallace aside and told him that if he continued to write the way he was writing “we’d hate to lose you.”14
Penner thought he was giving Wallace just the sort of help he had come to Arizona for, but Wallace was flabbergasted and furious, and also excited. As often when goaded, he fought back with humor. He liked to sit around with friends, imitating Penner’s mannerisms; the hemorrhoid pillow the teacher brought to class was fair game. He joined Penner’s Sunday basketball games. Wallace no longer threw a timid hook shot. He enjoyed battling his professor in the pebbleless paint. (Penner was famous for scrupulously sweeping the court before a game.)
In December, when a small studio opened in a row of bungalows on East Adams Street where several of the other writing students lived, Wallace moved. He brought his books and towels to the “casita.” The rent was cheap and Walden’s new puppy, Jonson, could spend the night with them there. (The North Cherry Avenue apartment building had prohibited pets.) The bungalow had only a swamp cooler, and Wallace, who sweated heavily even when he wasn’t in the grip of anxiety, took to wearing his tennis bandana off the court. As the months passed at Arizona, he let his hair grow; the bandana became useful to hold it back. The look felt right — part of his rejection of midwestern conformity, a light shock to the bourgeoisie that also kept the sweat off his face — and he began trying out various headscarves to see others’ reaction. Sometimes he borrowed Walden’s. One day he poached a turquoise sash from Heather Aronson and wore it around his head. Her sister Jaci, who also lived in town, told him he looked like a member of Kajagoogoo.
Wallace thought he was doing new and stimulating work at Arizona. The Broom of the System belonged to his creative past, but he understood the importance of getting it into print. He did not want to wait any longer to make his mark. He asked around for a teacher who would be willing to read it and make some suggestions for how to improve it, but no one offered. The prospect of spending time on a large undergraduate project of postmodernist tendencies did not appeal to the faculty. So, soon after arriving, Wallace asked Boswell to help. Boswell, who had been a star student in the program, made suggestions for the novel and also told Wallace he should get an agent. He suggested his friend send fifteen pages of the work to fifteen different literary agencies and see who responded first. A little more than a month after getting to Tucson, Wallace had a draft of the novel ready to submit. His cover note was coy:
I’ve been advised by people who seem to be in a position to know that The Broom of the System is not only entertaining and salable but genuinely good, especially for its being the first major project of a very young writer (though no younger than some — Ellis, Leavitt — whose fiction has done well partly because of readers’ understandable interest in new, young writing).
He enclosed a chapter from the middle of the book, explaining that to send the beginning would only confuse the reader, “since the novel itself isn’t really constructed in an entirely linear, diachronic way.” Perhaps he had also learned from his experience with Penner that certain chapters might not prepare readers for the medley of parody, philosophy, and Wittgensteinian teases that followed. One of the agencies the package went to was Frederick Hill Associates in San Francisco, where Bonnie Nadell, a new associate who had worked in the subsidiary rights department at Simon & Schuster when Less Than Zero was published, opened it. Nadell liked the cocky tone of the letter and was impressed by the term “diachronic,” which she did not know. She read the chapter and responded to its energetic comic voice. It reminded her of Pynchon, whom she had studied in college. Nadell asked for more pages. Wallace sent her the balance, and soon afterward she took the novel on. When the two first spoke by phone, Wallace called her “Ms. Nadell,” until he found out she was only a year older than he. He had so little cash he asked her to make a copy of the manuscript for him. “I defy you to picture a boy living on Ritz crackers and grape Kool-Aid…and be unmoved.” Nadell had no money either and instead got a friend at a publisher to photocopy it.