Plot Summary
Whose Story Gets Told
The novel opens with Lenore, a young woman entangled in a world shaped as much by language as reality. Her sense of self is fragmented, influenced by her iconic great-grandmother's Wittgensteinian philosophies and her own quest to locate who she truly is. Visiting her sister's college dorm as a teen, she's treated as innocent and awkward, observing the confidence and vulnerabilities in others, especially as boys and campus rituals intrude. Through her family's legacy and pervasive wordplay, she's left questioning what is real, what is merely said, and whether she exists beyond others' perceptions. Lenore's anxieties about being defined or used by systems—familial, social, or linguistic—set an emotional baseline of alienation and longing for agency.
Disappearance in Shaker Heights
Years later, Lenore's great-grandmother vanishes from a nursing home, along with over twenty residents. The disappearance incites a slow-boiling panic, not just within the institution but across Lenore's fractured family. Lenore, now a telephonist in Cleveland, finds herself enmeshed in corporate secrecy, as her wealthy father asks for discretion and stalling rather than police intervention. The personal search for her 'Gramma,' an important if controlling figure, becomes a metaphor for Lenore's recurring dilemma: how to respond when the people who have defined her identity suddenly vanish, along with whatever certainty she had about herself or her relationships.
Words, Identity, and Control
Through flashbacks, therapy sessions, and internal dialogue, Lenore's crisis deepens. Her great-grandmother's teachings—heavily indebted to Wittgenstein—insist that there is no self outside the act of speaking; that language is both broom and prison, shaping what is real. Lenore's boyfriend Rick, obsessed with narrative and self-reflection, mirrors her uncertainty, as both worry that their lives are simply stories constructed by others. In counseling sessions filled with layered jokes and philosophies, Lenore is prodded: Is there any difference between living and being told? These meta-conversations drive home the destabilization of meaning and the paradox of needing control while being controlled by words.
Rick Loves Lenore
Rick Vigorous, publisher and much older lover to Lenore, narrates his passionate, neurotic, and sometimes suffocating devotion to her. He views love like a linguistic exercise—never inside, always reaching, always craving to "have" Lenore's essence but sensing her resistance and autonomy. Their love is a battleground of possessiveness, misunderstandings, and performance, with Rick alternating between desperate longing and confessional vulnerability. His emotional monologues reveal an obsession with making Lenore his own story—a reflection of his broader desire to control meaning, to keep what he loves from slipping away, but always awakened to the tragic impossibility of true union.
Systems and Symptom-Systems
Around Lenore and Rick swarm a constellation of eccentric characters—family, colleagues, lovers—each illustrating the ways society and language grind individuals into parts of larger "systems." The story parodies corporate, familial, and linguistic structures with satirical detail: a phone system that fails in profoundly personal ways; a city built like a movie star's profile; even an artificial desert manufactured for "hewing" meaning out of cultural softening. Each system, whether it's a family, a business, or a story, becomes a machine that uses people, leaving them anxiously seeking proof that they are more than functions, more than roles—yet also craving the satisfaction that comes only from being of use.
Talking Birds and Secret Recipes
Symbolic chaos erupts when Vlad the Impaler, Lenore's cockatiel, begins to speak—spouting both sacred and obscene phrases. His sudden loquaciousness is tied to experimental baby food laced with mysterious extracts, a project inspired by Lenore's missing great-grandmother. As a televangelist tries to turn the bird into a star, the boundaries blur between authenticity and showmanship, communication and manipulation. Vlad's unpredictable chatter exposes the farcical side of charisma and echoes the novel's worry: what's real, what's performance, and who gets to decide the message?
Lovers and Other Outsiders
A steady drift of characters—Rick, Lang, Mindy, Candy, and others—attempt to connect and belong, with varying degrees of loneliness, betrayal, and comic failure. Former lovers re-enter lives with old wounds; new ones offer possibility or complication but rarely resolution. Couples seek satisfaction, but find the terms of connection are always mediated—by secrets, power games, or simply the inexorable difference of being distinct selves. Every relationship is tinged with longing for a fulfillment that never quite arrives, the feeling that inside/outside, self/other, can never fully meet.
The Desert and Its Meaning
The Great Ohio Desert—a real, government-commissioned expanse of black sand—is more than background; it's a symbol for the emptiness each character must face. Characters wander its edges or strike out for its heart, seeking answers to missing persons or missing meaning. The desert's artificiality mocks the hope that true wilderness (or true feeling) can be manufactured, and its black sands reflect back the emptiness at the center of every system that promises fulfillment but delivers only more wandering, more thirst, more searching.
Family Games and Membranes
The Beadsman family is a psychological minefield. Rituals of "Family Theater," therapy-speak, and blunt confession reveal the layers of masks and roles that define (and trap) each member. Childhood memories, bridge games, and generational traumas replay in endless cycles, reinforcing both connection and helplessness. The family's story is always being rewritten by the elders, who, having lost all external function, obsess over usefulness and language as their last lines of defense. The "membrane" motif—of boundaries, hygiene, who gets inside—is everywhere, dramatizing the impossibility of perfect union and the inescapable need for others.
The Role of Vlad the Impaler
Vlad's improbable rise to TV fame—saying what televangelists and lonely viewers long to hear, sometimes heretically—parodies spiritual longing and media culture. The bird, a symbol for voice without agency, shows how messages can be hijacked, misinterpreted, and commodified. Meanwhile, those who "own" Vlad argue over rights and royalties, missing the irony that the bird's absurd utterances are the clearest truths in the book—a mirror for all the human confusion and performance that surrounds him.
Love, Function, and Usefulness
The story's heart is the search for "use"—to be of use, to be essential, to matter to others. Lenore's great-grandmother believes meaning is use; so do the baby food corporations hawking soul-saving formulas, and the self-help preachers promising satisfaction. Rick wants Lenore as his object and salvation, but is always frustrated by her irreducible otherness. The conclusion that "Jesus shall not want" is echoed by the bird, then ironically appropriated by the TV preacher. All seek the impossible—a love, a job, a word, a story—that will finally satisfy their own deep, word-shaped emptiness.
Connections, Disconnections, Reversals
As the novel's threads tangle and cross, characters return from the past, stories double back, secrets are revealed, and desired connections fail or only half-fulfill. Lang, Mindy, and Lenore's triangle embodies the instability of relationships—we want both closure and endless possibility. Roles reverse: readers become narrators, victims become agents, lovers dissolve. Each push toward unity brings its own negation and loss, reflecting the unreliability of memory, language, and meaning to deliver lasting comfort or truth.
Bombardini's Infinite Self
Bombardini, the landlord, embodies the grotesque desire to fill every emptiness—to grow until there's no room for any other. His decision to eat himself into infinity is a satire of American appetite and the fear of not enough: a parody of every scheme in the book, from business plans to love affairs to spiritual quests. The more he grows, the less he matters—a warning about the dangers of seeking an identity that's total, satisfied, and alone.
Endings, Games, and Beginnings
In the final scenes, relationships fracture and reform, stories come to unsatisfying ends or no end at all. The book's recursive structure loops back to its beginnings, with families, lovers, and friends left partly connected, partly alone. The bird continues to perform. Words swirl. The "system" proves impossible to leave—every effort at union or escape only produces new games, new sentences, new questions. The message—like Vlad's final, nonsense phrases—is ambiguous, open-ended, and, like Lenore herself, never finally defined by any story but her own uncertain voice.
Analysis
In today's world of fractured identities, corporate systems, and media overload, The Broom of the System stands as both a parody and a lament for the search for meaning. Wallace demolishes the comforting illusions of narrative wholeness or romantic union, showing how every system—be it language, family, love, or enterprise—both builds and traps the self. The quest for fulfillment, for being "of use," is revealed as both genuine and comic, a drive that makes us human and yet constantly unsatisfied. Through its eccentric characters and recursive narrative games, the book insists that being alive is being caught in webs of words and desires, never quite knowing whether you are telling or being told, using or being used. Ultimately, the lesson is one of humility and openness: to accept both the limitations and possibilities of our systems, to find dignity not in completion but in the ongoing, ever-revisable work of being—loving, seeking, failing, and telling story after story, even if only to ourselves.
Review Summary
Readers largely admire The Broom of the System as an impressive debut, praising its sharp humor, linguistic acrobatics, and Wittgensteinian philosophical underpinnings. Many note its playful postmodern structure — nested stories, fragmented plot, and self-aware characters — as both its strength and weakness. While some find it uneven or deliberately unresolved, most appreciate its comedic brilliance and thematic ambition. Comparisons to Infinite Jest are inevitable, with several reviewers considering this a fascinating precursor, albeit lighter and more purely comedic than Wallace's later masterwork.
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Characters
Lenore Beadsman
Lenore is the center of the novel's storm—a young telephone operator caught between powerful, eccentric relatives and her own fear of being merely "used." Haunted by her great-grandmother's linguistic determinism, exposed to competing definitions of function, love, and worth, Lenore both resists and yearns for definition. She relives the push and pull of others' stories—family, lovers, corporations, the media—and struggles to assert a self distinct from those stories. Her relationships with Rick and Lang alternate between tenderness, rebellion, and confusion, mirroring her larger crisis: can she be more than what's said or expected of her? Through crisis, loss, and brief joy, her development is less about answers and more about embracing uncertainty, and the never-ending project of telling her own story.
Rick Vigorous
Rick, owner of Frequent & Vigorous Publishing, is in love with both stories and Lenore, but plagued by insecurities about his age and desirability. His neurotic monologues reveal a longing for narrative control and the pain of always being "outside" essential moments. He seeks to define Lenore and possess her, but is continually shut out—by her boundaries, by narrative interruptions, by his own impotence and anxiety. Rick's psychological arc is one of comic suffering and partial growth: learning, through pain, that love and control are opposing forces; that his desire for wholeness is, ultimately, unsatisfiable.
Lenore Beadsman (senior/Gramma)
Lenore's formidable great-grandmother was a student of Wittgenstein, adept at wielding language's power to define reality. Her teachings on words, use, and being haunt the novel—half wisdom, half curse. As leader of the nursing home escape, she pursues her own project of self-definition and system-creation, even as her philosophy offers no safe answers. Symbolic of both liberation and control, she is both inspiration and nemesis to her great-granddaughter, whose sense of self is alternately expanded and shadowed by her legacy.
Stonecipher Beadsman III (Lenore's father)
The head of Stonecipheco Baby Foods, Stonecipher embodies traditional power but is largely absent emotionally. He sees life—and family—through the lens of business, value, and function, and is more reactive than nurturing in crises. His complex relationship with his children—especially Lenore—reflects generational misunderstandings, and his efforts to manage or control only deepen the family's fragmentation. He distrusts ambiguity, yet is continually undermined by it.
Andrew Sealander ("Wang-Dang") Lang
Lang is a college friend, sometime rival, lover, and potential usurper. His Texas bravado and easy plurality of roles (husband, translator, vacationer, agent of company and personal chaos) make him a current of change, both exciting and undermining stable relationships. Psychologically, he represents an appetite for immediacy, for going "outside" prescribed roles, but also brings the risk of disconnection and pain. With Lenore, he is at turns gentle and overwhelming; his own unresolved marriage to Mindy Metalman is a cautionary tale about the impossibility of fixing the past.
Mindy Metalman (Lang's wife)
Mindy, once the object of male fantasy and now the "voice" behind supermarket interfaces, embodies the complex, sometimes cruel interplay between surface and depth, control and vulnerability. Her relationships—with Lang, Rick, and herself—are shaped by a drive for "feature-based" love, but she is also left adrift when those features are lost, taken for granted, or commodified. Her ambition to be omnipresent as a voice is echoed, ironically, by how little she is truly seen or known.
Candy Mandible
Candy's friendship with Lenore offers counsel, comic relief, and occasional complications. Her own shifting romances (with Nick Allied, Lang, others) and her matter-of-fact attitude toward sex and ambition contrast with Lenore's anxieties. Candy is both a resource and, at times, a destabilizer, illustrating the ways friends can both support and unnerve each other in the labyrinth of contemporary adulthood.
Dr. Curtis Jay
Dr. Jay's pseudo-Freudian/Blentnerian therapy sessions are at once therapeutic and comic, exposing the limits of psychological systems. He insists on "membranes" and "breakthroughs," but is as trapped in word-games and neurosis as his clients. He serves as a vehicle for the book's metafictional games, often blurring the distinction between insight and absurdity. He wants to "help" but ends up, like the system he represents, only adding layers to the confusion.
Norman Bombardini
Bombardini, landlord and would-be "infinite" man, undertakes to fill the universe by literally eating himself to limitlessness. Parodic and deeply sad, he represents the dangers of unchecked appetite and isolation—the fantasy that complete fullness will obliterate loneliness, but only brings grotesquerie. Bombardini's attempts at literal and metaphysical fullness mock every character's wish for a universe that is finally "full" of themselves.
Vlad the Impaler
Lenore's cockatiel begins as a background pet but becomes a star—the spiritually "touched" bird who spews out religious, romantic, and obscene phrases. Everyone projects meaning onto Vlad: a truth-teller, a commodity, a sign of the times. He embodies the novel's central anxiety about voice, agency, and meaning: words can fly, but what do they actually signify?
Plot Devices
Fractured Narrative and Metafiction
Wallace employs a fragmented, self-reflexive structure: chapters shift between first and third person, transcripts, therapy sessions, stories submitted to Rick's magazine, and even mock-official documents. Characters tell stories about themselves and others, interrupting the "main" narrative with jokes, dreams, and parodies. This mirrors the book's central anxiety: that lives are stories, always constructed, always subject to revision and interpretation. The narrative structure is both liberation and trap, exposing the limits of control and the impossibility of ever telling—or owning—the "real" story.
Linguistic Play and Wittgensteinian Games
At the heart is a philosophical tension borrowed from Ludwig Wittgenstein: whether the self exists outside of language, and whether stories or identities are anything more than functions of words and use. The broom of the system motif—meaning changes depending on its use—is used in family lessons, therapy, and the company's product marketing. Recurring jokes, puns, and semantic puzzles highlight how language creates reality—and as easily unravels it.
Absurd Plot MacGuffins
The broad mystery of Gramma's vanishing and its connection to experimental language-enhancing baby food drive the plot, but are ultimately revealed as excuses for philosophical and emotional exploration rather than puzzles with satisfactory solutions. The "systems" that control people—corporate, romantic, familial, technological—are revealed in their farcical, tragic, and absurd aspects.
Foreshadowing and Circularity
Early scenes echo later revelations; recurring motifs (the urge for connection, objects as symbols, missing persons, empty systems) forecast subsequent turns without clear linearity. The book ends with reversals and doubled endings, suggesting that stories only fade into others, and no true closure is possible.
Pop and Corporate Satire
From the public spectacle of Vlad's TV stardom to the invention of the Great Ohio Desert and the endless parade of malfunctioning systems, the book satirizes late capitalist America's hunger for meaning, satisfaction, and control. Names of companies, products, and characters burst with irony, suggesting that in a world saturated by commerce and narrative, everything becomes subject to function, parody, and perpetual "rebranding."
