Review: The Broom of The System by David Foster Wallace, and some chat about Goodreads :-)
I’ve pained and obsessed over the recognition of genius in others for a long time now and finally feel like I’ve made some progress in my own thoughts: this is the most I will ever have to say about a book I read only a third of before giving up.
This, this, a story told to me with all the confidence of a young man so filled with self-belief and enthusiasm for a tale that he might well explain the entire plot of a film he enjoyed to me after I had just answered ‘Yes, I did see it.’ [1]
To those of you who identified a general “first-book-problem-feel”, the following: almost completely paraphrased, apart from the DFW bits- I made them up obvs.
Robert McKee says: There must be an inciting incident very early on in the story- if possible, in the very first scene. If a scene does not progress your story, it is there most likely for background information. Cut it out! Find another way to put in that information.
DFW says: There must be an inciting incident at some point, surrounded by volumes of superfluity that wrap it up in 100 pages of background information before the next plot point arises. Tell the story out of order for no apparent reason, undercutting almost all story progressions you have. For example, if two characters are going to date, show them in bed together, and then explain how they first met- since your audience already knows that they are together, the excitement will instead come from… from um… [2]
Robert McKee says: it doesn’t need to be cut out of your story if it isn’t advancing the plot only if you are being funny.
DFW says: Exactly! Just as well I’m always funny.
(I say: this in particular strikes me as a bit of a risk. Occasionally hilarious, sometimes very funny, but frequently incomprehensible and at that point, since it doesn’t advance the plot, purely self-indulgent. Depending on how much you weight each of these properties might well determine your overall enjoyment- that’s something I can’t predict for sure.)
Anton Chekhov says: Cut a good story anywhere, and it will bleed.
DFW says: Hide your story under a thick callus, that chapters may be shorn off in their entirety with no harm done whatsoever to the sequence of events.
Anton Chekhov says: Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it’s not going to be fired, it shouldn’t be hanging there.
DFW says: Lay guns on the floor, the walls, cover your characters in guns and meticulously detail every occasion on which they ever encountered a gun. May none of them go off.
[The developers of the game Half-Life 2] say: Give the player a hint of the true depth of the world, and let them fill in the rest themselves.
DFW says: The first gun that Lenore ever encountered was a Smith & Wesson M&P22 with a scratch on the hilt from where her father snatched it off her at age 11 and it scraped on the steel buckle of his Versace patent leather belt given to him as a present by Lenore’s great grandmother on the… And the second gun she ever encountered was… and the gun’s owner was…
Stephen King (On Writing) says: I’m not particularly keen on writing which exhaustively describes the physical characteristics of the people in the story and what they’re wearing… I’d rather let the reader supply the faces, the builds, and the clothing as well… if I describe (my Carrie), it freezes out yours, and I lose a little bit of the bond of understanding I want to forge between us. Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s. When it comes to actually pulling this off, the writer is much more fortunate than the filmmaker, who is almost always doomed to show too much… including, in nine cases out of ten, the zipper running up the monster’s back.
DFW says: the zipper was of stainless steel (that is a steel alloy with a minimum of 10.5% chromium content by mass) manufactured by…
Anton Chekhov says: Don’t tell me the moon is shining; show me the glint of light on broken glass.
DFW says: Tell me the moon is shining, its angle, proportions, the exact hue and how it relates personally to each of the characters and the first time they saw the moon and how exactly the moon has and will always affect them because when they were five their mother first used bad language in front of them on the vernal equinox. This is what is known as “characterisation”.
Marina Abramović says: To be a young and famous artist is the killer.
DFW says: To be a young and famous artist is- the goal!
Ira Glass says: (well, all of this, worth a watch for storytellers)
DFW says: Hehehe. Wait, seriously?
Samuel R. Delany in Dhalgren says: Should I triumph over my laziness, I suspect I would banish all feeling for economical expression which is the basis of style. If I overcame my bitterness, I’m afraid my work would lose all wit and irony. Were I to defeat my power-madness, my craving for fame and recognition, I suspect my work would become empty of all psychological insight, not to mention compassion for others who share my failings. Minus all three, we have work only concerned with the truth, which is trivial without those guys that moor it to the world that is the case.
DFW says: (weepily a la Renee Zellwegger) You lost me at “economical expression”.
I’ve kept my own writing mostly well-hidden, never seriously pursued publication and pained about not adhering to all of these rules, but here’s someone who starts writing at the same age as me, can gleefully forget about all of them and be praised to high heaven (I will explain how to handle this kind of jealousy in due course).
This is the heart of postmodernism. Or wait, is it? All these things I seem to have collected after the age of 22, as a somewhat crude but nonetheless useful comparison. None of the writing seemed to be to be a knowledgeable revelation of the conceits of storytelling, it was much more accidental. As an example, I have a friend who works as a camera technician and made a postmodernist short film that was really good, but he wondered why his boss advised him not to use Godard’s techniques in future- well, you need to know the rules before you can break them, this we know. It’s not that I have a problem with the rules being broken, it’s my suspicion that they went by unknown. And I have grown to believe and maintain that “quirk” in storytelling is some form of enemy.
To use DFW’s analogy, the different parts of a broom might indeed be useful for different applications, but in this case we shouldn’t be forced to choose parts. Without enough glue to hold the thing together, I don’t know what it is, but it’s not a broom.
Back to the jealousy: if you want to be jealous of someone, you have to be jealous of everything, so the aphorism goes. Wallace fans should most definitely read Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself where his suffering, self-doubt and unenviable smoking and junk food habits come to light- and by the way, not the useful Proustian suffering or the brand of anger-fuel that stokes Dostoyevsky’s creativity furnace, but a kind of useless almost Scottish yawning stretch of misery, so it seems to me. And let’s talk about that too. A book like this, so sprawling, warm and large can only come from a similar country- as a Scot, I’ve chosen the wrong role model. And the chapters with the short story ideas: what’s his point? Have you never had a failed short story concept? If they were chapters in Broom that just consisted of the short story I’d still want them excised and put somewhere else, but at least then it would make sense but no, it’s like a treatment that’s been halfheartedly converted into a convenient conversation, yet more evidence that this is a work far from a British claustrophobic minimalism that would be more interesting for me at least.
In the pointless self vs. DFW that I conducted, I’ve since decided that it’s noble to do any work well, and competition is far too diffuse for exact comparisons between any of us- what a relief. This is most apparent in artistic circles, but I see it extending to work of any form. This of course you already knew but as a scientist I’m not one to believe something without witnessing the evidence.
Finally: Screenwriter Larry Cohen says: Anything in life is going to be disastrous for you if you live your life to please other people… (and all the rest here at 5:00 min onwards)
So, best of luck to all individuals doing anything! We’re all trailblazers in our own way, and even when our disciplines don’t lend themselves to fame, we’ll know when we’ve caught the big fish, and ultimately that might be the extent of our satisfaction. That will be good enough for us!
If you found any of this useful, it’s a greater joy that you did so than that you read it from me, and that was the anxiety release of 1/3 of The Broom of The System.
[1] As I go on to discuss, apparently info-dumping is fine now. Here are some thoughts on Goodreads reviews in general.
I’m a chemical engineer but I don’t understand the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy is disorder and disorder always increases, you cannot make a 100% efficient heat engine. Fine, but I don’t know what that means.
Entropy is defined as follows:
dS = dQ/T
That is, an infinitesimal change in disorder is equal to an infinitesimal change in heat divided by absolute temperature. Fine. But I don’t know what that means.
That doesn’t make me a bad chemical engineer. And I can use the Second Law because it’s been written down and understood by someone else, but that still doesn’t mean that I understand it.
Why, if you are a writer or otherwise, would you need to love and understand every enormous complex book that comes your way? Would you need to pretend to understand it, ever?
There was a code implanted in my brain that set off quite recently and programmed me to voraciously consume and purge out art. I mean to say that 2+ years ago when I never needed to care about writing fiction I only read Murakami about 2 maybe 3 times a year, because his were the only books that resonated with me. I used to enter bookshops and think ‘Wow, look at all these books- who the hell reads all of this? I’ll have one Murakami, please.’ And that was just dandy. It is no surprise to me that if now programmed to read 100 books/yr I genuinely like/love about 5 of them and understand around 20-25, depending on how many enormous complex meticulously WTF books I have chosen to read that year. And that’s just fine. And in trash there are moments of greatness, and in “really important works” sometimes there’s none at all. And that’s just fine too. Reading anything is just what you’re doing right now, it’s scanning your eyes left to right over a bunch of ordered letters, no matter what those letters seem to communicate.
It’s no secret to either of us that the reason we communicate on this site is not through an interest in how respectively clever or verbacious either of us are- I submit that such an interest would only serve to distance us. Why then, if that is true, would that change for writing reviews or fiction?
[2] In …Becoming Yourself he will suggest that the non-linearity of his writing reflects the non-linearity of modern life. Yet Robert Musil writes in an extended musing in The Man Without Qualities that “our activities no longer follow a logical sequence” in 1000+ pages of linearly-structured albeit Modernist prose. I suspect that Wallace’s non-linearity is part of his apparent fondness for quirks.
