a “lymph node” so that he can tell his family he does not own a “phone”—and stories proliferate throughout Wallace’s text. The younger Lenore is a switchboard operator for a publishing company, engaged in a halfhearted affair with her boss, Rick Vigorous.

While Lenore feels comforted when Rick reads her the stories he has received for the literary magazine he publishes, she also feels disoriented, imagining that she has no identity except as a character in the stories other people tell about her. A minor character sums up this difficulty of finding a stable identity amid the confusion of an ever-changing world: “How to begin to come to some understanding of one’s place in a system, when one is a part of an area that exists in such a troubling relation to the rest of the world, a world that is itself stripped of any static, understandable character by the fact that it changes, radically, all the time?”

In contrast with critics of Infinite Jest who have complained that that novel lacks narrative resolution, readers of The Broom of the System often feel the novel’s rapid conclusion is too contrived. Whereas Wallace chooses to end Infinite Jest without neatly summing up the story, in his first novel he does not allow readers to forget that their experience of the text is mediated, as the plot that Lenore (and readers) have been attempting to understand through the fragmented pieces of Wallace’s narrative is miraculously explained.

Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way

Published as part of Girl with Curious Hair, Wallace’s novella Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way parodies John Barth’s “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967), a classic metafictional story that debunks the illusion that realistic fiction presents an unmediated view of life. A fictional patricide of its metafictional forefather, Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way presents a cogent account of the absorption of Barth’s once-transgressive metafictional aesthetic by contemporary commercial culture. The story recounts the journey of D. L. Eberhardt and Mark Nechtr to Collision, Illinois, for the televised reunion of every person who has ever appeared in a McDonald’s restaurant commercial. D. L., a self-proclaimed postmodernist who constructs poems made entirely of punctuation, and Mark, a talented but blocked writer, are students of Professor Ambrose (a stand-in for Barth) in the East Chesapeake Tradeschool Creative Writing Program. Accompanying D. L. and Mark is Tom Sternberg, a claustrophobic actor who has one eye turned around in his head, although, the narrator informs us, “he doesn’t talk about what the backward eye sees.”

The other plot line of Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way describes a successful advertising executive’s courting of Professor Ambrose and his scheme to license a nationwide chain of funhouse franchises. While Wallace praises the groundbreaking work of Barth and Coover, he sharply criticizes the imitators of these metafictional masters, who borrow experimental techniques for no substantive thematic purpose. According to Wallace’s diagnosis, television usurped metafiction’s business of irony and self-reference and thus robbed the metafictional novel of its power to critique televisual culture. What worries Wallace in Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way is not Professor Ambrose’s “selling out,” but that “they want to build a Funhouse for lovers out of a story that does not love.”

Infinite Jest

The media frenzy surrounding the publication of Infinite Jest hailed Wallace’s massive novel as the literary spectacle of the 1990’s. Set in a dystopian postmillennial near future—when the calendar is subsidized (years are sponsored: “Year of the Tucks Medicated Pad,” “Year of the Whisper-Quiet Maytag Dishmaster,” “Year of the Depend Adult Undergarment”) and huge catapults launch garbage projectiles into a wasteland referred to in the United States as the Great Concavity and in Canada as the Great Convexity—Infinite Jest presents a huge cast of characters and their stories. As an encyclopedic novel, it is a compendium of filmmaking, pharmacology, postmillennial politics, and literary history, supplemented with hundreds of footnotes that Wallace uses to fracture the surface of the primary text.

One of the novel’s main narrative threads concerns Don Gately, an ex-burglar and oral narcotics addict, who is trying to break his addiction at the Ennet House Drug and Alcohol Recovery House (the redundancy is telling). The other major story chronicles the elite Incandenza family: Hal, a tennis prodigy who memorizes dictionaries; his two brothers, Orin, a professional football punter, and Mario, a dwarf; and their father, James, an “après-garde” filmmaker who apparently committed suicide by sticking his head in a microwave oven.

To deal with his loneliness after his father’s suicide, Hal loses himself in tennis and drugs, a pattern that is replicated throughout the novel, as every character struggles with some form of addiction. The novel’s title, which alludes to Hamlet’s graveyard tribute to Yorick from William Shakespeare’s 1600-1601 play, refers to the title of one of James’s films, which showcases an entertainment so spectacular that anyone who watches it becomes instantly addicted. Enraged by U.S. president Johnny Gentle’s plan to catapult American garbage into their country, a group of wheelchair-bound Canadian assassins plan to disseminate the tape in the United States.

The mysterious film features Joelle van Dyne, who was Orin’s girlfriend before he lost her to his father; in the novel’s present, she is a radio host who appears at Ennet House after a suicide attempt, where Don falls in love with her. Despite numerous connections between different narrative threads, the novel eludes a clear-cut ending, circling instead back to its beginning. Near the end of the novel, Wallace posits an inclusive vision of a “radical realism” that contains “every single performer’s voice” in the foreground. To Wallace’s credit, the novel, which contains at least fifteen different points of view, does not degenerate into meaningless chaos. Like James Incandenza’s “anticonfluential” film, Wallace’s Infinite Jest has been called “a stubborn and possibly intentionally irritating refusal of different narrative lines to merge into any kind of meaningful confluence,” reflecting Wallace’s refusal to reduce the complexities of his characters’ lives artificially into a neat resolution.