In the latest example of my hands having far too much time on them (first example), please take some time to look over Exhibit A: a complex PowerPoint diagram I put together to document the intricate character relationships in The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace’s now 25-year-old first novel. (Here’s a link to a legible version.)
BOTS, in an extremely simplified sense, is about Lenore Beadsman, a 20-something underemployed receptionist at the publishing house of Frequent and Vigorous, a job made all the less demanding by Lenore’s relationship status with F&V Chief Executive Richard “Dick” Vigorous (as the kids say, “it’s complicated.”) One day in 1990, Lenore gets a call from a Mr. Bloemker, manager at the Shaker Heights Home, where her great-grandmother (also named Lenore Beadsman) has apparently gone missing, along with another two-dozen patients and staff members. In the company of Dick Vigorous, Lenore goes in search of her missing great-grandmother—both physically and I suppose intellectually—along the way discovering or re-discovering various people in her life and in many cases stumbling across histories or idiosyncrasies they had heretofore failed to disclose.
Continue reading “I made a really detailed graphic explaining all the characters in The Broom of the System, which, incidentally, is a pretty good book”
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