DFW

Since no one is going to mention David Foster Wallace's first novel, The Broom of the System, I will. I mistakenly took a class in college in my standard way: force-add whatever class would take me, regardless of whether it was required or relevant to my major (which, to this day, I'm not sure I ever declared one, maybe English, but likely not, given the alarming syntax in this post which I'm too lazy to fix. At.). I was in this Modern Writers 451 or something, with this prof who looked like Cedric Hardwicke in Rope, but who would wear a Navajo print vest around. There was some other putz in the class who only wanted to talk about Wittgenstein, and this guy and Professor Pince-Nez would drolly go back and forth, their lofty repartee floating far, far over my Goebel-saturated head.

One of the required texts was The Broom of the System and it was quite enjoyable, particularly the heroine's one-legged brother LaVache ("the cow"?") who was incomprehensibly brilliant but lazy, so would write all his frat brothers' papers for them, providing they would slide drugs into a drawer he had installed in his wooden leg. "Feed the leg," he'd say, expecting a baggie of mushrooms.

The book in toto was sort of a college-age version of Duluth by Gore Vidal, with a great desert near Cleveland and all sorts of other just-slightly-off-reality ephemera all set up to obfuscate the basic plot of our heroine Lenore's Search For Love.

I quite loved this book, and still bring it up when the conversation turns to Wallace.

Plus, his excoriation of Updike in a Consider the Lobster essay almost turned me against the Bard of Shillington for about 11 seconds after reading it. Then I took a deep breath, said "what a asshole" [sic] under my breath and went out to face the day.