By Michael O’Connell

Featured Art by Claire Bateman

David Foster Wallace is often discussed as a regional writer; critics have focused on the ways his fiction and nonfiction depict both the northeast (in Infinite Jest) and the midwest, primarily his sometime-home of Illinois. But what is often overlooked is that his first novel, The Broom of the System, is an Ohio novel. Although Wallace didn’t have any concrete ties to the state (he grew up in Illinois, and was living in Massachusetts when he first drafted the novel), he chose to set the book in the Cleveland area, for the same reason that so many writers use Ohio as a setting—because it serves as a synecdoche for America itself. Shortly after the novel’s release, he told an interviewer that he had never actually been to Cleveland, but as “a middle-westerner. . . he wanted a heartland city that he could imagine instead of describe.” In Wallace’s imaginative vision of the “heartland,” Ohio is, as one character describes it, “both in the middle and on the fringe. The physical heart and the cultural extremity.” He goes on to claim that “we feed and stoke and supply a nation much of which doesn’t know we exist. A nation we tend to be decades behind, culturally and intellectually.” This is a division that Wallace explores in much more depth and detail in many of his nonfiction pieces, such as “The View from Mrs. Thompson’s,” “Getting Away From Already Being Pretty Much Away From It All,” and “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley,” all of which use the midwestern locale to interrogate what it means to be a true American.

In Broom, Wallace uses the heartland setting to explore many of the thematic elements that are central to his later writing (some more successfully than others—it is very much an apprentice work). The central plot, such as it is, revolves around 24-year-old Lenore Beadsman, who must negotiate being surrounded by a variety of hideous men (including her boyfriend/boss, her landlord, and her therapist), while searching for her great-grandmother, a former student of Wittgenstein, who has escaped from her Shaker Heights nursing home. The novel also interrogates the idea of what constitutes reality; Lenore in particular is worried that she is just a construct of language, and that “she had no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera, and that these were . . . not really under her control.” Wallace later distanced himself from the novel, calling it “a sensitive little self-obsessed bildungsroman” written when he was “a young 22.” Michiko Kakutani accurately described Broom as “an unwieldy, uneven work—by turns, hilarious and stultifying, daring and derivative.” She notes how Wallace takes on “serious philosophical and literary discussions” while also getting sidetracked by “repetitious digressions, and nonsensical babbling that reads like out-takes from a stoned, late-night dormitory exchange.” This is a fair critique, but as with many a late-night stoner conversation, there are certain elements that can hold up to closer scrutiny in the sober light of day.

Personally, one aspect of Broom that I find particularly intriguing is the way it gestures toward the more mature spiritual insights of his later work, and how central the Ohio locale is to this. Indeed, the state name is incorporated into the novel’s most innovative and striking symbol: the Great Ohio Desert (or G.O.D.). In the novel’s fictional timeline, the G.O.D. was manufactured in the early 1970s by the governor of Ohio in order to unsettle the deep-seated apathy that he claims has infected the state. He tells his aides, “Guys, the state is getting soft . . . It’s getting to be one big suburb and industrial park and mall . . . People are getting complacent.” He wants to build a desert in central Ohio to remind its citizens of the way “this state was historically hewn out of the wilderness,” and to serve as “a point of savage reference for the people of Ohio . . . An Other for Ohio’s Self.” As a deliberately engineered ecological deformity of the landscape, the G.O.D. anticipates the biohazard of the Great Concavity in Infinite Jest, and serves as a pointed social critique of both American materialism and political malfeasance.

Although the G.O.D. was created to be a hard and lonely place, it quickly becomes just one more commodified and commercialized space. In the present day of the novel, just 18 years after the desert’s creation, it is already marked by the presence of “concession stands at the rim,” and we learn that “the really desolate areas can get pretty crowded, of course.” Access to the G.O.D. is relatively easy: “you can just buy a Wander Pass at any gate. They’re only about five dollars.” Wallace is making the somewhat obvious point that in American society, anything and everything, including (perhaps particularly) religion, falls prey to commerce. It is certainly relevant that the mid-80s, when Wallace was working on Broom, coincided with the rise (and fall) of televangelists like Jimmy Swaggart and Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker, marrying pseudo-religious insights and commercialism. (Wallace actually incorporates a televangelism subplot into Broom—Lenore’s talking pet cockatiel ends up as part of “The Partners with God Club” TV program, where he spouts ironically profane lines in dialogue with the preacher.)

But Wallace is not simply using the G.O.D. to critique the nature of American religion, or to draw connections between religion and politics. Although Wallace is clearly critical of the political machinations that led to the creation of the G.O.D. (they wipe out a number of local communities in order to create the desert), and the way all spaces in America become commodified, the G.O.D. is still a unifying force in the novel, serving as the location for the climax. After 400+ pages, where the G.O.D. has lingered persistently in the background, in the penultimate scene of the book Lenore and her boyfriend Rick and a few other characters finally end up in the crowded desert. (“‘Jesus, Rick, look at this crowd. How are we supposed to get through all this?’ ‘They’re just waiting for the shuttle to the interior wastes.’”) Lenore believes her grandmother might be out there somewhere; Rick, on the other hand, uses the trip as an excuse to try to lock down their troubled relationship. (He literally handcuffs himself to Lenore, declaring “We are now joined, my center and reference! In negation and discipline! Our bodies are husks!”) Although the entire scene is absurd, and played for laughs—Lenore is not in actual danger, since she has friends at hand who immediately come to her aid—there is a sort of truth that is revealed here in the desert. One of Lenore’s continual worries throughout the book is that she is a construct of language and lacks a material reality; being handcuffed to Rick proves her corporeality. As he declares, “If she weren’t three-dimensional, she wouldn’t be caught!”

Although the Ohio governor, when describing his vision for the G.O.D., claimed that it would be marked by “Desolation. A place for people to wander alone. To reflect. Away from everything,” the reality of the space is that it becomes a tourist trap where it is impossible to be alone. But, still, Lenore is awakened to a crucial insight in this space—and it comes about precisely because she is not alone. The physial connection, however unwanted, proves that she is not simply a product of the discourses around her. This stands in contrast to the final scene in the book, which incorporates a transcript of “The Partners with God Club” televangelist program, in which the preacher invites his audience to “become a partner’’ with him (by sending him money and thereby “join[ing] here tonight, together, in the electronic soil of faith today”). He then asks the audience to place their hands on their televisions, to join together in touch, through the screen: “Let us all place our hands together in the electronic soil.” Of course, there is no actual connection being made here (the scene points toward the alienating effects of media, a central theme in Infinite Jest); the lack of immediate physical contact is the deliberate inverse of what takes place with Lenore in the G.O.D. But there is a similar underlying impulse at work in both—the desire to escape our inherent loneliness and

foster true communion with another person. Wallace identifies this desire at the heart of human nature, connects it explicitly to God, and gives it pride of place in the climactic scenes of the book.

I find this ending particularly compelling, because here we have Wallace concluding his first novel with two parallel scenes, both overtly invoking religious imagery and implying that what we are yearning for is some form of transcendence that can both ground us and connect us. A few years later, around the time of the publication of Infinite Jest, he laments that his fellow novelists keep “an ironic distance from deep convictions or desperate questions,” claiming that his contemporaries, particularly writers of “literary fiction,” write about faith and metaphysics and ethics only ironically, if they address such subjects at all. In his later work he will, at times, write about such things with open sincerity, but it is worth noting that here, in this first novel, he cannot yet do so. His depictions of both Rick’s madness and the televangelist’s phoniness are draped in irony, and point toward the limitations of the American religious inclination. But these scenes also demonstrate how central this spiritual yearning is, both to American identity and to Wallace’s own literary imagination, even here at the beginning of his career.

As many Wallace readers know, via his Kenyon Commencement address “This is Water,” if nothing else, there is a strong religious impulse in his writing (the book David Foster Wallace and Religion, edited by Michael McGowan and Martin Brick, does a good job exploring this dimension of his work). In his more mature fiction, particularly the unfinished novel The Pale King, Wallace writes about the Desert Fathers, and the wisdom of the desert, as a way to come to understand the relationship between the self and the divine, so it is fascinating that in his apprentice work he already intuits the significance of the desert in the spiritual quest. In this sense, his entire fictional project is bookended by these depictions of the search for God in the desert. In Broom, Wallace uses the G.O.D. to both critique America’s shortcomings while also gesturing toward the very real desire for spiritual- ity that is at the heart of America. And it is surely no accident that Wallace chose Ohio as the heartland setting for his first novel; after all, one could not create the G.O.D. without including Ohio at the literal center of the project.

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Michael O’Connell is a writer, editor, and educator who lives in Ann Arbor. He is the author of Startling Figures: Encounters with American Catholic Fiction (Fordham University Press, 2023) and editor of Conversations with George Saunders (University Press of Mississippi, 2022). He is also co-editor of The Journal of David Foster Wallace Studies.