Wallace's aesthetic ideas regarding the purpose of the novel fuse with his stylistic strategies. In fact, Wallace deploys literary techniques only in the service of his novels' central concern of writer-reader communication—excepting, perhaps, for some of his more overdetermined gags! Wallace's novels are at times less novels than they are composites of fragmented discourse. The Broom of the System itself is comprised of hospital duty logs, an evangelical Christian television show dialogue, journal entries, transcripts of meetings between politicians, transcripts of meetings between a psychologist and his patients, newspaper articles, and even fictional submissions to Rick Vigorous's creative-writing journal, which stories Vigorous faithfully retells to Lenore.

All of which combine to make an incredibly engaging and entertaining read, although in turn make it correspondingly complex and difficult to follow.

Again, however, Wallace contends that reader exertion is central to serious fiction's purpose of literary redemption. As...