![]() ![]() And like ''Lot,'' it focuses on a woman's quest for knowledge and identity.Īs her name might indicate, Lenore Stonecipher Beadsman is engaged in an effort to decipher the mysteries of the world about her, and she's also trying to figure out exactly who she is. ![]() Like ''Lot,'' it uses stories within stories to examine the relationship between real life and fiction, language and perception. Like ''Lot,'' it features comic and willfully symbolic characters with odd, cutesy names - a publisher named Rick Vigorous a roommate named Candy Mandible, an Amherst student named Stonecipher Beadsman (also known as the Antichrist), and a talking cockateel named Vlad the Impaler. Like ''Lot,'' it attempts to give us a portrait, through a combination of Joycean word games, literary parody and zany picaresque adventure, of a contemporary America run amok. ![]() It's an unwieldy, uneven work - by turns, hilarious and stultifying, daring and derivative - but at the same time, it's a novel that attests to the publishers's committment to risky new fiction and its young author's rich reserves of ambition and imagination.įrom its opening pages onward through its enigmatic ending, ''The Broom of the System'' will remind readers of ''The Crying of Lot 49'' by Thomas Pynchon. This novel, chosen by Viking to kick off its new series of contemporary American fiction, was written by a 24-year-old graduate of Amherst College who is working for his M.F.A. ![]()
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