To illustrate this idea, Wallace uses different formats to build the story, including transcripts from television recordings and therapy sessions, as well as an accompanying fictional account written by one of the main characters, Rick Vigorous.

The manager of the nursing home, David Bloemker, repeatedly expresses himself in an overly elaborate style, only to have to reduce his own locutions to a much simpler form.

A recurring concept in The Broom of the System is psychology as relating to words; many of the theories discussed involve Ludwig Wittgenstein's ideas and principles.

[...] And the novel falls off drastically at the end, when a tortured running joke turns into a contrived explanation and characters we expect to appear never show up.Despite these perceived short-comings, she ultimately found strength in the writing: But the author's narrative command carries him over the low spots.

A saving grace of excessive novels is that a few missteps hardly matter; The Broom of the System succeeds as a manic, human, flawed extravaganza.In the same newspaper, Michiko Kakutani wrote a somewhat unfavorable review, calling it "an unwieldy, uneven work - by turns, hilarious and stultifying, daring and derivative".

The problem is that [...] 'The Broom of the System' is pock-marked with superfluous verbal riffs [...] repetitious digressions, and nonsensical babbling that reads like out-takes from a stoned, late-night dormitory exchange."

Kakutani claimed Wallace has a "story-telling gift" but recommended more "narrative discipline and the exchange of other writers's [sic] voices for a more original vision.

"[7] In 2011, Tori Schacht of The Rumpus praised the irony of the ending and wrote, "This is Wallace in the nascent stage of his literary powers, attempting to reconcile his interest in Wittgenstein and language with his desire to speak of something urgent and true about us and our beautiful messes.