(This note organizes the book's IJ-relevant signal by front.)

TL;DR

Wallace's 1987 debut novel, read here as the deepest prehistory of Infinite Jest's preoccupations. Broom is DFW's Wittgenstein novel — its heroine fears she is made of nothing but words — and nearly everything IJ later builds at novel scale is already here in comic register: the communication/solipsism spine (the book's densest thread by far), a government-manufactured wasteland that anticipates the Great Concavity almost outright, a dynastic family-business household shaped like a proto-Incandenza clan, a therapy satire that seeds IJ's professional conversationalist, several startling previews of the Entertainment's desire-kills logic, and — the book's most famous feature — an ending amputated mid-sentence, DFW's earliest designed anti-closure. The novel advances no theories about IJ, so its whole signal is connective: 56 connections across 21 chapters, 4 at prefiguration, the two strongest anchors being the manufactured wasteland, carried by three device-level blocks, and the withheld last word. What the connections document is prefiguration weight only — the pre-IJ shape of the obsessions, not claims about IJ's plot.

Key claims

• Broom is the communication-solipsism source-book. The problem IJ inherits — whether language can connect isolated selves at all — is Broom's explicit subject, stated as philosophy (Gramma Lenore's Wittgenstein: "everything was words"), as crisis (Lenore: "the living is the telling... why live at all?"), as farce (Bombardini eating his way to a universe of pure Self), as infrastructure (one phone number for half of Cleveland), and as parable (the tree-toad story: love as "a way not to connect, at all"). Fourteen-odd distinct echoes carry it, uniformly at shared-preoccupation — the shared question, not a prefigured scene.
• The Great Ohio Desert is the corpus's clearest pre-IJ device. A state governor commissions a hundred-mile black-sand wasteland as "An Other for Ohio's Self" from a Dallas firm (Industrial Desert Design) that builds deserts to order — a region-scale wasteland willed into being by state-plus-industry as a soft consumer polity's constitutive Other. That is the Great Concavity's device-class, and it is held at prefiguration (the book's only one besides the ending).
• The ending is the earliest designed hole. The novel stops mid-sentence — "I'm a man of my" — the word "word" withheld so the reader must supply it; and its central quest-objects (the vanished matriarch, her teased green book) are never resolved either. Prefiguration of the anti-closure design principle the archive's theories about the ending read into IJ (the "designed holes" idea), not of any IJ mechanism.
• The Beadsman house is a proto-Incandenza shape: patriarch-founded family enterprise (Stonecipheco Baby Foods), children tested for succession and isolated in a fortress nursery, a dominating verbal elder, siblings each damaged along a different axis, domestic life staged as literal "family theater." A shape, not a map — held at shared-preoccupation throughout.
• Dr. Jay seeds the professional-conversationalist register: paid, jargon-armored, breakthrough-sniffing talk that manages rather than meets the client — sharpened by the reveal that his sessions are secretly transcribed, scripted from outside, and propped on an invented authority ("There can be a Blentner if you want there to be").
• The Entertainment's logic appears twice in miniature, without the device: John Beadsman's game-show delusion (the "totally desirable prize" won only by not wanting it, the audience restrained behind electrified mesh, the contestant wasting away and existing only on camera) and Rick's insects-at-the-lightbulb meditation (a light "that can be only desired, or else extinguished"). Both held at shared-preoccupation with near-prefiguration flags — desire-shapes, not media objects — alongside the televangelist screen-communion whose theology ("to be satisfied is to be used") states the satisfaction-that-consumes outright.
• Articulate evasion is Broom's house style: LaVache's "lymph node" redefinition-to-deceive, Dr. Jay's deflecting jargon, Lang's "strategic misrepresentation," Rick's stories-instead-of-talk and serial "I promise to tell." The full evidence dossier is laid out in front 8 below.
• Broom argues nothing about IJ. The fiction advances no interpretive claim about any IJ question — an honest limit worth stating up front; what it offers is echo, carried passage by passage.

Theories & evidence

None — Broom doesn't argue anything about Infinite Jest. Its value here is atmospheric: dozens of thematic and image echoes, organized below by front.

---

The signal, by front

Locators are paragraph indices, tagged [e-text] once here for the whole note (this electronic text is the canonical edition for this book; no print pagination exists).

1. Meaning-as-use and the words-only self — the communication-solipsism spine

Crux tags: communication-solipsism (throughout); wittgenstein-frame (influence-crux sightings). Weight: shared-preoccupation across all blocks. The book's densest front — it runs through the entire novel.

• The doctrine. Gramma Lenore, Cambridge student of "a mad crackpot genius named Wittgenstein, who believed that everything was words" [5-1990:p164], demonstrates it with the title object: the broom's essence is bristles if you sweep with it, handle if you break windows — "Meaning as use. Meaning as use." [9-1990:p13] (the thesis-lecture).
• The crisis. Lenore's fear that "all that really exists of my life is what can be said about it" [8-1990:p48], that "the living is the telling... why live at all?" [8-1990:p60], that "any telling automatically becomes a kind of system, that controls everybody involved" [8-1990:p115]; earlier felt as the authored self — "no real existence, except for what she said and did and perceived and et cetera", "There was nothing pure" [5-1990:p66]; later literalized in the parrot, "this little feathered pseudo-myself outside me that constantly reminds me it's just myself I'm talking to, only" [13-1990:p67], and in her plain self-diagnosis, "it's hard sometimes not being an especially verbal person in a family that tends to see life as more or less a verbal phenomenon" [17-1990:p542].
• The unreachable other. Rick Vigorous: "I must in the final analysis remain part of the world that is external to and other from Lenore Beadsman" [5-1990:p10]; "The Screen Door of Union is for me unenterable" [13-1990:p95]; Dr. Jay's membrane jargon — "the membrane must be a strong, clean membrane" [16-1990:p108], "You would be truly and utterly alone" [16-1990:p106]; Evelyn's too-clean window you touch "to make sure it's there" [15-1990:p120] (verbal-echo).
• The two wrong solutions. Fusion: Bombardini's Project Total Yang — "fill the universe with Self" [6-1990:p195], Rick's "Shall I simply eat her?... Then the Other will certainly become Self." [16-1990:p406], the husks/negation handcuffing. Isolation: the paralyzed dentist whose one working lip sends signals no one ever sees [18-1990:p138] (the corpus's purest sealed-self image); Biff Diggerence, self-imprisoned until "they thought he was somebody else" [17-1990:p723].
• The comic literalizations. One phone number for half of Cleveland ("picking out a target set and not a target," [3-1990:p283]); Vlad the Impaler asking the book's question — "I just don't know what you mean by love. Tell me what you mean by that word" [7-1990:p48] — recurring on national TV as Ugolino [21-1990:p40]; the tree-toad story's own gloss, "The tree toad is the mechanism of nonconnection and alienation" [11-1990:p173].

IJ side (diffuse): the Marathe/Steeply love debates (scenes 035, 088), the professional-conversationalist non-conversation (scene 005), Hal's sealed articulate interior; no single scene is prefigured and none is claimed.

2. The Great Ohio Desert — the manufactured wasteland (→ Great Concavity)

Crux: none (not yet indexed under its own name). Weight: prefiguration — the book's anchor device, carried by three device-level blocks; mention/satire sightings at shared-preoccupation.

• The commissioning (c4 — prefiguration). A 1972 transcript: Ohio has gone soft, "one big suburb and industrial park and mall" [4-1972:p12], so the Governor orders a wasteland: "GOVERNOR: We need a wasteland." [4-1972:p14] / "GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, we need a desert." [4-1972:p16] / "A point of savage reference... A place without malls. An Other for Ohio's Self.... Gentlemen, a desert." [4-1972:p18] — black sand for "sinisterness" [4-1972:p44], eminent domain ("A desert respects no man," [4-1972:p32]).
• The industry (c14 — prefiguration). The wasteland has a manufacturer: Lang's father's Industrial Desert Design [14-1990:p108], deserts built to order in Ohio and on Corfu — "small, solid, tasteful, and sinister" [11-1990:p744] (a shared-preoccupation sighting of the same industry) — even hand-seeded ("when we planted cacti," [14-1990:p147]).
• The designed purpose (c17 — prefiguration). The desert is an engineered experience of negation: "Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that... That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing" [17-1990:p743]; "melt into the blackness, united in discipline and negation" [17-1990:p643].
• Sightings at shared-preoccupation: the Wander-Pass gate and Bloemker's "need for... for sinisterness" [8-1990:p517]; the c16 mention (a weaker sighting); the commercialized tourist Desert of c18 — "This whole thing's just gettin' too goddamn commercialized" [18-1990:p37]; the dead Lake Erie as environmental twin ("spared a sludge-death yet again," [12-1990:p143]).

Honest disanalogy, stated in all three anchor blocks: the G.O.D. is an aesthetic/existential contrast-desert a state wants; the Concavity is a toxic waste-sink a state offloads. The prefigured object is the manufactured region as a polity's Other — the device-class, not the poison. No genealogical attestation is on record tying the passages to the Concavity's design; the connection stands to upgrade if one ever surfaces (none found — see scope limits).

3. The Beadsman dynasty — proto-Incandenza

Crux: none (not yet indexed under its own name). Weight: shared-preoccupation (all five blocks; the c17 block held down to match).

The compound is strikingly IJ-shaped while the contents differ entirely (baby food and words vs. optics and tennis): a patriarch-founded family firm that owns the family's world down to the nursing home it loses its matriarch from ([3-1990:p106]–[3-1990:p111]); children "constantly" given "specially developed standardized tests... to begin the process of determining on whom the mantle of corporate power would someday devolve," sealed in an "impregnable" nursery [12-1990:p113]; a dominating verbal elder ("she sort of dominated the family for a while," [17-1990:p546]); scattered damaged siblings — LaVache the drug-savant with the drawer-leg, John starving on principle, Clarice married into the Company; an institutionalized mother; and domestic life performed as theater — a family "summit meeting" over a child saying "brand" for "kind" [17-1990:p552], the Snapiard masks-and-cardboard-audience play. The child-template block: Vance Vigorous, the athletic prodigy "pithed" by professionals into "flat and soulless perfect chalk drawings" [5-1990:p177] — the gifted child processed into numbness, whom IJ splits across Orin and Hal. IJ anchor: the founding-of-ETA material (scene 020, pp. 63–65).

4. Dr. Jay and purchased talk — the professional-conversationalist register

Crux: conversationalist-frame where tagged. Weight: shared-preoccupation (five blocks; c9's one-line gag at verbal-echo; the c16 block held down on review).

The register IJ gives the professional conversationalist (scene 005, pp. 27–31) and the grief-therapist (scene 064) is Broom's running satire: verbatim "PARTIAL TRANSCRIPT OF RAP SESSION" chapters in which the paid listener's jargon does all the talking — "I smell breakthrough" [8-1990:p36], "The question makes you uncomfortable" [8-1990:p13], "Come see me the minute you have money" [8-1990:p124]; "Forget I'm here altogether. Pretend I'm you." [16-1990:p104] (gas-masked); "I'll make it a free session" as the answer to being fired [20-1990:p60]. The scripted-from-outside twist is the front's sharpest datum: Jay is himself a rescued "pathetic phobic neurotic" [14-1990:p281] whose session transcripts are bought back by the family and whose textual authority is fabricated on demand — "There can be a Blentner if you want there to be" [14-1990:p285]. Paired throughout with Rick-the-teller, whose stories are the purchased conversation's domestic form ("Telling stories that are not my own is at this point what I do," [5-1990:p167]).

5. The authored self and the fabricated audience — solipsism/figurant

Crux: communication-solipsism; figurant-design sightings (existing slug). Weight: shared-preoccupation.

Lenore's crisis is not knowing whether she is real — whether her acts have "some sort of... function beyond herself" [5-1990:p63] — the figurant dread (existing only as a function in someone else's scene) stated from inside; the IJ side anchors to the wraith's figurant monologue (scene 162, pp. 827–845). Its staged double: the Snapiard family-theater performed to a Laserdisc of an audience filling a theater, padded with "Life-size cardboard cut-outs" of the family itself [10-1990:p83] — figurants watching figurants perform being "family-parts" [10-1990:p92]. c19's four-sentence juxtaposition (Lenore's first-ever cry vs. "Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people," [19-1990:p4]) caps the performed-affect side (sighting only, deliberately not promoted).

6. Entertainment-lethality logic — the desire-trap, without the device

Crux: entertainment-lethality where tagged. Weight: shared-preoccupation, two blocks carrying near-prefiguration flags.

Broom twice builds the Entertainment's mechanism with no media object to house it:

• The game-show delusion (c11 — near-prefiguration flag). John Beadsman, wasting away, will speak only on camera, and believes he is a contestant for "the most desirable prize imaginable," the audience "restrained with electrified wire mesh," the prize won only by not wanting it for 60 seconds, on pain of shocks — "To receive totally desirable prize by not desiring prize I did not receive prize." [11-1990:p315] Desire as the lethal mechanism, the Marathe-ascesis counter-rule included.
• The insects at the lightbulb (c17 — near-prefiguration flag). The desired light is unenterable: open the bulb and "either the light they want is killed and the game is over, or else they simply orbit the unenterable filament until they are fried dry and fall away" [17-1990:p164]; "an insect, in a field of light that can be only desired, or else extinguished?" [17-1990:p175] — the same day the projection TV is "a huge white sail of a screen that curved predator-like... a projector pointed like a gun" [17-1990:p476].
• The screen as false communion (c21). Televangelism whose promise is total need-satisfaction through the television — "Your needs are now Jesus's needs, and thus you will not go wanting. You will not go wanting" [21-1990:p65] — priced as consumption of the viewer: "to be satisfied in a spiritual sense is to be used" [21-1990:p119], communion taken hands-on-screen in "the electronic soil" [21-1990:p136], enacted by Mindy kneeling at the set, "Cold light comes out from between her fingers" [21-1990:p144].
• Minor sightings: "Hi Bob" TV-cued compulsive drinking ([11-1990:p466]); T. Rex-style pacification is GWCH's, but Broom's cousin is Bombardini's consumption-without-off-switch; the Road Runner read as "an existential program" [16-1990:p455] — pursuit worth less than its cost, the addiction shape in cartoon; Costigan's surveillance shrine with its video "continuing loop" of the boy, consumed in place of the living person ([15-1990:p90], crux eup-connection).

7. The withheld ending — designed-holes

Crux: designed-holes. Weight: prefiguration (sustained, and borne out across the whole book).

The book's final paragraph, entire: "'You can trust me,' R. V. says, watching her hand. 'I'm a man of my" [21-1990:p154] — sentence, closing quote, and the word "word" all withheld; the reader's reflex supplies the missing word, closing the hole the book refuses to. This is DFW's earliest published undecidable-by-design ending — the design principle the archive already applies to IJ's own missing year ("closure would make the book an Entertainment"). The pattern extends to the whole book: the central quest never closes either — Gramma Lenore is never found, and the green book she teases Lenore with ([3-1990:p162]) is never seen or explained again — the phrase "green book" never recurs after c3. Early seed inside the text: the novel's first embedded story ends unresolved on a ringing phone ([2-1990:p56], verbal-echo).

8. Articulate evasion — evidence only

Crux: none (a question the Girl with Curious Hair material left open, re-raised with evidence here).

The dossier: LaVache's "This isn't a phone, this is a lymph node... So when Dad asks me do I have a phone, I can in all good conscience say no." [11-1990:p478] — meaning-as-use weaponized into truthful lying — and his "dancing accident" deflection [11-1990:p559]; Dr. Jay's jargon that never answers ("Why won't you ever let me go with my thoughts?", [8-1990:p52]); Lang's "what you might call strategic misrepresentation" [17-1990:p593] and Mindy the "professional voice" [17-1990:p423]; Rick's story-as-wall — "I implore you first to implore me for a story" [18-1990:p63] against Lenore's "we really need to talk" [18-1990:p68] — and his serial deferral ("I promise to tell," [21-1990:p145]), capped by the amputated "man of my [word]." IJ side (diffuse, uncited by design): Hal's articulate surfaces, AA/ETA's ritual registers, Marathe/Steeply's fencing, scene 005.

9. Thin fronts, honestly held

• Anhedonia: Vance Vigorous "pithed" into affectless precision ([5-1990:p177]) is the one strong instance; Bombardini's void-eating is appetite, not affect-death; Fieldbinder's chosen Stoic non-attachment is named but correctly not tagged; a full check found no further instance. Broom's comic register carries consumption, not clinical anhedonia — there is no under-carriage, just scarcity.
• Geographic-cure: one earned block — the c7 inset story's villain-therapist selling isolated woods-cabins as cure, where "their old emotional troubles begin to manifest themselves in tiny ways" [7-1990:p157] and destroy the family — the AA teaching literalized nine years early. Beyond it, only a faint c20 sighting.

Scope limits (read before citing)

• Fiction ≠ theory. Broom advances nothing about IJ; every connection above is prefiguration-weight testimony about DFW's preoccupations, usable as background on Wallace's development, never as evidence in an IJ plot-crux question.
• Prefiguration is claimed for exactly two objects (the manufactured-wasteland device; the anti-closure ending), and for the device/design-class in both cases, not for IJ's mechanisms. No genealogical attestation (interview/letter/draft) ties any Broom passage to IJ's composition — the weights rest on concept-identity and survive on that basis alone; a future secondary-source pass could re-open them in either direction.
• Register throughout is comic/farcical where IJ's is clinical or dread-laden; the blocks state the disanalogy in-line and the weights cap accordingly. The two near-prefiguration flags (front 6 above) mark the passages a critic would most plausibly promote.
• Locators are paragraph indices ([e-text]), never print pages; the electronic is canonical for this book. Quotes here are byte-verified against the electronic text (a print-class source, so verbatim quoting is in bounds; ASR rules do not apply).

Themes

Communication/solipsism (the spine — meaning-as-use, the words-only self, membrane/Screen Door, fusion-vs-isolation) · the manufactured wasteland as a consumer polity's Other (→ Great Concavity) · family dynasty as institution (→ Incandenza/ETA) · therapy and purchased talk (→ professional conversationalist) · entertainment/desire-lethality in embryo (game-show, insects, screen-communion) · anti-closure as design (the mid-sentence ending, the unresolved quest) · articulate evasion · performed vs. felt affect (family theater, figurant sightings) · appetite without off-switch (Bombardini).

Cross-references

• girl-with-curious-hair + gwch-westward — book 1 of the pre-1996 corpus; Broom corroborates its communication/solipsism and geographic-cure readings and supplies the evidence that settled the articulate-evasion question left open there.
• e-unibus-pluram-ij-connections — c21's screen-communion and c15's recorded-loop shrine are pre-EUP sightings of the essay's television critique (six years early).
• IJ anchors most often echoed: scene 005 (pp. 27–31, professional conversationalist), scenes 035/088 (Marathe/Steeply on love), scene 020 (pp. 63–65, JOI/ETA founding), scenes 007/025 (the Medical Attaché), scene 162 (pp. 827–845, the wraith's figurant monologue), scene 135 (pp. 692–698, Kate Gompert/anhedonia), scene 064 (pp. 242–258, grief therapy).

Notable passages

All [e-text]; locators are paragraph indices (this book has no print pagination):

• "Meaning as fundamentalness. Fundamentalness as use. Meaning as use. Meaning as use." [9-1990:p13]
• "it's just that the living is the telling, that there's nothing going on with me that isn't either told or tellable, and if so, what's the difference, why live at all?" [8-1990:p60]
• "There was nothing pure." [5-1990:p66]
• "GOVERNOR: Gentlemen, a desert. A point of savage reference for the good people of Ohio. A place to fear and love.... A place without malls. An Other for Ohio's Self." [4-1972:p18]
• "small, solid, tasteful, and sinister." [11-1990:p744]
• "I just don't know what you mean by love. Tell me what you mean by that word." [7-1990:p48]
• "This isn't a phone, this is a lymph node." [11-1990:p478]
• "To receive totally desirable prize by not desiring prize I did not receive prize." [11-1990:p315]
• "either the light they want is killed and the game is over, or else they simply orbit the unenterable filament until they are fried dry and fall away." [17-1990:p164]
• "Forget I'm here altogether. Pretend I'm you." [16-1990:p104]
• "to be satisfied is to be used, to be used is to be a partner, to be a partner is to be a worker" [21-1990:p130]
• "Nobody ever finds anybody in a place like that... That's the opposite of the whole concept that's behind the thing." [17-1990:p743]
• "Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people." [19-1990:p4]
• "'You can trust me,' R. V. says, watching her hand. 'I'm a man of my" [21-1990:p154] — the novel's last line, as printed.