Inelegant Blubbering: Rick Vigorous near the end.

He also gets way with almost never going to class, because, hey, you can't expect the poor kid with one leg to crawl his way to class every day.

High-School Hustler: La Vache helps other students with their work in exchange for drugs and money.

Good Ol' Boy: Invoked by Andrew 'Wang Dang' Lang starting in college because he was from Texas and everyone at college has to have 'a thing'.Green-Eyed Monster: Rick Vigorous turns into one over his ironically green-eyed rival Andrew Lang.Generation Xerox: Lenore has the same hair cut as Lenore.There's a lot of talk of 'membranes' and 'penetration' and 'incapability'. Freudian Excuse: Rick has a really really tiny penis.Rick Vigorous has cried in front of lots of people This is contrasted to Rick's breakdown in the Great Ohio Desert (Inelegant Blubbering below): Cry into Chest: Lenore cries into Andrew Lang's chest towards the end.

Brilliant, but Lazy: Youngest brother Stoncipher La Vache Beadman, though he does do a lot of work, just not his own.Big, Screwed-Up Family: The Beadsman clan, wealthy from baby food ever since great great grandfather, Stonecipher Beadsman, founded Stonecipheco.Big Eater: We first meet Norman Bombardini, owner of the building in which Lenore works, at a restaurant where he's beginning his plan to eat until there's no more room for anyone else in the universe.The novel is primarily preoccupied with language and the power of words, and is told using various formats, including straight narrative, sections of just dialogue, therapy transcripts, tv transcripts, Rick's journal entries, and a in-universe-fictional writing by Rick centering around a man named Monroe Fieldbinder. Of course, this just scratches the surface. Over the course of the novel, she has to deal with the disappearance/escape of her great- grandmother, also named Lenore Beadsman, (and a number of other patients and employees) from the nursing home the Beadsman family also owns, the increasingly obvious neurotic jealousy of her boyfriend Rick/ Dick Vigorous, and the sudden verbosity of her cockatiel Vlad the Impaler and his proceeding fame as the co-host of an Evangelical Christian TV show. The novel focuses on Lenore Beadsman, a 24-year-old telephone switchboard operator from a wealthy and eccentric family, who isn't sure whether she exists or not. No where near as long as the Door Stopper Infinite Jest, but still pretty healthy in size at around 450 pages. David Foster Wallace's first novel, published in 1987. Also, the Ohio city in which most of the action takes place is in the shape of Jayne Mansfield's profile when viewed from the sky.

The broom of the system