Boswell referred to Broom as "first and foremost a work of metafiction," but I do not fully agree. While the "direct and immediate concern with fiction-making itself" that characterizes the metafictionist, is undeniably present in Broom, it is superseded by a much more pressing concern: how to actually live in a linguistically unstable world, the same concern Wallace observed in Wittgenstein's Mistress. Broom offers a structural meditation on exactly that instability, forcing he novel's form to replicate the linguistic labyrinth of its characters; the novel explores, and indeed exploits, the conventions of metafiction, but does not allow the work to be overwhelmed by its metafictionality. Rather, Broom is more a work that interrogates metafiction by means of its own devices, and finds it wanting. [...]