----
![]()
"I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself."
--from his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in Fiction for J R , April 1976
Aside from a couple interjections all of this information was copied from williamgaddis.org and themordernword.com. I just hope that publishing these summaries on The Dennis Cooper blog will hip at least one or two more people to the genius that is Gaddis. If you equate "difficult" books with pretentiousness he is definitely not the one for you, but if you enjoy a challenge that really gets those synapses firing, Gaddis is the man. –winter rates
The Recognitions – 1955
![]()
Though neglected for many years, this monumental, eclectic, and intertextually dense masterpiece is now regarded as one of the foundation stones upon which American literary postmodernism is built. With its unrelentingly mordant ironies and overt reflexiveness, The Recognitions presages both "black humour fiction" and the "self-conscious novel." More than this, the very difficulty and abstruseness of the text, the myriad allusions and symbolism as well as the refusal to identify speakers or explicate and contextualise dialogue and plot details, ensure that the experience of reading the novel is often as maddening an ordeal as the trials which are endured by many of its characters as they too seek in vain to claim or recapture some artistic essence, the ever-elusive materia prima. Inserting himself into the novel (and his subsequent works) in various guises, both Gaddis and his reader are caught firmly within its satiric purview; acerbic, contemptuous, angry, one of the author's primary recognitions is that his own "original" text, no matter how widely received, will reach only "a very small audience". -Rob Jackson
(more)
Gaddis's first novel takes the form of a quest. In a carefully wrought and densely-woven series of plots involving upwards of fifty characters across three continents, we follow the adventures of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a clergyman who rejects the ministry in favor of the call of the artist. His quest is to make sense of contemporary reality, to find significance and some form of order in the world. Through the pursuit of art he hopes to find truth. His initial "failure" as an artist leads him not to copy but to paint in the style of the past masters, those who had found in their own time and in their own style the kind of order and beauty for which Wyatt is looking. His talent for forgery is exploited by a group of unscrupulous art critics and businessmen who hope to profit by passing his works off as original old masters. As the novel develops, these art forgeries become a profound metaphor for all kinds of other frauds, counterfeits and fakery: the aesthetic, scientific, religious, sexual and personal. Towards the end, Wyatt wrenches something authentic from what Eliot called "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." The nature of his revelation, however is highly ambiguous and is hedged about by images of madness and hallucination, which disturbs simple distinctions between real and authentic, between faiths and fakes.
(more from williamgaddis.org)
Time Magazine Review from 1955
It is almost impossible to ignore a novelist who produces 956 closely printed pages. William Gaddis, a 33-year-old New Yorker who has never published a book before, rates attention for other reasons as well. He has written this novel from that dark night of the soul where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "it is always three o'clock in the morning." To the small army of "beat generation" characters in The Recognitions, dawn never comes.
As Author Gaddis sees it, the 20th century U.S. is a soggy butt end of western civilization, an age of publicity and duplicity in which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting ( New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer.
(more)
from Fire The Bastards! by Jack Green
william gaddis's the recognitions was published in 1955 its a great
novel, as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its it
only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job—
—2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book
—one critic made 7 boners others got wrong the number of
pages, year, price, publisher, author, & title
—& other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics
addict
—one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from
another review
—one critic called the book "disgusting""evil""foul-mouthed,"
needs "to have its mouth washed out with lye soap" others
were contemptuous or condescending
—2 of 55 reviews were adequate the others were amateurish
& incompetent
failing to recognize the greatness of the book
failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its
essential qualities are
counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions—the
standard cliches about a book that is "ambitious,""erudite,"
"long,""negative," etc
counterfeiting competence with inhuman jargon
—constructive suggestion: fire the bastards!
(more)
Five years or so ago my wife met a new co-worker, and in the course of her introductory conversation she mentioned I was a writer. When asked who my favorite authors were she replied "Pynchon, Joyce, and Vollmann among others."
---"Has he read William Gaddis?" asked this sage, "he has to read The Recognitions."
---The co-worker disappeared shortly after as if he was a messenger from the literary gods.
My wife got me a copy and I read it six months later. I can remember the camping trip I took where I read the first page and immediately knew Gaddis was a genius. When I read the last page I was stunned. This was my new favorite book. Its encyclopedic scope begs for countless rereads. I cannot wait to attack it again. – winter rates.
Buy it
JR – 1975
![]()
Twenty years after his first novel, and after twenty years of working for the government and big business, Gaddis produced his highly acclaimed second; the prize-winning J R, another huge book of 726 pages containing very little except dialogue. A number of critics have said that this is the novel which comes closest to catching the varieties of spoken American English, while another has called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature". The first line of the novel gives us its theme: "- Money...?". J R is a satire on corporate America and tells the story of the eleven-year-old schoolboy JR Vansant who builds an enormous economic empire from his school's public phone booth, an empire that touches everyone in the novel, just as money - the getting of it, worry about the lack of it, the desire for it - shapes a great deal of the characters' waking and dreaming lives. Through conversations, letters and telephone calls, we come to understand what Marx called "the distorting power of money", how all value under capitalism is transformed into economic value. The novel lays before us in immense detail, in the very grain of the human voice, the alienation that is part and parcel of a world in which our innermost feelings have been commodified and where money has become fetishized; rather than it being simply a medium of exchange, a means to an end, money has become an object of desire for its own sake, an outward sign of success and power. The novel draws on a huge range of social and economic thinkers from Marx, a phrase of whose hangs over the entrance to JR's school, to Max Weber, George Simmel and George Bernard Shaw, whose interpretation of Wagner's Ring as an allegory of the rise of capitalism is central to J R.
(more)
In style, J R retains the frenetic allusiveness and self-deprecatingly ironic mood of The Recognitions, but the text is even more uncompromising in its repudiation of conventional fictional modes. Composed almost exclusively as unmediated dialogue, wherein incessant interruptions and the doltish obstinacy of the characters mean that their conversations invariably proceed at cross purposes, the novel bombards the reader at every pass with its outright refusal to conform to any expectation of what a literary narrative should be. The farcical plot, intricate in its design even so, recalls one to the fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" in exposing the capitalist hegemony as an unmitigatedly corrupt and pathetic sham cloaked by language itself – communication – which is revealed and exemplified simultaneously as the most corrupted and pathetic sham of all. Like Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Wagner's dwarf Alberich, the neglected waif-turned-business mogul J R is a personification of corrupted innocence, of the capitalist ethic run amok, an iconic representation of the routinization of greed in Western industrial society.
J Rreceived the 1976 National Book Award. – Rob Jackson
(more)
I read J R a couple of years ago and it was quite the challenge. 95% of the book comes in the form of unattributed dialog, as in he never bothers with "said Bob" etc.
(excerpt)
--------- It's worked so far but it can't work forever, sooner or later somebody will show up who reads Greek. Then where are we?
– Up the creek, Miss Flesch obliged with a promptness that lost her some coffee down her chin, like the smut mail.
– There's an issue. The smut mail rise.
– My boy sent off for a ball glove and what he got back in the mail was. . . .
– Mouthpiece puller, sleigh bells, strobotuner, choir risers, tympanies, marching bell and stand, two thousand five hundred and... what's all that for?
– Breakage. Here, replacing glass, repairing doors, painting, refinishing and so forth, thirty-three thousand two eighty-five. Thirty-three thousand dollars for breakage, isn't that what we're really talking about? Plain unvarnished vandalism? And another fourteen thousand plus item down here, repairs and replacement, chairs, desks, project tables, pianos, same thing isn't it? Breakage. . . ?
Gaddis first experimented with this style during some outrageous cocktail party scenes in The Recognitions. The only bits of non-dialogue occur between scene transitions. These are made of very abstract and highly poeticized prose. Once you familiarize yourself with the characters the going gets relatively easier. It is a very rewarding read and thematically I'd say it is even more relevant now than when it was published in 1976. –winter rates
Buy it
Carpenter's Gothic – 1985
![]()
Heiress Liz Booth is trapped inside an unfulfilling marriage and the few furnished rooms of a dilapidated "carpenter gothic" house in a swank but out-of-the-way New York suburb. Meek, self-deluded, and agoraphobic, she spends her days fielding barely-comprehensible messages and trying to placate the three men in her life: her husband, Paul, a Vietnam veteran and wannabe entrepreneur; her younger brother Billy, impressionable and shiftless; and McCandless, a geologist and writer who once sold out to the CIA, and the owner of the house she and Paul are renting. The more Liz tries to intervene and make sense of all the confusion and deceit which plagues their travails, revolving around a crusading Christian televangelist named the Reverend Elton Ude, a geological survey, mining lease and political upheaval in East Africa, and looming Armageddon, the more the shady dealings and destinies of the men she cares for become irredeemably entangled. - Rob Jackson
(more)
Fakery and Stony Truths
New York Times
July 7, 1985
by Cynthia Ozick
THIS is William Gaddis's third work of fiction in 30 years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Mr. Gaddis is a deluge. The Recognitions, his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second, J R, a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. For those whom tonnage has kept away, Carpenter's Gothic - a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others - should disclose Mr. Gaddis's terrifying artfulness once and for all. Carpenter's Gothic may be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim. With fewer publications so far than he can count on one hand, Mr. Gaddis has not been "prolific" (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal - omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works - the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness - but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.
(more)
Apparently Gaddis found the all-dialog style of J R worked for him and he uses it again in Carpenter's Gothic. (and A Frolic of His Own as well, but I haven't read that one yet, just flipped through it.) This time he limits his number of characters and contains all the action in one house over a short period of time. Like a play, all we have are the words his characters say. There is no narrator telling us what is going on inside their heads. But unlike a play this is ALL we have. Even a radio drama provides us with the actor's interpretation of the dialog, and a written play tells us plainly who said what. Again, though published in 1985 the themes remain utterly relevant twenty years later. Like his first two books it is also laugh-out-loud hilarious in parts. –winter rates.
Buy it
A Frolic Of His Own
![]()
Similar to J R, Gaddis's last novel announces its theme with its first word, but then develops it in the rest of its first line: "Justice? - you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law." The novel follows a series of litigations through the courts and it is the discrepancy between the ideal of justice and the reality of the law that is Gaddis's subject. For Gaddis, the theory of justice is a beautiful, ordered system we have constructed to ward off or minimize the chaos and contingency of existence. The practice of law however, is for him "a carnival of disorder", a self-sustaining system of legalese and a conspiracy against the people run for the benefit of a self-serving legal profession. The law is finally "about itself." As one character puts it, "Words, words, words. That's what it's all about." On the one hand, the law is an attempt to establish a constant principle in the face of social differences, the principle of justice. On the other hand, the operation of the law can be used by the rich and powerful to subvert these very principles.
(more)
Oscar Crease, yet another of Gaddis's fictional alter egos, is a former community college history teacher and failed playwright who lives alone and ostracized amongst the clutter and gradual collapse of the family mansion on Long Island. Incapacitated in a bizarre mishap with his car and only just released from hospital, he is tended to by his step-sister, Christina, brother-in-law Harry, and Lily, his much younger mistress. Despite their solicitations and advice Oscar embarks on a spree of outrageous litigations, eventually suing himself for injuries sustained in the accident while also lodging a claim and injunction against a major Hollywood movie director for plagiarizing from his unproduced Civil War melodrama. Meanwhile, Oscar's father, a Federal judge and eminent nonagenarian, is presiding over a series of increasingly ridiculous court cases in the Deep South concerning an enormous steel sculpture, a dead dog, a drowned boy, and Judge Crease's attempts "to rescue the language," all of which erupts into a national cause célèbre and steals Oscar's limelight yet again.
Incorporating several long excerpts from the script of Gaddis' own unpublished play "Once at Antietam," along with wickedly-accurate travesties of legal judgments and depositions and his trademark dialogue, allusiveness, and sense of the absurd, justice is a travesty in this scathing indictment of the culture of litigiousness, the third and final installment in Gaddis' satire of modern-day America.
A Frolic of His Own received the National Book Award in 1995. –Rob Jackson
Buy it
Agapē Agape
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The book is an extraordinary work of fiction by any standards: it is particularly fascinating to anyone with a serious interest in player and reproducing pianos for the way in which it puts them at the heart of debates about modern culture. Gaddis was clearly extremely well-informed about many aspects of these instruments, particularly the technical, so it is a great pity that he entirely failed to understand the potential of the Pianola as a musical instrument of considerable subtlety. Of course he was right that it is quite possible to 'just keep pumping' but anyone who knows what the instrument is capable of will feel that his arguments, scintillating as they are, are undermined by the real potential of the instrument he so maligned. - Claire L'Enfant
(more)
Bedridden and dying writer meditates on the significance of his life and his life's work as he tries vainly to draw together his thoughts and papers into some ultimate coherency. Composed as a dramatic monologue, many of the themes and concerns from Gaddis's major works are reprised in this posthumously-published novella. –Rob Jackson
(more)
Buy it
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There are loads and loads of great links to interviews, essays, etc. at the Gaddis Annotations Site
----
*
p.s. Hey. Winter Rates, better known around here in the current day as writer and d.l. L@rstonovich, put together this fantastic look at the stuff of William Gaddis some seven-plus years ago. High time for a revival, and, so, there it is up there. Enjoy it as heavily as you like and can. Hope everybody reading this is doing great.
"I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen. I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself."
--from his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in Fiction for J R , April 1976
Aside from a couple interjections all of this information was copied from williamgaddis.org and themordernword.com. I just hope that publishing these summaries on The Dennis Cooper blog will hip at least one or two more people to the genius that is Gaddis. If you equate "difficult" books with pretentiousness he is definitely not the one for you, but if you enjoy a challenge that really gets those synapses firing, Gaddis is the man. –winter rates
The Recognitions – 1955
Though neglected for many years, this monumental, eclectic, and intertextually dense masterpiece is now regarded as one of the foundation stones upon which American literary postmodernism is built. With its unrelentingly mordant ironies and overt reflexiveness, The Recognitions presages both "black humour fiction" and the "self-conscious novel." More than this, the very difficulty and abstruseness of the text, the myriad allusions and symbolism as well as the refusal to identify speakers or explicate and contextualise dialogue and plot details, ensure that the experience of reading the novel is often as maddening an ordeal as the trials which are endured by many of its characters as they too seek in vain to claim or recapture some artistic essence, the ever-elusive materia prima. Inserting himself into the novel (and his subsequent works) in various guises, both Gaddis and his reader are caught firmly within its satiric purview; acerbic, contemptuous, angry, one of the author's primary recognitions is that his own "original" text, no matter how widely received, will reach only "a very small audience". -Rob Jackson
(more)
Gaddis's first novel takes the form of a quest. In a carefully wrought and densely-woven series of plots involving upwards of fifty characters across three continents, we follow the adventures of Wyatt Gwyon, son of a clergyman who rejects the ministry in favor of the call of the artist. His quest is to make sense of contemporary reality, to find significance and some form of order in the world. Through the pursuit of art he hopes to find truth. His initial "failure" as an artist leads him not to copy but to paint in the style of the past masters, those who had found in their own time and in their own style the kind of order and beauty for which Wyatt is looking. His talent for forgery is exploited by a group of unscrupulous art critics and businessmen who hope to profit by passing his works off as original old masters. As the novel develops, these art forgeries become a profound metaphor for all kinds of other frauds, counterfeits and fakery: the aesthetic, scientific, religious, sexual and personal. Towards the end, Wyatt wrenches something authentic from what Eliot called "the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history." The nature of his revelation, however is highly ambiguous and is hedged about by images of madness and hallucination, which disturbs simple distinctions between real and authentic, between faiths and fakes.
(more from williamgaddis.org)
Time Magazine Review from 1955
It is almost impossible to ignore a novelist who produces 956 closely printed pages. William Gaddis, a 33-year-old New Yorker who has never published a book before, rates attention for other reasons as well. He has written this novel from that dark night of the soul where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "it is always three o'clock in the morning." To the small army of "beat generation" characters in The Recognitions, dawn never comes.
As Author Gaddis sees it, the 20th century U.S. is a soggy butt end of western civilization, an age of publicity and duplicity in which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting ( New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer.
(more)
from Fire The Bastards! by Jack Green
william gaddis's the recognitions was published in 1955 its a great
novel, as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its it
only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job—
—2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book
—one critic made 7 boners others got wrong the number of
pages, year, price, publisher, author, & title
—& other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics
addict
—one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from
another review
—one critic called the book "disgusting""evil""foul-mouthed,"
needs "to have its mouth washed out with lye soap" others
were contemptuous or condescending
—2 of 55 reviews were adequate the others were amateurish
& incompetent
failing to recognize the greatness of the book
failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its
essential qualities are
counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions—the
standard cliches about a book that is "ambitious,""erudite,"
"long,""negative," etc
counterfeiting competence with inhuman jargon
—constructive suggestion: fire the bastards!
(more)
Five years or so ago my wife met a new co-worker, and in the course of her introductory conversation she mentioned I was a writer. When asked who my favorite authors were she replied "Pynchon, Joyce, and Vollmann among others."
---"Has he read William Gaddis?" asked this sage, "he has to read The Recognitions."
---The co-worker disappeared shortly after as if he was a messenger from the literary gods.
My wife got me a copy and I read it six months later. I can remember the camping trip I took where I read the first page and immediately knew Gaddis was a genius. When I read the last page I was stunned. This was my new favorite book. Its encyclopedic scope begs for countless rereads. I cannot wait to attack it again. – winter rates.
Buy it
JR – 1975
Twenty years after his first novel, and after twenty years of working for the government and big business, Gaddis produced his highly acclaimed second; the prize-winning J R, another huge book of 726 pages containing very little except dialogue. A number of critics have said that this is the novel which comes closest to catching the varieties of spoken American English, while another has called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature". The first line of the novel gives us its theme: "- Money...?". J R is a satire on corporate America and tells the story of the eleven-year-old schoolboy JR Vansant who builds an enormous economic empire from his school's public phone booth, an empire that touches everyone in the novel, just as money - the getting of it, worry about the lack of it, the desire for it - shapes a great deal of the characters' waking and dreaming lives. Through conversations, letters and telephone calls, we come to understand what Marx called "the distorting power of money", how all value under capitalism is transformed into economic value. The novel lays before us in immense detail, in the very grain of the human voice, the alienation that is part and parcel of a world in which our innermost feelings have been commodified and where money has become fetishized; rather than it being simply a medium of exchange, a means to an end, money has become an object of desire for its own sake, an outward sign of success and power. The novel draws on a huge range of social and economic thinkers from Marx, a phrase of whose hangs over the entrance to JR's school, to Max Weber, George Simmel and George Bernard Shaw, whose interpretation of Wagner's Ring as an allegory of the rise of capitalism is central to J R.
(more)
In style, J R retains the frenetic allusiveness and self-deprecatingly ironic mood of The Recognitions, but the text is even more uncompromising in its repudiation of conventional fictional modes. Composed almost exclusively as unmediated dialogue, wherein incessant interruptions and the doltish obstinacy of the characters mean that their conversations invariably proceed at cross purposes, the novel bombards the reader at every pass with its outright refusal to conform to any expectation of what a literary narrative should be. The farcical plot, intricate in its design even so, recalls one to the fable of "The Emperor's New Clothes" in exposing the capitalist hegemony as an unmitigatedly corrupt and pathetic sham cloaked by language itself – communication – which is revealed and exemplified simultaneously as the most corrupted and pathetic sham of all. Like Milo Minderbinder in Joseph Heller's Catch-22 and Wagner's dwarf Alberich, the neglected waif-turned-business mogul J R is a personification of corrupted innocence, of the capitalist ethic run amok, an iconic representation of the routinization of greed in Western industrial society.
J Rreceived the 1976 National Book Award. – Rob Jackson
(more)
I read J R a couple of years ago and it was quite the challenge. 95% of the book comes in the form of unattributed dialog, as in he never bothers with "said Bob" etc.
(excerpt)
--------- It's worked so far but it can't work forever, sooner or later somebody will show up who reads Greek. Then where are we?
– Up the creek, Miss Flesch obliged with a promptness that lost her some coffee down her chin, like the smut mail.
– There's an issue. The smut mail rise.
– My boy sent off for a ball glove and what he got back in the mail was. . . .
– Mouthpiece puller, sleigh bells, strobotuner, choir risers, tympanies, marching bell and stand, two thousand five hundred and... what's all that for?
– Breakage. Here, replacing glass, repairing doors, painting, refinishing and so forth, thirty-three thousand two eighty-five. Thirty-three thousand dollars for breakage, isn't that what we're really talking about? Plain unvarnished vandalism? And another fourteen thousand plus item down here, repairs and replacement, chairs, desks, project tables, pianos, same thing isn't it? Breakage. . . ?
Gaddis first experimented with this style during some outrageous cocktail party scenes in The Recognitions. The only bits of non-dialogue occur between scene transitions. These are made of very abstract and highly poeticized prose. Once you familiarize yourself with the characters the going gets relatively easier. It is a very rewarding read and thematically I'd say it is even more relevant now than when it was published in 1976. –winter rates
Buy it
Carpenter's Gothic – 1985
Heiress Liz Booth is trapped inside an unfulfilling marriage and the few furnished rooms of a dilapidated "carpenter gothic" house in a swank but out-of-the-way New York suburb. Meek, self-deluded, and agoraphobic, she spends her days fielding barely-comprehensible messages and trying to placate the three men in her life: her husband, Paul, a Vietnam veteran and wannabe entrepreneur; her younger brother Billy, impressionable and shiftless; and McCandless, a geologist and writer who once sold out to the CIA, and the owner of the house she and Paul are renting. The more Liz tries to intervene and make sense of all the confusion and deceit which plagues their travails, revolving around a crusading Christian televangelist named the Reverend Elton Ude, a geological survey, mining lease and political upheaval in East Africa, and looming Armageddon, the more the shady dealings and destinies of the men she cares for become irredeemably entangled. - Rob Jackson
(more)
Fakery and Stony Truths
New York Times
July 7, 1985
by Cynthia Ozick
THIS is William Gaddis's third work of fiction in 30 years. That sounds like a sparse stream, and misrepresents absolutely. Mr. Gaddis is a deluge. The Recognitions, his first novel, published in 1955, matches in plain bulk four or five ordinary contemporary novels. His second, J R, a burlesquing supplementary footnote appearing two decades later, is easily equivalent to another three or four. For those whom tonnage has kept away, Carpenter's Gothic - a short novel, but as mazily and mercilessly adroit as the others - should disclose Mr. Gaddis's terrifying artfulness once and for all. Carpenter's Gothic may be Gaddis-in-little, but it is Gaddis to the brim. With fewer publications so far than he can count on one hand, Mr. Gaddis has not been "prolific" (that spendthrift coin); instead he has been prodigious, gargantuan, exhaustive, subsuming fates and conditions under a hungry logic. His two huge early novels are great vaults or storehouses of crafty encyclopedic scandal - omniscience thrown into the hottest furnaces of metaphor. Mr. Gaddis knows almost everything: not only how the world works - the pragmatic cynical business-machine that we call worldliness - but also how myth flies into being out of the primeval clouds of art and death and money.
(more)
Apparently Gaddis found the all-dialog style of J R worked for him and he uses it again in Carpenter's Gothic. (and A Frolic of His Own as well, but I haven't read that one yet, just flipped through it.) This time he limits his number of characters and contains all the action in one house over a short period of time. Like a play, all we have are the words his characters say. There is no narrator telling us what is going on inside their heads. But unlike a play this is ALL we have. Even a radio drama provides us with the actor's interpretation of the dialog, and a written play tells us plainly who said what. Again, though published in 1985 the themes remain utterly relevant twenty years later. Like his first two books it is also laugh-out-loud hilarious in parts. –winter rates.
Buy it
A Frolic Of His Own
Similar to J R, Gaddis's last novel announces its theme with its first word, but then develops it in the rest of its first line: "Justice? - you get justice in the next world, in this world, you have the law." The novel follows a series of litigations through the courts and it is the discrepancy between the ideal of justice and the reality of the law that is Gaddis's subject. For Gaddis, the theory of justice is a beautiful, ordered system we have constructed to ward off or minimize the chaos and contingency of existence. The practice of law however, is for him "a carnival of disorder", a self-sustaining system of legalese and a conspiracy against the people run for the benefit of a self-serving legal profession. The law is finally "about itself." As one character puts it, "Words, words, words. That's what it's all about." On the one hand, the law is an attempt to establish a constant principle in the face of social differences, the principle of justice. On the other hand, the operation of the law can be used by the rich and powerful to subvert these very principles.
(more)
Oscar Crease, yet another of Gaddis's fictional alter egos, is a former community college history teacher and failed playwright who lives alone and ostracized amongst the clutter and gradual collapse of the family mansion on Long Island. Incapacitated in a bizarre mishap with his car and only just released from hospital, he is tended to by his step-sister, Christina, brother-in-law Harry, and Lily, his much younger mistress. Despite their solicitations and advice Oscar embarks on a spree of outrageous litigations, eventually suing himself for injuries sustained in the accident while also lodging a claim and injunction against a major Hollywood movie director for plagiarizing from his unproduced Civil War melodrama. Meanwhile, Oscar's father, a Federal judge and eminent nonagenarian, is presiding over a series of increasingly ridiculous court cases in the Deep South concerning an enormous steel sculpture, a dead dog, a drowned boy, and Judge Crease's attempts "to rescue the language," all of which erupts into a national cause célèbre and steals Oscar's limelight yet again.
Incorporating several long excerpts from the script of Gaddis' own unpublished play "Once at Antietam," along with wickedly-accurate travesties of legal judgments and depositions and his trademark dialogue, allusiveness, and sense of the absurd, justice is a travesty in this scathing indictment of the culture of litigiousness, the third and final installment in Gaddis' satire of modern-day America.
A Frolic of His Own received the National Book Award in 1995. –Rob Jackson
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Agapē Agape
The book is an extraordinary work of fiction by any standards: it is particularly fascinating to anyone with a serious interest in player and reproducing pianos for the way in which it puts them at the heart of debates about modern culture. Gaddis was clearly extremely well-informed about many aspects of these instruments, particularly the technical, so it is a great pity that he entirely failed to understand the potential of the Pianola as a musical instrument of considerable subtlety. Of course he was right that it is quite possible to 'just keep pumping' but anyone who knows what the instrument is capable of will feel that his arguments, scintillating as they are, are undermined by the real potential of the instrument he so maligned. - Claire L'Enfant
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Bedridden and dying writer meditates on the significance of his life and his life's work as he tries vainly to draw together his thoughts and papers into some ultimate coherency. Composed as a dramatic monologue, many of the themes and concerns from Gaddis's major works are reprised in this posthumously-published novella. –Rob Jackson
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There are loads and loads of great links to interviews, essays, etc. at the Gaddis Annotations Site
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p.s. Hey. Winter Rates, better known around here in the current day as writer and d.l. L@rstonovich, put together this fantastic look at the stuff of William Gaddis some seven-plus years ago. High time for a revival, and, so, there it is up there. Enjoy it as heavily as you like and can. Hope everybody reading this is doing great.