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A review by mamimitanaka
J R by William Gaddis
5.0
Defies description, defies all the rules and succeeds in every dissembling of them, defies my stupid self-indulgent attempts to encapsulate the truly great works of fiction in my own derivative hand [sorry, workin' on it]. Gonna try to write something more substantial about it on subsequent reads but it is unhyperbolically near perfect, maybe the closest thing to a perfect novel in terms of style and craft; the entire thing is this barely controlled chaos that feels like it's going to fall into total entropy any second, it is more or less proto-hyperlink in its presentation, every individual voice and every overwhelmingly sensory conversations and phonecalls contribute to a feeling of having your eyes and ears pulled all around from endless arrays of computer monitors, it's pummeling and dizzying and full of garish noise but so much beauty too, just like our current age. But it's also an angry and bitter satire and pitch black comedy as much as it is a work of structural entropy as well as deep human drama, Gaddis' characters are as alive as they've ever been despite being drowned so often in a world so deadening [making their brief moments of connection and kindness even more cutting when they go back to the $$$ chase again]. Overall this just uses everything to the advantage of the medium of "novels" to its absolute creative heights, a sustained creative blaze of energy that just soars for nearly 800 pages to levels of literary brilliance that make me envious of Gaddis' powers. It's definitely a book you have to be confident in the author for, you really have to trust he just takes you where he wants to take you here and that every voice will be recognizable despite the lack of signifiers [hint: they will, for the most part], but if you do put that faith in him you will get an experience that cannot be found anywhere else.
And honestly? It's not that fucking difficult. I know making that kind of claim about any of these "pretentious weird big books" automatically makes me sound like I'm on my high horse and full of shit, but in this case I actually mean it. I read these 770 pages in just under 2 weeks which besides "Animal Money" by Cisco is the shortest time I've ever taken to read a novel of this length, to say it is compulsively readable or a page turner or whatever would be an understatement. There are so many parts of this book that for me were literally exhilarating to read, because of just how damn well this thing moves as a work of formal innovation and narrative. It's mostly dialogue, and mostly is a very fast paced novel set in the heart of never-sleeping New York, so for one thing you're already expected to move along at a pretty steady pace because if you don't you won't be able to keep up with the voices and dialogue itself, which are the main thing you're meant to be following here. It's less in the substance of what these people are saying [financial jargon, arguments over business and advertisements and prospects for $$$, etc] than what it reveals about them, what their position and relationship to the Almighty Dollar is, and how it shapes them and informs their tragedies of missing the bigger picture. It's a rare novel where reading it slowly [at least on first read] would actually make it more confusing, because you'd just spend a lot of it trying to parse out the details and specifics of who is fucking over and associating with who etc, but being lost is part of the point. The characters shine in the little details, the human moments that intrude upon the entropic dissonance of the text, it really isn't hard to follow if you can just trust in Gaddis like I said; if something is confusing or muddied, he will always bring it back around and tie it in perfectly, you'll eventually acclimate to the voices and be able to easily tell who is who because of how well voiced they are.
At its heart this is a very musical novel, one that's about sound as much as it is prose. The structure of the the novel itself almost works as a piece of music which is in conversation with Gaddis' interest in the art form in this book [almost always explored through the lens of Bast] and the metatextual influence of orchestral music on the book. I know shit about classical music so I'll avoid embarrassing myself by trying to talk about it but the work is very clearly in debt to avant-garde music and dissonance in general, it reminds me of anything from Stravinsky to the barely-controlled chaos of the best avant-garde jazz pieces. The novel makes the reader hyperfocus on Cadence not only through the characters' very established voices [almost as if the sounds of their individual chatter were motifs in a greater orchestra] but also through these totally spellbinding passages of lyrical beauty which are the most profound descriptions of the mundane world since episode 17 of "Ulysses", these time-laps style transitions between conversations to reorient place and time for the characters that just soar with melancholy poetry as well as they can percussive, momentous rhythm. The balance between the clamor of Voices and Noise and the lyrical passages of prose was a stroke of genius and literally constantly makes this entire thing feel like one long work of musical beauty that it is once polyphonic and harmonic, never have I felt books work on such similar wavelengths to music before, and rhythm has always been a draw to literature for me.
Oh yeah and the characters? Pretty much every single one of them, amazing. Like I said though you will most likely miss and confuse a few voices [and that identity confusion is part of the point too, a Gaddis theme which will be familiar to readers of "The Recognitions"], you'll still come to get most of them, for me at least it didn't take long before I was able to parse out the speaking voices here just because they are SO varied, realistic, and human. Like I have lived in the New York metropolitan area my whole life, and yeah...this is how people from the northeast USA talk. Full stop. And without a single use of interior monologue the ones here will, like all the best characters, compel laughter and pity at once, love and hate and the darkness and light within humans, and what happens to us when we lose touch with Nature and an ideal of human oneness in favor of a fragmented carnival of cutthroat competition that only serves the masters and banks at the end of the day. J R himself is the perfect child genius character, brilliant for all the wrong reasons, Bast is a great and generally relatably flawed protagonist, all the side characters are great too. Rhoda, Mrs. Joubert, Gibbs - Gaddis clearly knows about People despite seeming to hate them sometimes, if he does, he's also great at showing them at their most vulnerable and establishing empathy for them even in the depths of parody. How the heck??
It's a funny and often playful book, but it is also remarkably heartbreaking at times. Because of Gaddis' attunement to the people of his cast they will have these moments of connection broken up by the fragmented narrative and dialogue, so many of these people are looking for something great but they either lost their way in finding their personal ideals or have had them restructured and corrupted by the ever-present hunt for [and fight against] money, they want to see beauty and do something in their lives and have connections, and they often come close but the world is set up to break us apart rather than keep us together, even when we're this connected. So much of the motifs of time and the passage of days [and weeks and months] in this book give a feeling that we're losing precious time while we get caught up in this money spell, I'd say the book is prophetic but if anything it probably just shows that life has been like this for a long time, in different iterations with every generation since at least the first World War. Not everything in the novel has resolutions [in fact most don't] just like real life and resolutions when they are there are not guaranteed to favor the characters. It feels like a warning, but also feels like a demonstration of where we're at now, the inherent absurdity of that condition, and the idea [however difficult when the system encompasses all] that breaking away from it seems to require a rejection of that material greed and instead found in emotional connection with our fellow people, our planet, the natural world. The one that's being polluted by the garbage poured into our lakes and streams by capitalists generating waste as far as they can expand their empires, the corporations cutting down trees and forests with saws and pipelines to destroy Native reservations, stabbing the earth's skin by building banks and office buildings and cities on top of it, the world being cut apart and divided like lines on a pie chart for the ever-ubiquitous search to appease the fertility God named Capitalism. Where do we go now to stop this cycle of waste?
Gaddis may not have all the answers, but I suppose that's why he's an artist rather than a philosopher. And this isn't an all purpose critique of capitalism, but it is certainly a critique of the mindset that arises as a result of this endless exploitation and greed. But most importantly it's an explosive moment of literature, it functions on too many levels to even name, it is formally innovative and overflowing with creative vigor and not a single line is wasted even among all the literal Waste and babble. There's not much surprise that this took 20 years to write, I mean it sure as hell shows it, it's the kind of masterpiece any writer of fiction would probably kill to have under their belt. There's too much going on here to wrap up with one read but it's my year of Gaddis and I think I'm going to be spending many of the next few years getting deeper into his fiction and rereading. This should be read by anyone it appeals to, I guarantee its difficulty is overstated. Just trust in the author and let go for a wild ride that you won't get elsewhere.
"Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him …"
And honestly? It's not that fucking difficult. I know making that kind of claim about any of these "pretentious weird big books" automatically makes me sound like I'm on my high horse and full of shit, but in this case I actually mean it. I read these 770 pages in just under 2 weeks which besides "Animal Money" by Cisco is the shortest time I've ever taken to read a novel of this length, to say it is compulsively readable or a page turner or whatever would be an understatement. There are so many parts of this book that for me were literally exhilarating to read, because of just how damn well this thing moves as a work of formal innovation and narrative. It's mostly dialogue, and mostly is a very fast paced novel set in the heart of never-sleeping New York, so for one thing you're already expected to move along at a pretty steady pace because if you don't you won't be able to keep up with the voices and dialogue itself, which are the main thing you're meant to be following here. It's less in the substance of what these people are saying [financial jargon, arguments over business and advertisements and prospects for $$$, etc] than what it reveals about them, what their position and relationship to the Almighty Dollar is, and how it shapes them and informs their tragedies of missing the bigger picture. It's a rare novel where reading it slowly [at least on first read] would actually make it more confusing, because you'd just spend a lot of it trying to parse out the details and specifics of who is fucking over and associating with who etc, but being lost is part of the point. The characters shine in the little details, the human moments that intrude upon the entropic dissonance of the text, it really isn't hard to follow if you can just trust in Gaddis like I said; if something is confusing or muddied, he will always bring it back around and tie it in perfectly, you'll eventually acclimate to the voices and be able to easily tell who is who because of how well voiced they are.
At its heart this is a very musical novel, one that's about sound as much as it is prose. The structure of the the novel itself almost works as a piece of music which is in conversation with Gaddis' interest in the art form in this book [almost always explored through the lens of Bast] and the metatextual influence of orchestral music on the book. I know shit about classical music so I'll avoid embarrassing myself by trying to talk about it but the work is very clearly in debt to avant-garde music and dissonance in general, it reminds me of anything from Stravinsky to the barely-controlled chaos of the best avant-garde jazz pieces. The novel makes the reader hyperfocus on Cadence not only through the characters' very established voices [almost as if the sounds of their individual chatter were motifs in a greater orchestra] but also through these totally spellbinding passages of lyrical beauty which are the most profound descriptions of the mundane world since episode 17 of "Ulysses", these time-laps style transitions between conversations to reorient place and time for the characters that just soar with melancholy poetry as well as they can percussive, momentous rhythm. The balance between the clamor of Voices and Noise and the lyrical passages of prose was a stroke of genius and literally constantly makes this entire thing feel like one long work of musical beauty that it is once polyphonic and harmonic, never have I felt books work on such similar wavelengths to music before, and rhythm has always been a draw to literature for me.
Oh yeah and the characters? Pretty much every single one of them, amazing. Like I said though you will most likely miss and confuse a few voices [and that identity confusion is part of the point too, a Gaddis theme which will be familiar to readers of "The Recognitions"], you'll still come to get most of them, for me at least it didn't take long before I was able to parse out the speaking voices here just because they are SO varied, realistic, and human. Like I have lived in the New York metropolitan area my whole life, and yeah...this is how people from the northeast USA talk. Full stop. And without a single use of interior monologue the ones here will, like all the best characters, compel laughter and pity at once, love and hate and the darkness and light within humans, and what happens to us when we lose touch with Nature and an ideal of human oneness in favor of a fragmented carnival of cutthroat competition that only serves the masters and banks at the end of the day. J R himself is the perfect child genius character, brilliant for all the wrong reasons, Bast is a great and generally relatably flawed protagonist, all the side characters are great too. Rhoda, Mrs. Joubert, Gibbs - Gaddis clearly knows about People despite seeming to hate them sometimes, if he does, he's also great at showing them at their most vulnerable and establishing empathy for them even in the depths of parody. How the heck??
It's a funny and often playful book, but it is also remarkably heartbreaking at times. Because of Gaddis' attunement to the people of his cast they will have these moments of connection broken up by the fragmented narrative and dialogue, so many of these people are looking for something great but they either lost their way in finding their personal ideals or have had them restructured and corrupted by the ever-present hunt for [and fight against] money, they want to see beauty and do something in their lives and have connections, and they often come close but the world is set up to break us apart rather than keep us together, even when we're this connected. So much of the motifs of time and the passage of days [and weeks and months] in this book give a feeling that we're losing precious time while we get caught up in this money spell, I'd say the book is prophetic but if anything it probably just shows that life has been like this for a long time, in different iterations with every generation since at least the first World War. Not everything in the novel has resolutions [in fact most don't] just like real life and resolutions when they are there are not guaranteed to favor the characters. It feels like a warning, but also feels like a demonstration of where we're at now, the inherent absurdity of that condition, and the idea [however difficult when the system encompasses all] that breaking away from it seems to require a rejection of that material greed and instead found in emotional connection with our fellow people, our planet, the natural world. The one that's being polluted by the garbage poured into our lakes and streams by capitalists generating waste as far as they can expand their empires, the corporations cutting down trees and forests with saws and pipelines to destroy Native reservations, stabbing the earth's skin by building banks and office buildings and cities on top of it, the world being cut apart and divided like lines on a pie chart for the ever-ubiquitous search to appease the fertility God named Capitalism. Where do we go now to stop this cycle of waste?
Gaddis may not have all the answers, but I suppose that's why he's an artist rather than a philosopher. And this isn't an all purpose critique of capitalism, but it is certainly a critique of the mindset that arises as a result of this endless exploitation and greed. But most importantly it's an explosive moment of literature, it functions on too many levels to even name, it is formally innovative and overflowing with creative vigor and not a single line is wasted even among all the literal Waste and babble. There's not much surprise that this took 20 years to write, I mean it sure as hell shows it, it's the kind of masterpiece any writer of fiction would probably kill to have under their belt. There's too much going on here to wrap up with one read but it's my year of Gaddis and I think I'm going to be spending many of the next few years getting deeper into his fiction and rereading. This should be read by anyone it appeals to, I guarantee its difficulty is overstated. Just trust in the author and let go for a wild ride that you won't get elsewhere.
"Sixteen years like living with a God damned invalid sixteen years every time you come in sitting there waiting just like you left him wave his stick at you, plump up his pillow cut a paragraph add a sentence hold his God damned hand little warm milk add a comma slip out for some air pack of cigarettes come back in right where you left him, eyes follow you around the room wave his God damned stick figure out what the hell he wants, plump the God damned pillow change bandage read aloud move a clause around wipe his chin new paragraph God damned eyes follow you out stay a week, stay a month whole God damned year think about something else, God damned friends asking how he’s coming along all expect him out any day don’t want bad news no news rather hear lies, big smile out any day now, walk down the street God damned sunshine begin to think maybe you’ll meet him maybe cleared things up got out by himself come back open the God damned door right there where you left him …"