Scan barcode
A review by andrewmerritt00
J R by William Gaddis
5.0
—Hey? You listening?
Holy… what a god damn circus of a novel. Nobody does it quite like William Gaddis, huh? Over 726 pages Gaddis brilliant satirizes the nature of capitalism, the hunt for money and power, playing to win the game at all costs, and ultimately what America’s all about.
“—Yes look up at the sky look at it! Is there a millionaire for that? But her own eyes dropped to her hand on his shoulder as though to confirm a shock at the slightness of what she held there. —Does there have to be a millionaire for everything?”
While not an easy read by any means, after finding the rhythm something around the 75-100 page mark, I started to settle in and found the novel more accessible than its size and structure lets on. What struck me the most throughout the twoish weeks I spend with JR, Bast, Gibbs, et al., was how much Gaddis had his finger on the pulse of day to day life and the constant stream of information and noise that comes with it. There’s only so many times you can have a conversation interrupted by a phone call or restart a thought multiple times because you keep getting cut off before it starts to feel like Gaddis is scripting your day job.
“—Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…”
In a year full of great books, JR offers a reading experience unlike any other and has turned me into a full blown Gaddisite. Reading JR has made me realize how I didn’t fully appreciate The Recognitions (which I’ve know would require a couple two-three more reads), and that I need to read his other National Book Award winner — A Frolic of His Own. Whichever novel I get to first, you can find me picking through his collected letters all throughout 2024
Holy… what a god damn circus of a novel. Nobody does it quite like William Gaddis, huh? Over 726 pages Gaddis brilliant satirizes the nature of capitalism, the hunt for money and power, playing to win the game at all costs, and ultimately what America’s all about.
“—Yes look up at the sky look at it! Is there a millionaire for that? But her own eyes dropped to her hand on his shoulder as though to confirm a shock at the slightness of what she held there. —Does there have to be a millionaire for everything?”
While not an easy read by any means, after finding the rhythm something around the 75-100 page mark, I started to settle in and found the novel more accessible than its size and structure lets on. What struck me the most throughout the twoish weeks I spend with JR, Bast, Gibbs, et al., was how much Gaddis had his finger on the pulse of day to day life and the constant stream of information and noise that comes with it. There’s only so many times you can have a conversation interrupted by a phone call or restart a thought multiple times because you keep getting cut off before it starts to feel like Gaddis is scripting your day job.
“—Before we go any further here, has it ever occurred to any of you that all this is simply one grand misunderstanding? Since you’re not here to learn anything, but to be taught so you can pass these tests, knowledge has to be organized so it can be taught, and it has to be reduced to information so it can be organized do you follow that? In other words this leads you to assume that organization is an inherent property of the knowledge itself, and that disorder and chaos are simply irrelevant forces that threaten it from outside. In fact it’s exactly the opposite. Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos…”
In a year full of great books, JR offers a reading experience unlike any other and has turned me into a full blown Gaddisite. Reading JR has made me realize how I didn’t fully appreciate The Recognitions (which I’ve know would require a couple two-three more reads), and that I need to read his other National Book Award winner — A Frolic of His Own. Whichever novel I get to first, you can find me picking through his collected letters all throughout 2024