"...[W]e are all in the same line of business: that of concocting, arranging, and peddling fictions to get us safely through the night," writes William Gaddis (1922-1998), comparing fiction writers and the religious. It is likely that more readers of U.S. fiction will have heard about Gaddis' concoctions than have read them. His first novel, The Recognitions, came out in 1955, and critics typed Gaddis as a difficult writer. In prose imbued with humour and a peculiar lyricism, there occur stimulating discussions of authenticity, forgery, painting, Christianity and other topics. The erudition and length of this 956-page novel irritated and defeated reviewers insensitive to inventiveness. They did not read The Recognitions thoroughly but talked as if they had, and their hostile opinions helped insure the novel sold poorly. It gradually assumed cult status nonetheless. Don DeLillo and William Gass drew encouragement from this vital work, as did later authors like David Foster Wallace and William Vollman.
Twenty years later Gaddis's reputation as 'difficult' was confirmed, for those predisposed to think that way, by his second novel, J R. Most of the 726-page novel is in dialogue without speech tags to indicate transitions from one character to another. Choppy, broken sentences create a picture of disorder on the communicative level that mirrors the misshapen composition of a financial empire ruled by an eleven-year-old. Gaddis placed a defiant remark about his aesthetics, aimed at inattentive readers, in the mouth of the character Jack Gibbs: "Most God damned readers rather be at the movies...." Thanks to Gass and Mary McCarthy, who recognized the quality of this exuberant, probing analysis of the financial world, J R won the 1976 National Book Award.
Carpenter's Gothic (1985), a work of 262 pages that respects Aristotelian unities, met with relative success, and Gaddis was no longer strictly a cult author. There is none of his plentiful humour (by turns dark, witty, slapstick, and occasionally sophomoric) in this novel that deals with, among other things, Christian fundamentalism, the U.S. grabbing another country's resources, and looming Armageddon. Gaddis's outlook over the course of the three novels had darkened from satire through meliorism to pessimism.
His fourth and last novel was the 586-page A Frolic of His Own. Comprising a traditional narrative, legal opinions, court transcriptions and excerpts from a play Gaddis had attempted to write, then abandoned, and could here recycle, it won the National Book Award for 1994. Gaddis's successful explorations of the novel and its potential, his complex structures, and the use of unusual material finally gained the respect he had been denied for forty years. Yet he was still classed as difficult, when all that was required was patience and an active participation on the part of a reader.
The Rush for Second Place collects essays, speeches and reviews spanning 1951 to 1998. There are articles and notes on the player piano and certain essays—"Old Foes with New Faces", on religion; "The Rush for Second Place", on the desire to be first; his NBA acceptance speeches—that will be of general interest. A few will appeal primarily to Gaddis readers. All are headed by Joseph Tabbi's informative notes. In the introduction he writes:
"What blocks the literary imagination is precisely what stimulated Gaddis to further creativity. By setting himself challenges equal to the world's own constraints and resistances, he could discover what freedom and autonomy might be possible, in the here and now, for an individual life and talent."
Jeff Bursey (Books in Canada)
Author of the deeply satirical novel JR (which features an 11-year-old capitalist who trumps up his Army surplus company in a manner that seems eerily prescient today) and of The Recognitions, Gaddis (1922-1998) was a fact-checker at the New Yorker and a corporate speech-writer before coming to prominence, but published very little essay-based work. Editor Joseph Tabbi here collects 29 short and occasional pieces, some left in manuscript at the time of Gaddis's death, others admiring encomiums to Saul Bellow or Julian Schnabel, all of which, as he notes, "create a sense of the environment in which Gaddis worked."
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
