William Gaddis

"JR won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction"--

At the center of this hugely comic tale of "free enterprise" America stands JR--an eleven-year-old capitalist, eagerly following the example of the grasping world around him. Operating through pay phones and post-office money orders, JR inadvertently parlays a shipment of Navy surplus picnic forks, a defaulted bond issue, and a single share of common stock into a vast paper empire embracing timber, mineral and natural gas rights, publishing, and a brewery. At once a novel of epic comedy and a biting satire of the American dream, JR displays the style and extraordinary inventiveness that has made Gaddis one of the most acclaimed writers of our time.

Maurice FitzGerald

I didn't read this book i experienced it. It got into my dreams. It is the funniest classic book i have ever read, laugh out loud funny. The settings were indelible. At times it annoyed the hell out of me. There are pages and pages of people talking on and on while someone tries but can't get a word in edgewise. In some ways it is a 700+ page Bob Newhart on the telephone skit. 
 I don't think it was as hard to read as i have heard. It's like a lot of more modern books if it was a film no one would complain about it being difficult. The difficulty of most modern fiction would even be commented on if it were in a film. People are a lot more sophisticated when it comes to decoding film. 
 It shines out in the wasteland that is american fiction. One has many more fingers than necessary to count the number of books written in america since this was published that deserve to be read more.

drikkes

Zum Zeitpunkt der Veröffentlichung hätte mal wohl mit "visionär" richtig gelegen. Aber auch einfach nur über 1000 Seiten derart unterhaltsam zu schreiben, muß man erst einmal hinbekommen.

Fraser Simons

Video review: https://youtu.be/6I5FTLaVmIA

The plot is very simple, really. Though it is and it isn’t what JR is about. A young, 11 year-old boy goes on a field trip and as a educational outing, every kid purchases $1 in stock. JR leverages that stock, and through a series of loop holes and above-board legalities, ends up creating an empire. Almost a mega corporation. Though not quite. Every other character essentially comes to work for the boy, knowingly or otherwise, though they all think they’re engaging in their own business. 

I have a lot to say on this one. Basically, I see it a very biting and angry text, one that does it level best to elicit that frustration presumably the author feels with capitalism directly into the text. And it worked. For me, at least. 

2/3 of it is dialogue and it doesn’t use dialogue tags as you might expect. Rather there is verbal ticks and a probably unusual amount of name referencing. But it feels very organic, even as everyone is talking over someone else. It’s also very explicit in what it’s about. Satirical on both a macro and micro level. Characters will just lay it out there. What isn’t being said—literally—is that each, in every situation, is in a conflict that is unceasing and present in every granular interaction. 

The idea of artistic freedom and the nourishment it affords, versus the systemic pieces of capitalism moving against those endeavours and people. Crucially, every person is a proponent of one or the other, depending on the situation. Music is often used as a short hand to show that, essentially, people are either a part of the symphonic music as artists, or they are merely noise. Interrupting, repeating, grating, nailing, penetrating noise. They halt all thought. All progress.

In the end, every character is nuanced and contradictory. A part of the system that continues to manufacture and co-opt people into the components capitalism requires to survive and propagate itself. Best we can hope for is recognizing it, making fun of it, cease to be The Noise. 

The granular humour is less of interest to me. Dick and fart jokes to more high brow stuff. The incredible thing about the novel is the marriage of form and structure and the way dialogue functions completely differently. It’s an accomplishment. I respected the frustrating parts because the point was to elicit frustration. Not every reader is going to feel that way. Boy, was it grating until it came together. But it did. It’s a 4.5 rounded up.

Daryl Houston

One of my all-time favorites. You have to learn how to read it as you go along. The first half of it I spent wondering why I was putting myself through the torture of it, and the second half I spent belly-laughing. An amazing accomplishment to have written, and a pretty significant one to have read and enjoyed (if I do say so myself).

----

I wrote the above blurb when first adding the book a few years ago. I just reread it for what I believe was my fourth full reading of the book. It's still a marvel, but I found it less thrilling this time through, perhaps because I knew most of the gags already and had less of the "I'm solving a puzzle as I read" feeling that makes the book so fun the first few times through. I found a lot of the repetitiveness tedious this time. It's still among my top favorite books because of the achievement it represents, but I think I'll wait a good long time before reading it again.

J R

Reviews