AN EAR TO AMERICA
LeClair, Thomas
BOOKS AN EAR TO AMERICA J R WILLIAM GADDIS Knopf, $15 ($5.95 paper) Ralph Ellison's second novel should be along sometime soon. The signs are good. Woiwode and Heller have published their...
...Speaking with the tarbaby's tongue, Gaddis decreates as no other writer has, mocks the entropic noise that jams our ears...
...No one heeds Aristotle's and Gaddis's reproach: "to be always seeking after the useful does not become free and exalted souls...
...Cates never knows that J. R. is an eleven-year-old boy who got his start from free information he picked up on a school tour of Cates's company...
...The problem, says writer Jack Gibbs...
...So he goes after big business and its babble...
...Gaddis was silent, became apocryphal...
...Monogrammed doormat sixteen ninety-five . . . Earn your respect making monogrammed doormats how's that...
...In Gaddis's America money metastasizes from business into education and the arts, poisons all relations, smears all clarity...
...crooked politicians and military men...
...He has a writer named Eigen (German for "ownself") experience the insistent garbled voices of America: "everything around him getting so God damned real he couldn't see straight long enough to write a sentence...
...A more serious problem-Wit also a major source of the novel's interest -is Gaddis's constructing it almost wholly out of talk...
...Now comes William Gaddis's J R, twenty years after The Recognitions...
...Here...
...and the artists victimized by what Gaddis calls a "shoot the pianist" culture...
...So I mean listen I got this neat idea hey, you listening...
...Even sunlight is "pocketed" in a cloud...
...But meanwhile other novelists and public knowledge have engaged the enemy...
...And like remember where I read you on the train that time where there was this big groundswill [sic] about leading this here parade and entering public life and all...
...J R proves Gaddis has been here all along-listening to America talk, listening to life become information, art become publicity, words become waste...
...J.R...
...Woiwode and Heller have published their "long-awaited" books in THOMAS LeCLAIR the last year or so...
...It was rumored that he was Joyce alive in America or, more recently, Thomas Pynchon as a young man...
...The novel opens with an old-fashioned family squabble over control of inherited stock, but this small-change disturbance soon involves principals and reader in the web of modern big business...
...But they are a monstrous tar-baby, and I think Gaddis signals this in the novel...
...A mirror to his environment, he becomes as venal as Cates, and even after federal agencies disband his eccentric holdings J. R. remains dedicated to the romance of business...
...named after Josiah Gibbs of the "Gibbs free energy function"), is entropy, thermodynamic and informational...
...Instead of "writing sentences," Gaddis records all the "damned real" triple-talk, verbal flatulence, and linguistic shuffles of our time...
...The Recognitions demonstrated what we've lost, J R what we have...
...The novel itself is a conglomerate: congeries of lives, forces, goods, and information so multiple, yet interlocked, that the reader enters it as he would the ITT annual report-with suspicion and trepidation...
...As Pound put it in The Cantos: "with usury the line grows thick...
...Listen to the cause, the novel's first line: "-Money . . .? in a voice that rustbed...
...Ironically, Gaddis's twenty years without recognition may account for the weaknesses of J R. Gaddis quotes from the reviews of The Recognitions in J R and suggests that commercialism robbed him of his place in letters...
...Forty characters, an equal number of companies or products, a geometrical progression of connections, and maniacal quick-cutting produce a complex formula made intelligible only by its lowest common denominator: money...
...Energy is unavailable for artists' work because they receive no support...
...Although The Recognitions is as important as any American novel published in the last thirty years, 1955 reviewers were largely unsympathetic to its massive ambition, learning, and innovation...
...Vibrating another filament is J. R. Van-sant, a hot newcomer who parlays some Army surplus forks into a bothersome little empire that includes a brewery (cobalt produces the beer's amazing head...
...Here exaltation is expensive and not even junk is free...
...Now forget these objections and read J R, an Ionescan Gravity's Rainbow, a Barthelmian Something Happened, a novel by William Gaddis...
...Jack honestly if you can't simply...
...lackey executives, brokers, and lawyers...
...Listen: "remember this here book that time where they wanted me to write about success and like free enterprise and all hey...
...To be worthy of its enemy, J R had to be massive, inclusive, long in preparation...
...J. R. claims a mineral depletion allowance), a drug company-nursing home-funeral parlor-cemetery arrangement, some R and D in tele-portation and freeze-dried sound, and a dollar sign logo...
...And although America invented information science, communication, with business as its paradigm, is accidental and meaning leaks from language...
...You listening...
...Embarrassingly acute, relentlessly inventive, as chaotically funny as Catch-22, as comprehensively satirical as Giles Goat-Boy, and a good bet for a National Book Award if that too has not succumbed to cultural entropy, J R is nearly as large (726 pages)- but not as profound-as The Recognitions...
...Horatio Alger, phantom competitor, and contemporary personification of Alberich in Wagner's Rheingold, J. R. is a marvelously malicious parody of the American success story...
...Gaddis attacks the business of America with Poundian bitterness and an updated version of Heller's Milo Minderbinder world...
...The technique is innovative, often effective, and sometimes tedious...
...But he doesn't create a homeostatic language to set against the stutter of popular culture...
...As Gibbs says of his long-delayed book on commerce and art: "nobody gives a God damn book everything's happened book about everybody knows hate it...
...newspaper's full of opportunities...
...A writer kills himself, a painter sells blood to buy paints, a composer writes schlock for promotional films...
...No no listen look, first time in history so many opportunities to do so God damned many things not worth doing, problem's they start with the sixteen ninety-five have to start with the doormat, went to the woods to live deliberately Thoreau says couldn't escape from the Protestant ethic, be the first ones to redeem it Amy making monogrammed doormats deliberately...
...At the center is "Black Jack" Cates, archetypal robber baron, manipulator, and mechanical man...
...As J. R.'s corporation grows, Gad-dis entangles it with other filaments: a school system committed to patriotism, kickbacks, hardware, ignorance, and its "custodial" function...
Vol. 103 • January 1976 • No. 2
