Singing the Entropy Blues

...And only in the frantic slapstick of the flat on 96th Street, where the ponderous immovability of obdurate things merges with the incessant talking drizzle in a kind of hilarious low comedy, does Gaddis seem to be genuinely in command...

...Among the dozens of knaves, bitches, fools, and losers who are trapped in JR's grubby machinations are Edward Bast, a pathologically timid composer, and Jack Gibbs, who incompetently teaches social studies in JR's school while supposedly working on his magnum opus, Agape, Agape, "a social history of mechanization and the arts...

...But William Gaddis, like Joseph Heller last year, has chosen a self-defeating artistic means of declaring his concern with the state of America at the present time...

...For him, forgery and authenticity, the counterfeit and the real, can be judged only as the work of art helps or hinders the discovery of those constant patterns: "To recognize, not to establish but to intervene...

...That book remained unnoticed and unread, except for a small, fiercely loyal underground cult, until it was reprinted last year in paperback (Avon, 1021 pp., $2.65...

...In this frenetic cy-clorama of modern noncommunication, everyone seems to speak at the same time, "fleeing one wad of sound for another" without bothering to listen...

...I won't even mention War and Peace, including the parts most people skip—too obvious...

...For Gaddis' copiously documented disgust with "the whole loud cheap pounding stupidity" is not an idea about the universal tyranny of kitsch but a violent—and still mesmerized—revulsion...

...I mean the thing is just where you get to sell something like, wait a second...

...The scenes in this demented confusion of noise and clutter are unarguably the best things in JR, since the apartment provides a zany, farcical context for all the spoken trivia and banality and cupidity...

...Moreover, when one thinks back to The Recognitions...

...He leaves out absolutely nothing he has heard, and is so flawlessly accurate a recorder that he makes that earlier master of plain talk, J. D. Salinger, seem deaf...

...Over this inextinguishable din, Gaddis is saying (if one could hear him) that art, feeling and intelligence, along with syntax, eloquence and clarity, are being corrupted and devoured by the epidemic debasement of language...

...It isn't the showy erudition of The Recognitions (the kind of exhibitionistic arcana a young novelist can rarely bring himself to leave out) that sticks with the reader, but Gaddis' brilliant menagerie of insufferable culture vultures and decadent poseurs...

...JR seems ostentatiously empty of any intellectual substance...

...Conversely, JR's school principal, who moonlights as a banker and is sucked into the boy's web of deficit spending and discounting, gets his point across in such maloccluded jargon as "tangi-bilating the full utilization potential of in-school television...

...All the more reason to lament the dullness of JR...

...The plot that raggedly takes shape through the dense smog of chatter has to do with an 11-year-old Long Island schoolboy, JR, who parlays a mania for sending in magazine coupons offering free samples and instant-success courses into a conglomerate of bankrupt corporations that he runs from a telephone booth...

...or Ulysses once and then half around again, up to "Circe...

...It is also the home of Bast and a mush-head named Rhoda, the easiest lay in Manhattan, whose incessant yammer consists almost entirely of the two words "man" and "like...

...The moral of this laboriously comic monster of a novel is hardly unfamiliar, and of course the password entropy, fondled by Gaddis' locum, Gibbs, makes several obligatory appearances...

...In this instance the esthetic credo of Mies van der Rohe is definitely relevant...

...In the past decade, the idea of entropy has been taken up as an apocalyptic leitmotif by novelists as dissimilar as Bellow, Barthelme, Updike, Pynchon, and Percy, who confront a world apparently running down and out, afflicted with a chaotic sameness of articulation and response, propelled by an irresistible force that grinds individuality into amorphous likeness and converts the vitality and diversity of older, better times into torpid uniformity and sloth...

...And nowhere, as he demonstrates in JR, is our verbal currency more thoroughly abused and defiled than in the unregenerate late-20th-century mess that is the world of big business...

...So dazzling was the verbal skill of The Recognitions that several academic critics spent many manhours industriously tracking down the book's Joycean parallels and influences...

...Unfortunately, Gaddis begs a critical literary question: Does one have to reproduce something ad nauseum in order to convey the fact that it is nauseating...

...Less is more...

...Nevertheless, the Johnny-come-lately critics who have begun to overpraise Gaddis' first book with pompous solemnity as one of the most important postwar American novels and a permanent contribution to the literature of modernism seem off the mark...

...and money—in one form or another—is usually what they are talking about...

...But there is an important difference: Joyce felt a strong affection for many of the fragmentary bits of popular songs and advertising slogans and newspaper headlines that he sent floating through the mind of Leopold Bloom...

...Gaddis dramatized with remarkable prescience contemporary culture's obsession with the moral imperatives of authenticity, later examined by Lionel Trilling in his profoundly illuminating study, Sincerity and Authenticity...

...In the entropy blues played by contemporary American authors—lamenting what they see as a vast breakdown of society, culture and sensibility—all is for the worst in the worst of all possible Americas...

...But JR is one of a new genre of fiction...

...For there is a suffocating excess of pretentious philosophical speculation packed into The Recognitions...

...Equipped with an ear spookily receptive to every nuance in the muck and muddle of contemporary colloquial discourse, Gaddis treats his readers as a captive audience, forcing them to listen, even if it kills them, to the endlessly aggressive and mindless cacophony of common speech today...

...The term, borrowed by Henry Adams and a long line of social philosophers and sociologists from the second law of thermodynamics, is used to mean, as one dictionary defines it, "the irreversible tendency of a system, including the universe, toward increasing disorder and inertness...

...Gaddis, alas, claimed in a recent interview that he has never read Ulysses...

...Like that unreachable radio, he can't turn off his enraged attention, and he dumps everything into these pages except what they most desperately need—the ironic and flexible detachment of a discriminating mind...

...His copyings, he insists, are not forgeries but acts of religious reverence to the spirit of the Flemish painters...

...If there is any single controlling idea behind JR, it is Gibbs' sober observation that "Order is simply a thin, perilous condition we try to impose on the basic reality of chaos...

...Yet no one has let it all hang out with such self-hobbling fanaticism as Gaddis...

...Nowhere in the book is this pervasive disorder more perfectly embodied than in a dirty tenement on East 96th Street, which houses the JR Corporation's uptown headquarters once the snot-nosed tycoon expands his initial deal (selling 9,000 gross of Navy surplus wooden forks to the Army) into a leaning tower of defunct companies trafficking in frozen pork bellies, worthless real estate, player-piano rolls, green aspirin, condoms, pornographic films, nursing homes, and funeral parlors...

...SINGING THE ENTROPY BLUES BY PEARL K. BELL Christmas Book Issue Toward the close of William Gaddis's new novel JR (Knopf, 726 pp., hardcover $15.00, paperback $5.95), it occurred to me that in the 10 days it was taking to struggle through the book, I could have been reading more pleasurably the collected works of Jane Austen...

...A novelist, though, can reproduce all the mangled syllables we utter without mangling himself into tedium only if he enriches, and in a sense reproaches the mindless spoken word by a defining structure, by boldly independent thought, by an imaginative variety of character and incident, by all the mysterious signs that show him to be unequivocally in charge...

...A combined warehouse and garbage dump crammed with packing crates full of potato chips and toilet paper, the "office" is a slimy chaos of hot water pouring out of ruined taps that can't be turned off, telephones ringing without mercy, an unreachable radio spewing commercials night and day, menacing government inspectors incessantly shuffling in and out, and delivery men gliding around the slalom of detritus...

...Gaddis' true gift, and it is indeed a great one as it makes itself felt in both his novels, is for satire, and in the funniest sections of the earlier work he skewers phonies of every description—artistic, sexual, intellectual, social —with deadly precision...

...Gaddis can produce with uncanny perfection ("What is she's your cousin...

...I predict it will be the most successful unread novel of the year...

...His meteoric rise is not for a second hampered by the fact that he's barely literate: " like I have this thing which what it is is it's this selling outfit where what you do is you send in and they...

...Yet it is hard to begrudge Gaddis his long-overdue good fortune, even if it has come to the wrong work...

...Inevitably, some impressionable reviewers are currently linking the mass-cult talk that is almost the whole of JR with Joyce's daring use 50 years ago, in the grand design of Ulysses, of what John Gross has described as "all the idiomatic rags and tatters of everyday speech...

...Unlike any of the books I wished I were reading instead, it seems concerned less with imposing the author's imaginative and technical will upon experience than with the total reproduction of mundane existence, down to the most insignificant hmmm...

...Not so long ago a publisher would have said: OK, you've got it all down, now go home and write a novel...

...Entropy of entropies, saith the preacher-novelist, all is entropy...

...And this is the haven where Gibbs makes futile stabs at finishing his doomed study...

...In this genre, already so characteristic of the literature of the 1970s—Pynchon, Bar-thelme, Heller in his nothing-happened phase—the obscurities and vulgarities of kitsch, electronic babble, pop art, and street talk are served up verbatim, un-mediated by a sense of form...

...The novelists of the late '60s and '70s are sending out signals of disintegration and decay, and some of them have written complex and difficult books about the question of entropy that compel attention...

...In the end, the message of his novel has been swallowed by the medium...

...Gibbs, however, has scarcely looked at his manuscripts in 16 years, and in his drunken railing at "most God damned readers," clearly speaks for Gaddis, whose one other novel, The Recognitions, was published in 1955...

...Hence the novel's bludgeoning monotony, the spastic repetitive-ness picking frantically at all the scars and sores that disfigure the urban wasteland...

...Finally, the roof of the tenement caves in, with a literal crash, on JR and his "Family of Companies," and on the brokers and bankers and PR men and politicians and lawyers and businessmen cutting each others' throats for a piece of the 11-year-old chairman's paper pie...

...Although an unscrupulous dealer soon enough makes the most of Gwyon's "authentic" originals, drawing the painter inexorably into a world of mercenary and freakish charlatans, fakes, mountebanks, crooked manipulators of every description, Wyatt continues to believe—against an age that worships "creative" novelty and confuses it with originality—that there is no such thing as pure invention, that art is simply the recognition of a holy reality, "patterns already there...

...A superbly faithful transmitter, he catches every note in the dissonant jabber clogging a world that has both lost the pure sound of silence and forgotten it ever existed...

...or the stories and plays of Chekhov, with some time left over for a few of his marvelous letters...

...or the major novels of Ford Madox Ford, not omitting the difficult four-volume Parade's End...

...JR is impossible to absorb for more than five pages at a time without reaching for the nearest distraction, whether light or fresh air or the infantile consolations of food, not because the novel is hard to understand or confusing to follow, but because it is as boring as its characters would be in the flesh...

...Because JR is made up almost entirely of dialogue whose speakers and auditors are often unclear, and there are neither chapter breaks nor spaces between any incidents throughout the many pages, that catastrophic abode becomes a lifeline in a choppy sea of sound without sense...

...Today, JR is chosen by the Book-of-the-Month Club and hailed by reviewers...

...His lackeys solemnly agree that "PRwise it can't hurt us educationwise...

...With a deeply aggrieved and personal bitterness, Gibbs raves that "most God damned writing's written for readers perfectly happy who they are rather be at the movies...

...Gaddis, perhaps because contemporary common speech is rooted in the media, which have stifled whatever spontaneous folk vitality casual conversation still happened to possess in Joyce's time, captures the flotsam and jetsam of our daily babble with nothing more than indignation and outright contempt...

...Gaddis' principal character, Wyatt Gwyon, abandons his theological studies in order to become a painter, and in turn rejects the ideal of original art to establish himself as a supremely clever "imitator" of the Flemish Old Masters...

...an extraordinary range of contemporary semiliteracy, incoherence, waffling, media-inspired inanity, grammatical mayhem, and garbled cliche, as well as the exact sound of egotism, chicanery, pomposity, pretentious ignorance, and the ill-tempered lie...

...Compared with his first novel, JR suggests entropy in Gaddis himself...

...Ask them to bring one God damned bit of effort want everything done for them they get up and go to the movies...

...The Recognitions, published 20 years ago when he was 33, was an extraordinary, albeit flawed, performance, beautifully written, casting a sly and witty eye on arty American expatriates in Paris and Spain just after World War II...