The death of an authentic American voice
Reporter-News.com

William Gaddis died last week.  He was not a household name.  He was perhaps the greatest American novelist since Faulkner.

Born in New York in 1922, Gaddis was kicked out of Harvard, where he edited the satirical Harvard Lampoon magazine, and roamed with the likes of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac.  In the spirit of the Beats, he had adventures around the world, among them helping Costa Rican rebels fight the government during that country's civil war, before he took to serious writing.  He published only four novels.  His first, The Recognitions, appeared in 1955, a sprawling story about a modern artist who makes a Faustian pact with the devil in exchange for the skill of the great masters and then wastes his talent producing forgeries.  The book became a critical success -- and a commercial failure.

Undaunted, Gaddis spent the next 20 years perfecting his technique and finding his own authentic voice before his next novel, J R, was published in 1975.  It won the National Book Award and remains his masterpiece, although Gaddis intentionally prevents casual reading.  Imagine, if you will, a 725-page continuous narrative with no chapters or division breaks, with at least 98 percent of the content consisting of dialogue -- in which the speakers are never identified.

Unique illusion of reality
Actually, it's not as hard to read as it might sound.  Gaddis so fully renders each of his panorama of characters that their speech becomes recognizable even without fiction's conventional means of identification, and his unorthodox style produces a unique illusion of real life.  The tale of crass materialism -- of the infuriating 11-year-old title character who swindles his classmates for seed money on the way to becoming a teen-age tycoon and leaves a flotsam of human lives and loves in his wake -- is as compelling as any in modern fiction.

Ten years later, Gaddis published Carpenter's Gothic, a slimmer volume of similar quality in his now-distinctive style.  A Frolic of His Own, labyrinthine on the scale of JR but focusing on the foibles of the legal profession and TV evangelists, appeared in 1994 and also won the National Book Award.  Before his death, Gaddis finished a fifth novel, Agapé Agape, which is due out soon.

Intellectual challenge
Gaddis' death didn't make the headlines.  Despite the laurels from critics, he was never a commercial success.  And as long as the publishing industry is ruled by the glib potboiler, his audience will remain narrow, confined to those with the courage to have their intellects challenged and their perspectives broadened.  Because the dominant theme of his fiction is the search for authenticity, in language and in life, that seems somehow appropriate.  Our age is notorious for its cultural dumbing-down.  In contrast, Gaddis refused to condescend to his readers or compromise his talent with slick imitation.  The body of his work stands as evidence that the human intellect and our abilities to write and read and think are far beyond what we ordinarily give them credit for.

Now that Gaddis is dead, the realm of criticism can begin assessing his achievement on literary history's larger time scale. Scholars will spend decades trying to exhaust that mine.

Saturday, December 26, 1998
http://www.reporternews.com/opinion/gaddis1226.html

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