A L S O+.T O D A Y

Waltzing the Cat
Reviewed by Paige Williams
Linked short stories, from the author of "Cowboys Are My Weakness," about a restless female photographer and her penchant for selfish, distant men

T A B L E+T A L K

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REMEMBERING WILLIAM GADDIS, NEGLECTED MASTER | PAGE 1, 2
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"The Recognitions" is a comic inferno that already displays its 30-year-old author's powers at their full: an extraordinary ear for speech, intricate plotting and a supple style that bridges the lyrical, the elegiac and the Gothic, while keeping up a counterpoint of irony, wit and pratfall. The book centers on Wyatt Gwyon, a failed seminarian and aspiring painter who works as a restorer -- and, finally, a forger -- of Flemish masterpieces. Brilliant and erudite, the novel has an exaggerated reputation for difficulty that overlooks its nonstop humor.

After the commercial failure of "The Recognitions," Gaddis worked in public relations and speechwriting for Pfizer International, the U.S. Army and Eastman Kodak, experiences he drew on two decades later for his next book, "JR." At 726 pages, this is his most challenging and essential novel, a scabrous, hilarious condemnation of American business and its genius for degrading everything it touches. Eleven-year-old J.R. Vansant, as wistful as he is appalling, builds a paper empire of penny stock and junk bonds from a school phone booth, drawing dozens of hapless adults into his disastrous orbit. Prophetic of 1980s Wall Street, "JR" is told in relentless overlapping dialogue, without chapters or breaks, that like its New York setting is at once exhilarating and draining. "JR" won the National Book Award in 1976.

Its unity of setting, its relative shortness and Gaddis' knowing reworking of familiar, almost trite, romantic elements make "Carpenter's Gothic" (1985) the most approachable of his books, though the plot is his darkest. Its interlocking intrigues lead, as usual, to disasters both local and global.

In "A Frolic of His Own" (1994), Oscar Crease is a middle-aged college instructor who sues a Hollywood producer for plagiarizing his unpublished play. The novel is not merely a satire on lawyers, since Oscar's high-minded principles are undercut by his ceaseless petulance, self-absorption and greed. The lawyers and jurists, while equally venal or biased, recognize as Oscar does not that justice and the law are entirely separate; Gaddis' lengthy pastiches of legal opinions show more than a grudging respect for the intellectual rigor of the law, imperfect as it is. Despite the characteristic multiple frantic threads racing one another toward chaos, "Frolic" ends on a note of, if not hope, at least respite. It won Gaddis his second National Book Award.

Over the years Gaddis' critical reception improved, but the idea of his "difficulty" remained a shibboleth of reviewers. Jack Gibbs, another of Gaddis' personae, is asked in "JR" if the book he's writing is difficult, and he replies, "Difficult as I can make it." For Gaddis this is a virtue, a gift of respect to his readers.

Ultimately he came to recognize that the number of readers willing to engage seriously with art is invariably small, a recognition that ends his first book: "He was the only person caught in the collapse, and afterward, most of his work was recovered too, and it is still spoken of, when it is noted, with high regard, though seldom played."

Gaddis is survived by his son Matthew, a filmmaker, and his daughter Sarah, a novelist. He left also a completed manuscript for a fifth book, "Agape Agape," the same "difficult" book about the player piano and mechanization in the arts that Jack Gibbs tried vainly to finish in "JR."
SALON | Dec. 18, 1998

Bay Area writer Carter Scholz's short fiction has appeared in Crank!

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