William Gaddis - J R
A
I still think this is the funniest book I’ve ever read. It’s weird too, because, like Gravity’s Rainbow, its sense of humor only adds to the fact that it’s one of the most cynical, angry books I’ve ever come across. A quarter of the book, characters spend in a small apartment filling up with trash, stubbing their foot on “Wise Potato Chips Hoppin’ With Flavor!” and angrily answering phone calls for a multi-million dollar conglomerate a precocious sixth-grader (flunking math) literally cut and pasted into existence. J R corp literally gets too big to fail and, in some way or another, leads to the destruction of the hundred or so recurring characters in the book…and the US economy. I gotta say I was really happy it didn’t get sucked up into the same black hole that enveloped the end of A Frolic of His Own, the other Gaddis novel I’ve read. It was bad enough that about 30% of the characters, by the end, either end up dead, crippled, or completely incapacitated, but by the end there’s really a sense of…something. It’s not really “hope,” because really everyone is in financial and existential ruin, but a lot of the characters have this reinvigorated drive to live their life—even if it’s just to get back to where they began. And godbless little J R Vansant…despite all odds, that greedy little jerk really won me over in the end.
Dallas Fort Worth – Broom of the System
C-
Well, at least I know where that angry “fuck metafiction!” vibe in “Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way” came from. For a guy who wrote at length about the coldness and laziness of the genre, his debut is one of the coldest, least-creative fiction experiments I’ve ever read. It’s really well written and has a capacity for philosophy and internal thought that honestly does impress me. When it came to words and overall style—and for the most part, this strange tone that only he had—Wallace really had that down by the time he was 24 (which never for a moment ceases to impress me.) However, over time, he was able to get in the heads of amazing characters with an empathy really unmatched by many writers of the past 50 years. I think starting to write nonfiction might have helped him a lot there. Hell, Don Gately, from IJ, is in my opinion the most well-drawn character in postmodern fiction. Here, every character starts out a caricature and spends the next 450+ completely flatlining. They’re basically used to stand in for a monolithic parable about how we can’t connect, yet the characters barely resemble “people” at all. I don’t care for them—and Wallace, with his wink and a nod shows us that he doesn’t particularly care for them either.
///rant:
I don’t know, maybe I’m just bitter that posthumously, anything and everything Wallace wrote has been retroactively considered “genius” and shined up for canonization. Like I feel like an author I really respect is turning into this deified cult figure who can Do No Wrong, sorta thing. Which ultimately undercuts one of the reasons why I think he was a great writer: he took a lot of chances within his fiction, and not all of them land. And throughout his career, he kept making these stylistic and perceptive leaps that led him, over time, to be the guy that wrote Infinite Jest, the essays of Consider the Lobster, and the “Interview” segments in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. But just thinking that this sloppiness somehow reaches greatness serves only to makes him more myth than man, something unattainable—which, btw, didn’t he warn about in that college address??
And the thing is I wasn’t even aware of Wallace until a few weeks after he died, I’d just turned seventeen, and Dreww posted a link to his 2004 essay, “The Host.” (One of his best, btw. Highly recommend if you haven’t read him, but are looking for an entryway, to start there.) So, in a way, I feel like by buying these books after he died—questioning whether I would’ve even known of him (or at least read him) were he still alive—I’m contributing to the same bizarre Dead Celebrity cult that turns an artist—who was once a goddamn, living-breathing person—into some sort of vague cosmos. Or at least a profitable, academic cottage industry.
/endrant///
Despite all this, I’m really looking forward to The Pale King (should be coming in the mail any day now). I want to do with Wallace what I did with Pynchon: finish his biblio on latest book.