Word: novels
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William Gaddis is the author of The Recognitions, a massive 30-year-old novel noted for its high style and erudite handling of religion and art. The book has been compared with Joyce's Ulysses and Gide's The Counterfeiters and credited with inspiring Thomas Pynchon's V. Yet as the novel's reputation grew, its author seemed to vanish. For 20 years Gaddis taught, lived on grants and wrote literature for business and industry: annual reports, speeches for executives, memorandums. In 1975 he reappeared with JR, a lengthy, knowledgeable satire about an eleven-year-old boy who becomes...
...thing he did was teach a college course on the theme of failure in the American novel. Not so coincidentally, Carpenter's Gothic is about losers in a competitive society. Gaddis reveals his characters in snatches of dialogue: "--Will you listen to me? Trying to tell you they're taking you to court here, anybody comes to the door don't open it. Stumpp serving a summons on you some seedy process server comes to the door tell them a mile away, some down at the heels hopeless looking bastard they get seven dollars a summons he has to hand...
...action of the novel is restricted to the McCandless house, located in a Hudson River town not far from New York City. The design of the residence is carpenter's gothic, "a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions... a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale." This description is a key to Gaddis' own architecture: a self-conscious scaling down of his earlier books, in which issues of decline and fraudulence were elaborately developed...
...even when he controls his impulse to wail, Hannah remains a distinctive, disturbing voice. Longtime fans continue to wonder when he will again reach the comic breadth and scope of Geronimo Rex (1972), his dazzling first novel. Certainly not this time. Captain Maximus is almost aggressively fragmentary. But Hannah's brand of disorderly conduct, even in bits and pieces, remains a welcome reminder that art can be just as wild and unpredictable as daily life. --By Paul Gray
...perhaps indicating a desire to take revenge on some threatening situation, if not the one that might have been uppermost in people's minds. Fictional heroes of the period may have offered similar distractions, functioning as little "bombs" in their own right. McMurphy of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Yossarian of Joseph Heller's Catch-22 were at war with the world, and both nuked the societies that sought to contain them. One took on the scientists, the other the military: a one-two punch for the common man. Perhaps these explosions were...