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JR

by William Gaddis, Frederick R. Karl (Introduction)

4.35 of 5 stars 4.35 · rating details · 905 ratings · 119 reviews

A biting satire, JR features JR, an eleven-year-old capitalist, who embodies the cash culture he grows up in. The young JR manipulates his meagre economic beginnings including a shipment of Navy surplus picnic forks, a defaulted bond issue and turns them into a massive paper empire. The novel's satiric assault upon the American Dream, and the economics it represents makes...more

Paperback, 752 pages

Published August 26th 1993 (first published 1975)

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May 05, 2013 [P] added it

Shelves: abandoned

So, like, I have a fetish, and it's becoming a problem. If someone told me there's a book out there and it's composed entirely of punctuation - no words, just 900 pages of exclamation marks, full-stops, and commas - I'd totally be there. I seem to want [at least a good proportion of] the literature I read to stand on my bollocks in high heels and call me a dirty bitch. Yet, I'm starting to realize what an empty experience that can be. Or maybe it's that I've read all the great stuff - all those...more So, like, I have a fetish, and it's becoming a problem. If someone told me there's a book out there and it's composed entirely of punctuation - no words, just 900 pages of exclamation marks, full-stops, and commas - I'd totally be there. I seem to want [at least a good proportion of] the literature I read to stand on my bollocks in high heels and call me a dirty bitch. Yet, I'm starting to realize what an empty experience that can be. Or maybe it's that I've read all the great stuff - all those knocked-out-of-shape experimental masterpieces - and so I'm left to swill the dregs around in my mouth and it's, inevitably, leaving a bitter aftertaste, but I'm not sure that's the case. JR, for example, is very highly rated by all the right people, and it's near 800 pages of unattributable dialogue [or so it's popularly claimed, but I'll come back to this], so I ought to love it, I would've loved it once upon a time. Now? I'm like the man with crushed bollocks turning to his dominatrix and saying 'well, yeah, you can terrorize testicles fine, dear, but what else can you do?'

I want to say up front that I'm not referring to difficulty here, I am talking about experimental not difficult literature [although the two often go hand-in-hand of course]. I still like it hard; I still like to work while I read. In fact, for all it's supposed difficulty I found reading JR a breeze. That's not a boast, by the way, I genuinely believe that it's not tough. But it has got such a reputation! Yeah, it has, and it rests on a couple of things, which I'll try and deal with, in the hope that the readers who do want to tackle the book aren't put off by that reputation. Firstly, those who complain about the difficulty claim that there are no clear transitions between scenes. Phooey. I would retort that these people aren't concentrating and that they ought to read it properly rather than skim-reading while picking their toenails. The transitions are obvious; Gaddis will do one of a number of things to let you know the scene has changed: either he will narrate the change [apparently there is no narration in the book, even though there, y'know, is], or he will have a character say something like 'that car nearly hit me' or 'it's really windy out here' when the previous paragraph clearly took place indoors, or the characters will change suddenly. Another claim of difficulty centres around the unattributed speech, and, well, again this isn't so. Often a character will say something like 'that's true, Jane' and so you know, of course, that the previous speaker is called Jane and one can then follow the conversation from there; indeed as far as I read of the book [about half of it] only one or two people were present and participating during a scene without being acknowledged by name. So, this begs the question, how would you know who these people are, these people who aren't identified by name? Gaddis uses verbal ticks to identify them, like the headmaster who peppers his speech with 'ahm.' Easy-peasy. As an act of contrition I do want to say before I move onto my reasons for abandoning the book that Gaddis' dialogue is amazing; one genuinely does feel like one is 'listening' to someone speak, real speech. And real speech is fucking difficult to capture, and I know this because so many authors are truly abysmal at it.

So, what's my problem then? My problem with the book is that it just doesn't go anywhere, at least not in the first half. In part JR is a book about mis-communication, about how no-one really listens to anyone else, and I love that, I really do, because I wholeheartedly agree, and for the first 100 pages, what with everyone trying to have, like, 50 simultaneous conversations, half on which are on the phone, I was really digging this. But 400 pages of it? Is that really necessary? The other central theme of the novel is capitalism; again, I was totally on board with this. The 11 year old boy who gives the novel its title is the best thing in the book; his money making schemes, his, almost wide-eyed, capitalist gang-banging, are, on the surface, great fun. Yet, there isn't enough of him, or to him. He appears too infrequently, and yet even when he does half of what he says, and is involved in, is a repeat of what he said, and did, the last time he was around. Repetition! See, there's a big problem with repetition in the book. There are only so many times you can read the same scene, such as JR and his friend squabbling over their trading of 'crap' for example, and it is only one example, before you feel like going postal. Another one of Gaddis' themes was, apparently, entropy, and yet it reads more like he was interested in monotony.

You might tell me that I quit just before it hots up. And you might well be right, but as MJ wrote in his review of Gravity's Rainbow, I'm not into books that get-going at page 450. It's like hooking up with a girl: no, I don't need to get laid on the first date, but I'm not waiting five years either. (less)

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Dec 03, 2012 Mariel rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: with a sytrofoam finger making it rain once

Recommended to Mariel by: I came for the food but stayed for the prom dresses

Well he, of course he did yes I, because it's one place it's the one place an idea can be left here you can walk out and close the door and leave it here unfinished the most, the wildest secret fantasy and it stays on here by itself in that balance between, the balance between destruction and and realization until..."

Talking day to night Barbie power suits. Nine to five to pour a cup of rat poison in your kid's cup of ambition. I don't understand money except that I don't have any. I don't unde...more Well he, of course he did yes I, because it's one place it's the one place an idea can be left here you can walk out and close the door and leave it here unfinished the most, the wildest secret fantasy and it stays on here by itself in that balance between, the balance between destruction and and realization until..."

Talking day to night Barbie power suits. Nine to five to pour a cup of rat poison in your kid's cup of ambition. I don't understand money except that I don't have any. I don't understand the current economic crisis except that money is printed and not everyone agree it has value. In God We Trust and some fine print I was too dumb to read first before I signed up for this mess. I was almost jealous of the idiot savant J.R., the testicular character. I guess he's an idiot savant, falling ass backwards into things like Kramer on Seinfeld. Hiring four star generals for his board of directors? It seems like these guys with money do that thing so this is my cruder copy of that thing. He would tell Mr. Bast he was doing it all for him. Look, this is the heart we had to make in class, yeah? No one ask any questions, don't look down economics. He will no doubt fare better in the world than I ever could. I'm the unpopular fat cheerleader at the bottom of the pyramid scheme. But then I don't want to wonder about how there is a millionaire for everything, either. I snapped out of my life failing feeling. I probably shouldn't admit to J.R. looking like he knew what he was doing envy. I get so scared some days over bills that a little of J.R.'s blindness would probably help me sleep better.

I identified with Amy in the café when she snaps over picking on the little old man who runs the place who tries so hard. Why does it have to be that way? Those who try so hard anyway are my heroes. It's really hard. J.R. is about trying hard when you are in the suit that is too big or too small for you. You're wife left you. You're tired of hearing about how your husband could have been everything that he needed to want to be when he grew up if he only didn't have a wife and kid to take care of. It's not losing your soul when you have to try so damned hard all of the time. These people come into your home and they measure your backyard for their new thing they want to build over you. You work all of the time, as you're working. Nothing is free. I don't want to be stepped on like a consumed bag of Wise potato chips hopping with flavor. I didn't want to be a standardized test. Make up the music in your head as you're working. Hug J.R. to your chest when he thinks there are stuffed people in the natural history museum. J.R. had a lot of heart. I put up off reading this book for a long time because I thought it was going to be a satire about the money obsessed culture. It's about not burning in the oven with your bills you're too afraid to open. I was moved by the effort. The real work, not the making others money work for you. I live with them on the bottom of the pyramid. I had a lot more to say in my head but I am really tired. It took me months to read J.R. because I haven't been sleeping enough for a long, long time. It was my comfort to read a little every morning before having to go to work again. A kind of sanity valve. Someone in the crowd to say "This shit is insane!" and not pretend that it's not all a bunch of made up shit. I don't only mean the money shit. Trying to get along with anything at all. It is all just a bunch of made up stuff, right? Can't it be about more than making it through the day. I miss my J.R. ritual.

… and they gaped obediently at the bird dropping coursing down that weathered angel’s cheek until the light changed and released them across Broadway and down Wall in disheveled Indian file staggered seriatim by a stench rising from the sidewalk grating at No. 11 until George Washington’s extended hand flung their attention fragmented round the corner into Broad where the lofty pediment at No. 20 threatened to spill its stone comedy of naked labor yoked, high above their heads, to the lively dominion seething within, buffeted by the anxiety of lifetimes’ savings adrift in windbreakers and flowered hats towards the visitors’ gallery where football field hyperbole addressed them in a voice strategically boxed along the rail.(less)

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Aug 21, 2008 Stuart rated it 3 of 5 stars

Glad I finished it, but I wouldn't read it again if you nailed it to my forehead and pinned my eyes open. 726 pages of unattributed dialogue. No complete sentences, just maddeningly naturalistic speech - all run-ons and sentence fragments and ums and ahs. No chapter breaks. A floating POV with only the dialogue to alert you to scene changes and character entrances/exits. In other words, a migraine dressed as a novel. But in all fairness, it's a good novel anyway. The title character, a sixth gra...more

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Jul 03, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: after-joyce, william-gaddis, unreadababble, 100-mccaffery-read

JR is simply loads of fun. Don't fall for the Franzen trashtalk about Gaddis being "Mr Difficult." Just fun. And smart.

[NEW]--A conversation apropos the Dalkey reissue of JR regarding Gaddis, JR, and Difficulty at Open Letters Monthly.

Gaddis Annotations is all you'll need to keep yourself oriented to scene and character. Don't let that unattributed dialogue scare you off -- Gaddis has the talent to individuate each of his characters and you won't have to bother reading a bunch of "he said . . ....more

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Jun 12, 2008 John rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: readers who want to know the world in its noisy entirety

Recommended to John by: Donald Barthelme

Shelves: american-novels-that-matter

An essential, a masterwork: uproarious yet profoundly troubling, syllable-perfect in its rendering of voices both adolescent and doddering, and gathering a vital and thunderous narrative force though it features a cast and a technique that risks utter confusion. Indeed, confusion is one of the core themes here, spiritual confusion, as Gaddis here looms up like a recording angel of late-20th Century materialist culture. He gets the entire culture, yes, though his plot never moves beyond a middle...more

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Feb 08, 2008 Alex rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: patient readers

Shelves: favorites

Someplace, sometime in the future, someone will be digging around in the rubble of American civilization and find this book. And it will be regarded as a definitive reflection on the entropy of late-stages capitalism.

It's a book of voices, stuttering and self-assured, echoing from a void that one comes to recognize all-too-easily as America itself. JR, the eponymous one, is the prepubescent ubermensch of capitalist will, devoid of self-awareness and scruples alike. What a cutie.

And above all, th...more

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Apr 05, 2013 Josh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: audiobook, longish-reviews, read-2013

OLD REVIEW:

People of Earth–should I start here or with The Recognitions?

UPDATE: Too late, I'm reading this first. I downloaded the audiobook because this seems to be one of the only books in the world that make sense to listen to rather than read... this way, it's not some crazy-intellectual, masochistic, artsy-fartsy novel– it's now some crazy-intellectual, masochistic, artsy-fartsy 37 hour long radio show, right? RIGHT?!

---

I couldn't imagine reading this as a book–without JR's dopey "Wait up,...more

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Aug 14, 2012 Victoria added it · review of another edition

It looks like I've given up on my second reading, which was undertaken because of the peculiarly inaccurately named Occupy Gaddis reading. It's very good and very funny and very painful and very long, and perhaps the reading should have been called Occupy Art, which is really what the occupation, by financial interests, described in the work is -- though Occupy Education is certainly a sub-theme.

Readers would be well advised to focus on the work itself and not be misled by Franzen and others in...more

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Jun 07, 2011 Doug Hart rated it 4 of 5 stars

Shelves: big-dense-demandinng, stunners

Watch your corn sales, price of hogs a hundred pounds goes over eleven times corn a bushel they'll feed the corn to the hogs, goes under eleven hell with the hogs sell the corn . . . Taken at random from this alternatively brilliant and exasperating work. Beginning where the Recognitions left off, Gaddis stuffs 725 chapterless pages with endless dialogue, myriad characters, financial transactions, radio broadcasts, obscure historical references, pop-culture riffs, etc., making this one of the ba...more

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Jan 14, 2009 Christy rated it 3 of 5 stars

Hugely disappointing. Once you look past the flash of his prose technique, the all-dialogue strategy plays like a one-note samba, and the characters are mostly tired mid-century clichés. The humor is strained, except for a few witty puns it’s all highly contrived slapstick, and Gaddis has a tendency to repeat any humorous verbal effect multiple times till it becomes tedious, even if it was funny in the first place. The portrayal of gender is about what you’d expect it to be, sadly: Gaddis joins...more

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Jun 20, 2011 David Lentz rated it 5 of 5 stars

I have long been struck by the irony that the most avid readers of literary novels seem to have been virtually ignored by American publishers who cater to the mainstream. Sad to say but American publishing's mindless fixation with mediocre mainstream fiction has had an obliterating effect on American literary culture. So God Bless Penguin for having the good sense to bring to light, even belatedly, this breakthrough literary novel by a supremely gifted writer. I haven't read a more challenging n...more

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Sep 22, 2010 Greg rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, favorites

1.

Trying to make sense of corporate America is like trying to make sense of Beckett. Wait, this was a bad year when you made 5% more than last year which was a good year?----Why are they waiting for some dude who never shows up? Why doesn't he just get out of the pile of pig shit?.

I hate capitalism. I abhor it. I don't have a better idea for how things could run, but I know that there is something fundamentally wrong with it. Corporate America knows there is something fundamentally wrong with it...more

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Aug 11, 2012 Jason rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

A profoundly disorienting masterwork by one of the giants of American literature (here unquestionably at his most giant), JR is a novel like no other. It builds a whole world within the world and circuitously navigates its specific topography in a free-floating, wordy, and darkly comic gymnasium of form. JR is composed almost entirely of unattributed dialogue which is highly stylized; it is totally literary and sui generis even as its mimics the stop-start quality and gramatalogical incongruenci...more

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Jan 27, 2012 Katinki rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favorites, bad-ass, everyone-should-read-this, stuff-kids-read-to-look-smart, classics

5 Stars. Straight up.

I won't make this a long review because I know that this isn't exactly "popular" fiction, meaning it's not beach or plane material that a lot of people are going to read.

But what it is is some of the finest satire I've ever read. It's incredibly smart and witty, all the while making some pretty interesting and bang on observations of America and the American dream.

It's also... dense reading. Told ENTIRELY in dialogue and with ZERO chapter breaks, you have to actually pay...more

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Feb 23, 2013 Josh rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

This is a fantastic book but impossible to sell. 726 pages of unattributed dialogue, no chapter breaks, no pauses, the thing rolls forward as implacable as a tank.

Still: it's brilliant. I've read it twice now, liked it a lot the first time, loved it the second. It's scary and funny and, thanks to the nonstop dialogue, faster paced than you'd think; it reads more like an epic play. The vocal mannerisms of each character are so fine-tuned that it's surprisingly easy to follow. But that's really be...more

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Sep 23, 2012 Mark Sacha added it · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

"...I'm trying to, to show you there's such a thing as as, as intangible assets?" stammers Edward Bast, reluctant assistant to the eponymous J R, in a futile attempt to make the 11-year old mail-order business magnate appreciate an aesthetic truth, or anything at all beside the thoughtless pursuit of profit. "That bleak little Vansant boy", as J R is described elsewhere, runs his business in absentia, orchestrating an ever-expanding series of schemes through a number of clueless adults such as B...more "...I'm trying to, to show you there's such a thing as as, as intangible assets?" stammers Edward Bast, reluctant assistant to the eponymous J R, in a futile attempt to make the 11-year old mail-order business magnate appreciate an aesthetic truth, or anything at all beside the thoughtless pursuit of profit. "That bleak little Vansant boy", as J R is described elsewhere, runs his business in absentia, orchestrating an ever-expanding series of schemes through a number of clueless adults such as Bast, with a strange and sociopathic effectiveness. However, the process itself is anything but efficient - a point that Gaddis fleshes out through the novel's form. The novel is a single continuous block of text, made up almost exclusively of naturalistic and unattributed dialogue that, by the time it reaches its conclusion, builds to a furious, almost seething level of chaos and interference.

The story unfolds as a massive satire with an atmosphere borrowing heavily from Kafka - for a novel so invested in dialogue, many scenes are characterized by a fundamental failure in communication. "It's like trying to reach Klamm in The Castle," remarks a character of his inability to so much as initiate contact. One attempt notably lasts for the bulk of the book.

The headquarters of J R's budding corporation is a run-down uptown Manhattan apartment whose disarray is likened to Sordini's room in Kafka's novel, acting as a sort of crux for the chaos spiraling throughout the novel's world. Jack Gibbs, an acquaintance of Bast's, stumbles in complaining of its entropy. Water runs constantly in broken tubs and sinks, deliveries and mail and waste accumulate, and the phone is constantly ringing. Amidst this wreckage, the characters attempt to navigate their work, and their lives, in a sense of constant disaster. The theme here is familiar to postwar literature - "the more connections, the more chaos", as D.F. Wallace remarked of DeLillo's and Pynchon's work. As in Pynchon, paranoia prevails. (And things, notably, several times in description go 'against the day'...)

While J R is responsible for the mayhem he creates, he is not the source. Rather, he is a product (satirically exaggerated) of a system which justifies the sensibilities of his success: "I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!"(less)

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Nov 30, 2012 Ben Thurley rated it 4 of 5 stars

This sprawling, comic tale of capitalist America centres around a precocious 6th-grader, JR, who parlays a shipment of Navy-surplus picnic forks, along with endless give-aways and promotional offers, into a continent-spanning corporate empire. JR trades through a series of barely-understood conversations on the payphone he has installed in the corridor of his elementary school (barely-understood because he disguises his age by stuffing his handkerchief in the mouthpiece) and through his hapless...more This sprawling, comic tale of capitalist America centres around a precocious 6th-grader, JR, who parlays a shipment of Navy-surplus picnic forks, along with endless give-aways and promotional offers, into a continent-spanning corporate empire. JR trades through a series of barely-understood conversations on the payphone he has installed in the corridor of his elementary school (barely-understood because he disguises his age by stuffing his handkerchief in the mouthpiece) and through his hapless adult business surrogate, composer Edward Bast. Caught up in the chaos are failed writer and alcoholic, Jack Gibbs, the beautiful and conflicted school-teacher Amy Joubert, and a host of grasping relatives, business executives, school managers and lawyers.

On its publication in 1971, it was both lauded and lambasted by critics. George Steiner even called it "unreadable." It's true that the novel makes demands on the reader, but it is far from unreadable and I found myself laughing out loud every few pages.

Verbal jokes and long-running gags abound, like Gibbs' feigned incomprehension, or the technician who ensures that every phone installation is bugged.

There is virtually no direct narration, or even description. The appearance, action and intention of characters must be inferred from elliptical and always at-cross-purposes dialogue which facilitates misunderstanding, misdirection and a staccato free-association of concepts, as when the corporate lawyer Coen is driving a feverish Bast to hospital:

-All got pissed off because their bellies dropped I mean what's so erotic about that.
-I , I'm sure I don't know Mister Bast why don't you just rest for a few minutes, perhaps we can find some music to...
-Sooth the savage dot dot dot, get to wed some savage woman she will...
-Rest your head back yes I believe we share an interest in your knee Mister Bast if you can move your knee, in fine music...
-She shall rear my dusty race want to say scrotum in Danish Mister Coen?
-Not, not particularly if I can, if I can just find some music yes if there's one thing I dislike Mister Bast it's disorder I don't like surprises, the caterwauling on most of radio that's why I felt the expense of having this FM here here listen! it's, I think we have Handel that's better isn't it yes Jephtha? Handel's Jephtha I remember this part yes when I was a child, I thought the soprano here was singing get away! get no no stop! stop! we almost what made you do that! We we could have been killed no get your foot down!
-Up yours Mister Coen.
-But you, you put your foot right through the...
-Up mine up mine du haaaaassest mich!
-No no listen Mister Bast stop it stop singing! I can't no, no you'll have to sit still I can't drive if you...

Scene changes or the passing of time are barely signalled, shifting as one conversation is interrupted by a phone-call or changes of light signal the onset of night or a new day. When impressionistic descriptions of the external world do occur, they come in beautifully calibrated, pitch-and-roll sentences that have a kind of manic intensity:

To the squeal of brakes, the car bust out into the open world trailing a festoon of privet, swerved at the immediate prospect of open acres flowered in funereal abundance to regain the pavement and lose it again in a brief threat to the candy wrappers and beer cans nestled along the hedge line up the highway, that quickly out of sight to the windows' half-shaded stare from the roof pitches frowning over the hedge to where it ended, and a yellow barn took up, and was gone in a swerving miss for the pepperidge tree towering ahead, past shadeless windows in a naked farmhouse sprawl at the corner where the road trimmed neatly into the suburban labyrinth and things came scaled down to a wieldy size, dogwood, then barberry, becomingly streaked blood-red for fall.

For all its comic aspects, this is a serious satire of corporate greed and the commodification of education, art and religion. JR's mucous-ridden handkerchief can be read as just another gag about a snotty schoolkid, but in this context the ongoing or growing illnesses of many of the characters are symptomatic of a society in poor moral health.(less)

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Apr 07, 2013 hirtho rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: gaddis

4/3 Using this as a reading guide: http://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/jrsce...
I like the funny word play and bad puns and people cutting each other off with overlapping turns of phrase.

4/7 Overall I wasn't enamored in any way I was with Recognitions and felt like this used a small sample of the various techniques of the earlier book to make some facile observations on the similarities and contradictions of commerce and creativity (esp music) in this book ala Recognition's same methodology with reli...more

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Oct 21, 2011 Jeffrey W. rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: 5-star

Truly one of the greatest books I've ever read. Definitely an influence on Pynchon's Against the Day.

Stressing the vital necessity of expanded capital formation unimpeded by government restraints, Senator Broos' impassioned plea for a restoration of faith on the part of the common man in the free enterprise system as the cornerstone of those son of a bitches who still think winning's what it's all about give them a string of high p e ratios and a rising market it's all free enterprise all they h

...more

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Jun 05, 2012 Peter rated it 5 of 5 stars

This book was outstanding! It was beautiful, it was insightful and it was FUN TO READ! Read it aloud like it was a Shakespeare play and it is hiiiiiiilarious and entertaining. I even started to tear up at the end, just like during the soliloqy at the end of Ulysses. And if you want to understand the private equity industry and be entertained at the same time, READ THIS BOOK!!!
(Warning: some may find it difficult to get into, because there are no normal markers to show who is talking. But as you...more

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Aug 05, 2012 Gobasso rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction

I read this book about 25 years ago. Much of Gaddis' criticism of today's business and government has only increased. Some of the characters seem caricatures of the business elite who use government to their own uses while justifying themselves as self made men. This book has it's challenges. Most of the story is carried forward by unattributed conversation. But, the authors ear for his characters makes identifying who is talking clear. All satire has to overdo a situation to make it funny. The...more

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Oct 29, 2010 Jasmine rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american

I am not a good classics reader.

First I would like to thank greg for (not) recommending this to me. I am glad I was aware of it and I am glad I put my best foot forward. and I at this point had more fun then I had not fun with this book.

Lets talk about magic mountain. It is 706 pages (this is 726). I called magic mountain on 440 (I'm calling this on 413 I wanted to give him another 50 pages but the fact is I am worried first that I will never finish and second that it will hurt his star rating...more I am not a good classics reader.

First I would like to thank greg for (not) recommending this to me. I am glad I was aware of it and I am glad I put my best foot forward. and I at this point had more fun then I had not fun with this book.

Lets talk about magic mountain. It is 706 pages (this is 726). I called magic mountain on 440 (I'm calling this on 413 I wanted to give him another 50 pages but the fact is I am worried first that I will never finish and second that it will hurt his star rating. This book helped me to understand why I stopped reading magic mountain. I enjoyed the beginning of both of these books. They both begin with a nice crescendo and then... and then... and then... after 200 pages of waiting for and then I get tired of waiting any longer.

So i read and enjoy plenty of books in which nothing happens. But in those books nothing happens in a really happening way think The Trick is to Keep Breathing. The fact is the book doesn't change or resolve so much but the layers of character really add on each other. And I feel like I'm really getting a return for my effort.

In this book well my graphed progress is telling. I was really enjoying the book up to page 229 at least. I read quickly or at least much more quickly then we see I started finding excuses not to read this book, but I still was okay with it. I hit 300, then I had midterms. I picked the book back up and read to 400 (only because it was the only book I had brought to midterms with me) and I seriously started considering going out to buy another book... I know. I want to chalk this up to something other than the book, but I really think it was directly the book just not working for me. I mean there are plenty of books I put down for months (years in the case of the plague) and go back to and continue to enjoy as much as I did originally. I am left then to assume that this problem comes down to a fundamental problem in our relationship so JR I'm sorry we are going to have to break up.

I'm sorry it's not you it's me (okay it's a little you) but I just don't see myself growing in this relationship anymore. I feel like we have become stagnant and I don't like it. I'm sorry I just feel dfw and scarlett thomas have more to offer me at this moment in my life.

okay so the nitty gritty. I love jr I think he is a super interesting character. I hate bast. I hate only seeing jr through what he says to bast. Bast is a pathetic loser with no backbone. I find this extremely annoying. yeah yeah themes business cruses the arts, I don't care bast should be squashed like a bug he is like eichmann but more annoying.

now the form of this book is fun and interesting, and actually not that hard to keep up with. But that doesn't last. Funny formating at some point stops being interesting and starts being a given. And the fact that most of the adults talk almost exactly the same except a few words is annoying at least differentiate characters. On this note gibbs is a fucking good time. I like him. Tom eigen I hate. someone please write fan fiction containing only gibbs and jr and I will love you forever.

so I mean my real problem this book stopped building for me. There isn't anything else I really want to know. It feels almost like it's starting over. another will another will problem. jr buys this jr buys that, this is not character development it is repetitive action. In fact this book has a serious lack of character development. It is like the behaviorist version of Ulysses this book is all about action and what people do and their jobs and their talking. Ulysses that is at best secondary and more likely irrelevant and the book is about the intermingling of aspects of the self. I like that.

If this book ended on page 300 I would have given it 4 stars. If I read to page 726 it is a 90% chance it would get 2 stars because I would have been annoyed with stringing the book out after the "newness had worn off". as it stands a tentative 3 stars that I feel like might be being influenced by feeling guilty about not liking something so many of my friends like. (less)

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Aug 18, 2012 Chad rated it 3 of 5 stars

This book is annoying. The story is ok but the writing style is what makes the book. At first I did not enjoy reading it, but as I got used to the cadence, I realized that more than the story, the rhythm and language of the book is the focus. Once I figured that out, it made the book interesting. I think Gaddis manages this writing style fairly successfully in this book. Another book of his, The Recognitions does not fare as well. There are some entertaining parts to the book, but overall it doe...more

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Feb 03, 2011 Geoffrey rated it 3 of 5 stars

I cannot believe I finally finished this mother. Free at last! My feelings are mixed: it might be a masterpiece, in spite of there being plenty of long sections that are simply excruciatingly boring and not enjoyable to read whatsoever. Then again, is might be a victim of the law of diminishing returns--it's thematically VERY similar to The Recognitions, but I am QUITE certain it is not on the same plane as the earlier novel. I'd probably have to give it a concentrated rereading to feel that my...more

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Mar 19, 2013 Nate rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: read-2013-cycle

Can we just all admit that this is a hilarious book? Like yeah Gaddis is Mr. Difficult and highly technical but if the reader focuses too much on that aspect they miss some truly hilarious, screwball moments. Like holy shit Bast is living in an apartment where the water's always running (and he decides not to like call the water company or the building souper to get it taken care of) he uses shirts for towels and he's horrendously malnourished.

The unattributed dialogue isn't hard to follow as l...more

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Oct 15, 2012 Anne rated it 5 of 5 stars

I love this book and want to reference it all the time but most people have never read it. I didn't make it through the Recognitions I think partially because I wanted it to be more like JR. I am a fan of a certain nostalgic futurism. With objects there is a kind of quaintness to the space age products of the 60's, as if to say, isn't it cute what they thought the future would look like. But with this fiction, there are more parallels to the wall street wiz kids and our current state of affairs...more

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Mar 16, 2013 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

I had a hard time getting into this book. I also have a hard time rating it. Being that the book is almost entirely dialogue it took me some time to understand what was going on and who was who and even who was speaking at any given time. The first two hundred pages or so was especially difficult as I had yet to figure out the characters and was not enjoying the reading experience as it was work to try and make sense out of the dialogue with no reference as to how it made sense. Luckily I chose...more

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Nov 24, 2012 Borbality rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

OK this book is funny and a real trip but I don't have the time to even get into it. Basically I wouldn't recommend this to anyone unless you have a whole lot of time to kill. Also it's kind of a "guy" book, and i'll just leave it at that.

There are long books and there are DENSE books. Basically no paragraph breaks or punctuation, 90% dialog, maybe two or three actual chapter breaks.

But it's really good. JR the character is an absolute classic, ("I'm on this here field trip, what does it look li...more

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Sep 05, 2012 Brian rated it 3 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: novels

Genre and literary fiction are different. After reading JR, Cloud Atlas, Zazen, and a few other books this year, I think I'm finally starting to learn a bit more about those differences. Consider (and I promise to bring this discussion back to JR, bear with me):

The Wizard of Oz. It’s about a girl trapped in another world, and the enemies and friends she makes while trying to get home. Every sentence forwards that story. The book could not be any shorter and still tell that story. The book has a...more Genre and literary fiction are different. After reading JR, Cloud Atlas, Zazen, and a few other books this year, I think I'm finally starting to learn a bit more about those differences. Consider (and I promise to bring this discussion back to JR, bear with me):

The Wizard of Oz. It’s about a girl trapped in another world, and the enemies and friends she makes while trying to get home. Every sentence forwards that story. The book could not be any shorter and still tell that story. The book has a beginning, middle and end.

Anathem. It’s about a kid who grows up in a mathematical monastery, but his life is upended when aliens visit his world. Every chapter of the book is focused on telling that story. The author engages in some interesting asides about mathematics and philosophy; these add interest to the story without advancing the plot much. The story has a beginning, a middle, and (somewhat surprisingly for a Stephenson novel) an end.

Infinite Jest. It’s about what happens to a tennis student whose father created the most dangerous video in history, and the recovering drug addict destined to help him find it. MOST of the book is focused on telling that story, but not all of it. It has a beginning and a middle, but no end. The story’s left dangling at the end of the book, although you can piece together bits of the end of the story if you read closely.

J R. It’s about an 11-year-old boy who is a financial genius and secretly creates a multinational corporation from a public school pay phone. But not really; the author has other goals besides telling that story. MOST of the book is not related to that story line at all. The book really only has a middle; there’s no beginning or end in the conventional sense. The story is simply a clothes hanger for the author to display the larger fish he has to fry … stylistic experimentation and a singularly grim treatise on the relation of art and work in late capitalism.

Finnegan's Wake. I'm not even going to get into it, partly because I haven't finished it (who has?) and partly because if you know anything about that book, you already know the facts about it that are relevant to this discussion. It's the epitome of the "difficult literary book."

This short summary partly describes the spectrum between pure genre fiction and literary fiction. I seem to be happiest somewhere in the middle; I found Oz and JR both somewhat trying, while Anathem and Infinite Jest were top-notch. As writers abandon story, they start to experiment with other aspects of text. I'm sure that can be compelling in the right hands -- Joyce and Gaddis simply don't hold much attraction for me. I've had an opportunity, with the #OccupyGaddis group, to read this book more deeply than I'm used to. That experience, more than the book itself, was unique, compelling, and enjoyable.

I think 400 pages of the middle of this book lift right out, leaving a much better book. I also think Gaddis would be horrified at the very idea, and probably considered those 400 pages the soul of the book. And who the hell am I to take an ax to a National Book Award winner? My likes and dislikes are not necessarily relevant to a true literary analysis, although neither are they immaterial. I find it hard to look past them, however, which is probably why pomo texts were part of what turned me away from a literature degree.

In that middle 400 pages, drunken Gibbs’ ranting and Whitebeck’s insipid stammering are hackneyed, tin-eared, and ultimately poisonous to reader communication. Gibbs’ dialogue, in particular, resembles the very worst sections of Stephen King’s prose, with endlessly repeated phraselet motifs that don’t get any deeper or more meaningful when they’re repeated 37 times. After 10 pages of Whitebeck, there's not a reader alive who wouldn't get the point that bureaucrats and bankers don't listen to anyone but themselves. But you don't get 10 pages, you get 150.

Having said all that: J R certainly does have a unique effect on the reader, and as you round the final curve, somewhere around Rhoda's soliloquy to Gibbs in the squalid 96th St. apartment, that effect begins to shift from annoyance to a quiet frisson. You begin to think back over the book and realize the amazing things Gaddis has achieved ... that he's written a novel entirely without any hint of internal experience; that he's painted perhaps the most damning and accurate portrait of work and finance in America between Sinclair Lewis and Douglas Coupland; and that between the lines of J R, he has described life in the 1970s in a way that I, as a child of that decade, found compelling and darkly nostalgic.

I'm conflicted about J R, and about this review. I hope the above sums up my different thoughts, but if not, here's a one sentence summary: Here's a good book that I'd not read again.(less)

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Jun 25, 2012 Jennifer (JC-S) rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

‘Who made the rules?’

This is William Gaddis’s second novel, a huge book of over 700 pages, a story told mostly through dialogue. The cacophony of voices contained in JR presents a brilliant satire on corporate America.

‘That’s what a game is, if there weren’t any rules there wouldn’t be any game, now sit up.’

JR Vansant is an eleven year old schoolboy who manages to build an enormous economic empire – using his school’s public phone booth. JR’s empire touches on everyone in the novel and most of t...more ‘Who made the rules?’

This is William Gaddis’s second novel, a huge book of over 700 pages, a story told mostly through dialogue. The cacophony of voices contained in JR presents a brilliant satire on corporate America.

‘That’s what a game is, if there weren’t any rules there wouldn’t be any game, now sit up.’

JR Vansant is an eleven year old schoolboy who manages to build an enormous economic empire – using his school’s public phone booth. JR’s empire touches on everyone in the novel and most of them become entangled in it: especially as the paper that documents JR’s empire needs to be stored. Everyone spends a great deal of their time thinking or dreaming about money: desiring money; obtaining money and worrying about a lack of money. Money is no longer simply a medium of exchange, in a world in which almost every aspect of life and feeling is commodified, money is an object of desire in its own right. JR’s empire grows like a particularly aggressive form of cancer, the size and spread of which becomes apparent to the reader through the conversations, letters and
telephone calls that make up the bulk of the novel.

‘Is it my fault if I do something first which if I don’t do it somebody else is going to do it anyway?’

JR is surrounded by musicians, teachers, and writers – but we see little that is positive or truly creative in their influence. Creativity is subservient to money; aesthetic values have no place in a world where everything is assigned a monetary value. Can such a world be sustained? Should it be? Surely there is a place for Edward Bast? And for Wagner? Both Nordic gods and stock markets can crash. The glory of the gods is only an illusion.

I have read this novel once, and found it both energising and exhausting. It took some time for me to appreciate the way in which Mr Gaddis constructed this world – mainly through dialogue – and drew the various connections between individuals and the recognisably dystopian capitalist world in which their lives were set. I admire the way in which the story is told, and if I’ve missed various layers of meaning, I’m sure my next read will fill in some of those gaps. This is not an easy novel to read, but it is a rewarding one.

‘Hey? You listening …?’

Jennifer Cameron-Smith
(less)

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About William Gaddis

William Gaddis was the author of four very complex novels (he completed an as-yet-unpublished fifth book, a non-fictional study of the player piano, called Agape Agape, before he passed away) and an artist inclined to avoid the trappings of celebrity. Gaddis was born in New York December 29, 1922. He went on to Harvard, but was asked to leave the college in his senior year (the circumstances of th...more William Gaddis was the author of four very complex novels (he completed an as-yet-unpublished fifth book, a non-fictional study of the player piano, called Agape Agape, before he passed away) and an artist inclined to avoid the trappings of celebrity. Gaddis was born in New York December 29, 1922. He went on to Harvard, but was asked to leave the college in his senior year (the circumstances of the situation are mysterious, and await the unfortunate biographer). He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation.
The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely (or ideally) projected the best of themselves in their work. He has been frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and especially Pynchon, and in terms of talent this must be so. Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955) is a 956-page saga of forgery, pretension, and desires misguided and inexpressible. Critical response to the book ranged from cool to hostile, but in most cases (as Jack Green took pains to show in his book of rebuke, Fire the Bastards!) reviewers were ill-prepared to deal with the challenge, and evidently many who began to read The Recognitions did not finish. The novel’s sometimes great leaps in time and location and the breadth and arcane pedigree of allusions are, it turns out, fairly mild complications for the reader when compared with what would become the writer’s trademark: the unrestrained confusion of detached and fragmentary dialogue. Consider the following excerpt from very early on in Gaddis’s second book, JR (1975; winner of the National Book Award), only 726 pages long:

– It’s worked so far but it can’t work forever, sooner or later somebody will show up who reads Greek. Then where are we?
– Up the creek, Miss Flesch obliged with a promptness that lost her some coffee down her chin, like the smut mail.
– There’s an issue. The smut mail rise.
– My boy sent off for a ball glove and what he got back in the mail was. . . .
– Mouthpiece puller, sleigh bells, strobotuner, choir risers, tympanies, marching bell and stand, two thousand five hundred and... what’s all that for?
– Breakage. Here, replacing glass, repairing doors, painting, refinishing and so forth, thirty-three thousand two eighty-five. Thirty-three thousand dollars for breakage, isn’t that what we’re really talking about? Plain unvarnished vandalism? And another fourteen thousand plus item down here, repairs and replacement, chairs, desks, project tables, pianos, same thing isn’t it? Breakage. . . ?

And this is only a sound byte of the logorrhea. The chaos of the unceasing deluge of talk of JR (very much part of the continuing spills, mistakes and general “breakage” which may be recognized as the plot) drove critics to declare the text “unreadable” – like the school’s “Greek” motto (–Oh, can you read it? one character asks another, who is seen copying it down. – Not exactly read it, said his companion). Reading Gaddis is by no means easy, but, as I think the above sample suggests, it is rewardingly hysterical. I don’t know of any more lacerating and artfully sustained attack on capitalism than JR, and The Recognitions makes one so(less)

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“If you want to make a million you don't have to understand money, what you have to understand is people's fears about money” — 11 people liked it

“I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway!” — 5 people liked it

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