J R is a novel of shady relations, legal, financial, familial. No one takes any direct responsibility or assumes accountability for anything. So it's a pretty nebulous world created here with no clear cut boundaries and it's a hard read that rewards the reader's inevitable confusion through the beauty and realism of its dialogue, and the book's humor, its enduring redeeming value. I would compare JR to trying to listen to a conversation across a crowded restaurant. Make that a crowded football stadium. Confusion is part of the book's message. Even the ridiculously ornate narrative passages are designed to frustrate and dazzle the understanding, not to shed any light on what is going on. When you are trying to follow the characters, Gaddis is absurdly telling you about trees and light and how it plays on some ivy covered stone wall in a sing song haiku voice. Totally...frikking...hilarious.

I'm not sure quite why, but I feel that this is a tale told by a angry drunk right at your elbow: opaque, sometimes hilarious, sometimes banal. The bland cultural references are almost out of the encyclopedia of stereotypes: "Mozart had a pauper's grave and said the word "shit" a lot! D'ya know that? Entropy is increasing! Wagner was an antisemite! The secret to making money is using other people to make it for ya! Artists have it tough! Capitalism is really really bad!" None of this is particularly deep, nor perhaps is it meant to be. It's a novel about the public realm, publicly "known" factoids and stereotypes and most of all public words.

Once you accept the technique Gaddis has chosen, you can actually appreciate it, coming at you sideways, the way it is written. The use of the long meandering blocks of description with short punchy lines of dialogue is not unprecedented. Flaubert's famous country fair scene in Madame Bovary and the Wandering Rocks chapter of Ulysses are clear models. The story sort of percolates into your mind drip by drip. (On first read: I'm paying attention but I'm still missing whole episodes and characters and it is frustrating. I think I have to sit down with an episode guide and try to fill in the gaps at this point. The best seems to be Gaddis annotations http://www.williamgaddis.org/jr/index...)

Update, second read: three stars become four. We're movin' on up. Second read MUCH easier and funnier. Didn't really need the notes as much as I thought. The way the school is corporatized and turned into tv learning by the Foundation is so ahead of its time. Can you say online for profit McUniversity? Also, some readers take Gaddis' theme to be art versus money, but this strikes me as too simplistic. Art is also an illusion, as much a drug in its own way as money. Look at the way it also ruins the lives of Gaddis' characters. The only question is: how do you want to go down and for what? A much more interesting idea, it seems to me. And the language, ooo la la. People say there is no Great American novel, but there were at least three of them in the 70s: Coover's Public Burning, this and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, and I'm sure I haven't even scratched the surface.

Favorite scenes: the nutso (or maybe not so nutso) aunts stump the lawyer Coen. The discussion at the school, repeatedly interrupted by the blaring television, and Bast's riff on Mozart which gets him fired. JR, who has been getting conned by offers in pulp magazines, overhears the secrets of success in business in a Wall Street bathroom during a school trip while a backroom deal is in progress at Typhon. As JR says: This is what you do. This is what WE do, every day all the time, without even realizing it.

I mean holy shit what a novel hey you listening...hey, you listening?