BOOKS
LOST LIVES
JR. By
William Gaddis. Alfred A. Knopf. Paper,.$5.95.
The value placed upon money (not what it procures for
you ,
but
it)
is
pathologic.
It
is the great American malady.... The possession of
learning, of genius in the arts or
sciences-nothing
seems
to
weigh in
the U.S. in comparison with money . . . . If one wrote something for
public consumption on these lines people would sneer, genuinely
bored. "Oh yes. The 'almighty dollar'
you
mean! " -Of course it
is
what I should mean. But it is one of those things which , if only they can
survive
identification
and
denunciation,
can go on forever and brazenly
endure .
-Wyndham Lewis,
Letters
For now long after Wilde had withdrawn
to
join the compost smolder–
ing in Europe with Pater's recipe for success in life, the tale how for
art's sake he 'd faced Leadville's bullies
to
a standoff continued
to
amuse
here where invention was eliminating the very possibility of failure as a
condition for success precisely in the arcs where one's best is never good
enough and who, now the song would play on without losing a note,
could resist the temptation
to
shoot the pianist?
-fromJack Gibbs's uncompleted manuscript,
inJR
William Gaddis's new novel is about money-its power, its
pervasiveness, its curious progression toward the unreal as its quantity in–
creases; it is also and inseparably about the waste of talent, substance,
love, and ultimately lives, and the base misuse and destruction of art and
intelligence . The literally hundreds of materials used by Mr. Gaddis
to
deploy and elaborate his themes take their shape as accreted layers of data
and innumerable threads, twisted and tangled .
It
is a magnificent work that
is at once savagely comic and drenched in bitter pathos. While it is not
tragic, it surely exists at the edge of despair. By a painstaking marshaling
of detail, the major characters are given us finally as exhausted, beaten, and
desolate.
