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PARTISAN REVIEW
It serves no purpose here , in a brief review, to paraphrase the densely
crafted plot of
JR.
Suffice it to say that everybody and everything in the
novel is interconnected in what might justly be called a perfect if insane
logic of possibility.
JR
does not work on the level of a meager naturalism,
but supposes a world that exists of and for itself and in which all the char–
acters are rigidly predestined to play out their roles. It is a claustrophobic
world that works, within itself, like a syllogism. The author iflsists on a
closed system: that this system plunges, with maniacal precision, toward
denouement
within
that greater system that we may label the "real world"
makes it no less a creation of supreme effectiveness and fictional truth.
JR, a sixth grade pupil at a gadget-ridden , computerized, and flagrant–
ly intellectually bankrupt public school on Long Island, sits at the center of
the novel, a boy who is the epitome of greed, the quintessential product
of twentieth-century culture run to seed, plastic , and decay; at the same
time, he is vulnerable, alone , touching-a castoff of his society and of his
broken family within it . From this center, he sets in motion a chain reaction
of financial wheeling-dealing that touches the seats of power where the
decisions that affect the structure of the world-its politics, culture , social
priorities-are formulated. He is, in his precocious strivings toward acquisi–
tion for its own sake , for the sake of attaining whatever, God help him, he
may take to be the good life , a perfectly formed miniature of the macrocosm
that he imitates. This latter world is given us most clearly in the financial
workings of the Diamond Cable Corporation , an industrial giant that con–
trols a good share of the world and many of its leaders, all of whom are
bought and sold like shares of stock.
Caught in this vortex areJack Gibbs, a despairing , cynical, and tortured
drunk who cannot finish the book (on the "social history of mechanization
and the arts, the destructive element' ') he has been working on for years-or,
more precisely, avoiding working on-and Edward Bast, a young and awk–
ward composer who is a marvel of naIvete, who feels that his art is all that
he is here for , and who works like a demented robot . These three are the
major figures in the book; dependent from and peripheral to them are
perhaps two dozen more, all of whom are locked into the madness thatJR 's
schemes awaken and fuel.
Mr. Gaddis has entwined these characters' lives in such subtle and
elaborately complex ways that' ' answers" or suggestions of possible answers
as to their motivations and relationships are not so much given as they are
strewn across the novel's pages. The curious and devastatingly poignant
links between Bast and Gibbs are spotted throughout the book in an almost
casual way; JR may be seen, finally , as a kind of new-model Gibbs or Bast;
Gibbs is a gigantically doomed figure-surely the protagonist of the book,
