BOOKS
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lost from the start-and Bast is his counterpoint. The complexities are
endless and ironic and shattering. Minor characters function in odd, neu–
rotic, yet precise ways, elements of data in this enormous investigation of
avarice and waste and their casualties .
Painters are cheated of their money , used and exploited as producers of
saleable goods ; writers are blocked, thwarted , duped, or twisted into shiny
and agreeable hacks; lovers are sacrificed to fates that function as cosmic
jokes; a school is perverted, drained, and finally sold; groves of ancient trees
are paved over in a "deal" and in another a house is moved; marriages are
smashed and soldiers sent to their slaughter carrying toy guns; and all of this
(and dozens of more instances of perversion and corruption) is not only
inevitable, it is logical, legal , and normal. The cause for this socially accept–
able devastation is the quest for profits. On its simplest and most obvious
level,
JR
is a compendium of those things that have been done, over the
past half-century , to the people of the world by their governments and those
whom governments truly serve.
It
is also, as I hope I have suggested, an
investigation of the artist in a society that not only has no need for him but
that despises him, and a mordantly limned picture of the "common man"
-armed with his manipulated opinions and his jest of a "voice" in public
affairs.
I should of course say something about the compositional techniques
of the novel.
It
is completely written, but for brief transitions, in dialogue.
Mr. Gaddis's ear is the perfect one of all first-rate novelists, by which I mean
his speech as here recorded is beautifully crafted so as to appear to be "real"
speech. His characters speak in cadences as precisely stylized as those of, say,
Hemingway or Henry Green.
It
is not the product of the tape recorder that
we are given, but the carefully selected and shaped materials that reveal each
character as definitely as physical description . The patterns and tics of each
character's speech are so brilliantly molded, so subtly and yet totally differ–
ent one from the other, that the reader, after his first introduction to a
character, has no difficulty in identifying that character in subsequent pas–
sages .
It
is a remarkable achievement and, I think , a stroke of genius on
Gaddis's part to have structured his novel this way. Not only do we stay in
absolute touch with what is being said by everybody, we begin to hear not
only
what is said, but what is
meant.
The " time" of the novel is of course
rigorously restricted to the actual time it takes the characters to say what they
have to say . Perhaps most importantly, this method of composition allows
us to see the surfaces of things-what is really there, what people really
appear to be to each other and to eavesdroppers (like the reader) . This
jettisoning of tawdry and banal "psychological" probing and the "hidden
