William Gaddis

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William Gaddis 1922–98, American novelist, b. New York City. An erudite master of satire and black comedy, he was both praised and criticized for his avant-garde techniques—repetitions, multiple layers of meaning, sprawling shapelessness, frequent digressions, complexities of plot and language that can veer into incomprehensibility, and the exhausting length of his works. Gaddis wrote five novels, the second and fourth of which won the National Book Award. Epic in size, his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), examines falseness and the loss of authenticity in its story of a master forger. The next four novels are written almost completely without narration in a series of dialogues and a multiplicity of voices. JR (1975) concerns elaborate corporate shenanigans, Carpenter's Gothic (1985) explores ramifications of the Vietnam War, A Frolic of His Own (1994) skewers the litigious modern world, and the posthumously published Agapē Agape (2002) records the reflections of a dying writer obsessed with player pianos and, by extension, the nature of art. Gaddis's shorter prose is collected in The Rush for Second Place (2002).

Bibliography: See S. Moore, A Reader's Guide to William Gaddis's The Recognitions (1982) and William Gaddis (1989); E. B. Safer, The Contemporary American Comic Epic: The Novels of Barth, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Kesey (1988); J. Johnston, Carnival of Repetition (1989); G. Comnes, The Ethics of Indeterminacy in the Novels of William Gaddis (1994).

Gaddis, William (1922–1998), born in New York City, after four years at Harvard and much foreign travel published The Recognitions (1955), a long, elaborate, experimental, satirical novel with settings as diverse as the author's travels, treating a Yankee artist whose original talent is overwhelmed by his career as a copyist of old masters. His second novel, J R (1975, National Book Award), is again a rich parodic treatment of hypocrisy and corruption. The eponymous hero, a sixth‐grader, amasses a corporate empire, using the telephone and the mails in questionable legality. The novel nimbly satirizes both public education and standard business practices. His third novel, Carpenter's Gothic (1985), is a far shorter work, less experimental, though employing his trademark disconnective dialogue, and more accessible than the first two. Its themes are the helplessness engendered by dependent love and family disorder. A Frolic of His Own (1994, National Book Award) is an almost 600‐page novel centering upon the complexities and bafflements of the law, with much technical legal detail. Written in his hallmark disconnected unpunctuated dialogue, the book is yet accessible. Its protagonist is Oscar Crease, a community‐college teacher who sees himself as “the last civilized man.” In trying to hotwire his own car, he has it run him over and injure him, whereupon he spends much effort and time figuring out whom to sue. The book is both harsh and funny.

Gaddis, William (1922–98), American novelist, born in New York, educated at Harvard. His four novels, three of them epic in scope and all published at long intervals, give him a unique place in contemporary world literature: an unforgiving satirist possessed of an almost Victorian moral sternness, combined with the bracingly experimental technique of the true modernist. The hero of his enormous first novel The Recognitions (1955) is Wyatt Gwyon, who has abandoned his training as a priest to become a forger of Old Masters. The book offers a highly complex disquisition on real and false spiritual values, but written in conventional prose. For J.R. (1975) Gaddis told his story of an 11-year-old stock market dealer entirely in fractured, overlapping, often incoherent dialogue. Both J.R. and the smaller-scale Carpenter's Gothic (1985) are bleak, but bitterly funny portraits of a society driven mad by material greed and spiritual emptiness. The more jaunty A Frolic of his Own (1994), is a satire on America's obsession with litigation.