J R
First edition
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| Author | William Gaddis |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Alfred A. Knopf |
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Publication date
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1975 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 726 pp |
| ISBN | (paperback edition) |
| OCLC | 28271816 |
| 813/.54 20 | |
| LC Class | PS3557.A28 J2 1993 |
J R is a novel by William Gaddis published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1975.
It was the author's second published book, twenty years after his first, and it won the annual U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
J R tells the story of the eponymous J R Vansant, an 11-year-old schoolboy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes what Gaddis called "the American dream turned inside out". One critic called it "the greatest satirical novel in American literature." Novelist Louis Auchincloss thought it "worthy of Swift."
The writing style of J R is intended to mimic Gaddis' view of contemporary society: "a chaos of disconnections, a blizzard of noise" The novel is told almost entirely in dialogue, and there is sometimes little indication (other than conversational context) of which character is speaking. (Gaddis later said he did this in order to make the reader a collaborator in the process of creating the characters.) There are also no chapters, with transitions between scenes occurring by way of shifts in focalization: for example, a character who is in a meeting may leave the meeting, get in his car, and drive off, passing, as he does so, another character, who becomes the subject of the next scene without any break in the continuity of the narration (though the novel is written in a discontinuous or fragmentary tone). The novel is thus broken only into French scenes (or perhaps "French chapters"). Gaddis later advised the reader not to put too much effort into figuring out each word but to read the novel at a normal talking speed; "it was the flow that I wanted," he said, "for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way."
This chaotic writing style may, some critics argue, reflect Gaddis' preoccupation with entropy and with the 20th century's rejection of Newtonian physics, the narrative style thus reflecting a quantum and Heisenbergian world of "waste, flux and chaos." In this world, the characters who devise complex systems to acquire as much material wealth as possible are founding their lives on illusion because matter is impermanent and because, as Gaddis himself wrote in an essay, "the more complex the message, the greater the chance for error. Entropy rears as a central preoccupation of our time." In J R, entropy manifests itself as "a malign and centrifugal force of cosmic disruption at work scattering everything in [people's] heads, homes and work"
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