A Frolic of His Own
by William Gaddis
Summary
Oscar Crease, middle aged instructor of American history and grandson of a Supreme Court justice, has been run over by his own car, a Japanese import that started while he stood in front of it, and is suing. He is also suing a Hollywood studio, on the theory that its Civil War epic, a bloodstained blockbuster called The Blood in the Red White and Blue, was stolen from Once at Antietam, the unproduced verse play he wrote decades ago about his grandfather, who hired substitutes to fight for him on both sides of the war and may have faced himself at Antietam.
Around Oscar's twin actions Gaddis builds a whole ecology of American litigation: his stepsister Christina and her corporate lawyer husband Harry, being worked to death by his firm; the magnificent opinions of Oscar's father, Judge Thomas Crease, ninety seven and presiding in Virginia over a case about a dog trapped in a public sculpture, written in a judicial prose so perfect the reader wants the fictional judge collected; depositions, complaints and insurance correspondence reproduced whole, each document a self portrait of its author's bad faith.
It is told, like all late Gaddis, almost entirely in unattributed talk, with the legal papers embedded like fossils, and its thesis is stated on page one in the book's famous opening line: Justice? You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law.
Around five hundred and ninety pages, difficult for a stretch and then irresistible.
Best for readers who want the great American satire of suing, and are prepared to hear an entire civilization talk itself into court.
Historical Context & Significance
A Frolic of His Own won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1994, giving William Gaddis his second, eighteen years after J R, and placing him in the small company of double fiction winners alongside Bellow, Faulkner, Roth and Updike, company his first reviewers would have found hilarious. The title is legal doctrine: an employee injuring someone while off on a frolic of his own leaves his employer blameless, and the phrase radiates through every plot line.
The legal documents read as parody only until one compares them with the originals; law reviews have treated the novel seriously as jurisprudence, and it remains the standard literary citation for American litigiousness.
It was the last novel published in his lifetime. Gaddis died in 1998, leaving the deathbed monologue Agapē Agape, and his reputation, four difficult books and two of these awards, has settled exactly where the pamphlet defending The Recognitions said it belonged: at the source of the American systems novel, teacher of Pynchon's and Franzen's generations alike.