J R
by William Gaddis
Summary
J R Vansant is eleven, a sixth grader on Long Island with a runny nose, unwashed sneakers and no discernible home life, and he assembles, entirely by payphone and mail order, using the free forms in the back of magazines and a handkerchief over the receiver to sound older, a conglomerate. It starts with surplus Navy forks and a defaulted bond issue; it swallows, before it dies, a brewery, a mill town, nursing homes and a publishing house. Nobody who deals with the J R Family of Companies ever meets its chairman, because its chairman has social studies in the morning.
Gaddis tells the whole thing in dialogue, seven hundred and twenty six pages of talk with almost no attribution and no chapter breaks, scene flowing into scene wherever a phone is hung up or a door opens. The reader learns to know every character by voice alone, which is the point: this is a book about a country that has become pure noise, money talking to itself.
Caught in the machine is Edward Bast, a young composer hired as J R's adult front man, whose ambitions shrink, in the book's saddest running joke, from opera to cantata to a piece for solo cello as the noise eats his time. Around him orbit teachers, lawyers and hustlers, and a wrecked Manhattan apartment stuffed with unsellable inventory where the radio is never off.
It is genuinely difficult for fifty pages and then, once the voices resolve, savagely funny.
Best for readers willing to earn the funniest difficult novel in American literature, and the best book anyone has written about money as pure process.
Historical Context & Significance
J R won the National Book Award for Fiction in 1976, two decades after The Recognitions, William Gaddis's near thousand page debut, had been dismissed by reviewers so comprehensively that a famous pamphlet was later written cataloguing their failures. The award was the establishment's apology, and the citation might as well have said so.
Early critics called the new book unreadable; Louis Auchincloss reached for Swift. Both camps were describing the same wall of unattributed talk, and the book's reputation has tracked the readership willing to climb it: Jonathan Franzen made his own quarrel with it famous, and the novel now anchors every argument about difficulty and its rewards in American fiction.
Gaddis won the award again in 1994 for A Frolic of His Own, making him one of the few two time fiction winners. As prophecy, J R has needed no defenders at all: an economy of leveraged nonsense run on confident noise by an actual child has stopped reading as satire.