Some Thoughts on JR by William Gaddis

JR is a hurricane of words. It is the most chaotic book I’ve ever read; multiple people having multiple conversations all at once, fragments breaking into each other, sometimes background noises grab the focus of the scene. Nearly every line of dialogue in the book is interrupted by another, which leaves the reader feeling frustrated and tired. There are very few descriptions in the book, and most are fleeting scenes of transition. Roughly 95% of JR is unattributed dialogue. There are no chapters or page breaks for the entire 800 pages or so. Instead Gaddis provides the literary equivalent of a movie filmed in one continuous shot. The viewpoint will follow a character down a hallway into a bathroom where another conversation is going on, or follow a car down the road to the next phone call. Confusion, misdirection, and obscurity reign supreme.

There are many short descriptions about clocks, usually during a scene transition. In these, the clocks are typically described as being out of sight or mind while counting off minutes and hours. A few examples:

Dead before their eyes, the clock severed another of the minutes that lacked the hour.

Somewhere a clock with a broken chime had a try at striking the hour…

A bell rang, lockers banged, clocks clipped away identical minutes out of each other’s sight round corners, down corridors where the tide of sweat rose as lockers banged, bells ran, the door marked Boys slammed, slammed.

...and behind them a hand severed a minute’s remnant on the clock beyond the shelter of the lockers.

For time unbroken by looks to the clock the only sound was the chafing of an emery board, and the clock itself, as though seizing the advantage, seemed to accomplish its round with surreptitious leaps forward, knocking whole wedges at once from what remained of the hour.

There is a violence to the words: “severed”, “broken”, “clipped”, “knocking”. A violence that suggests to me Gaddis was all too aware of time’s relentless march forward bringing everyone closer to their end.

There is one long, sincere moment of clarity roughly ⅔ into the book. Up until these scenes the book has been relatively sterile and emotionally distant, but suddenly two characters spend the night together leading to pages and pages of description and raw emotion. In this novel, description and emotion are linked; speech is cold and corporate. While it may be missing from before and after, for these fifteen pages there is love. These pages lead me to what I think is one of the major ideas of JR: talk is cheap.

JR strikes me as a very American novel. While I’m not sure I entirely buy into the idea of The Great American Novel, JR would definitely fit the bill for it. There is a never ending focus on money, getting more and more and any and all costs, even knowingly destroying the lives, livelihood, and homes of other people. Shell corporations and slimy lawyers live in the heart of JR. Everyone is constantly following the letter of the law rather than the spirit of the law to game the system, avoid taxes, and so on. Marketing of substandard products by making the flaw a selling point, such as green aspirin, “tell them to go ahead like it is that’s how we’re advertising it, just it’s green that’s all we’re saying. It’s green!” There is also a mirror of America’s paradoxical culture in that it is both hyper-sexual and prudish at the same time. Pornographic pictures are found and kept, adultery is common, but people are also careful to project the air of puritanical integrity, trying not to be seen in the company of certain people of the other sex. One of the few genuine people in the entire novel, a woman named Rhoda is demeaned for being perceived as easy, but attacked when she turns down a man. Art is considered only a commodity with no intrinsic value of its own, it’s only good if it can make money. Artists feel the need to produce great works even though they have no inspiration or even a clue as to why they feel this way.

In conclusion, JR is an incredible artistic and literary achievement. The way that all of the thousands of small, granular details slowly resolve into a high resolution imageby the end of the novel is unlike anything else I’ve ever read. While it wasn’t always the most enjoyable book to read, it might have been the best book I’ve ever read.