William Gaddis
Paperback | Pages: 752 pages Rating: 4.29 | 2620 Users | 304 Reviews
Declare Books Conducive To JR
| Original Title: | J R |
| ISBN: | 0140187073 (ISBN13: 9780140187076) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | J R Vansant |
| Literary Awards: | National Book Award for Fiction (1976) |
Relation Toward Books JR
J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses -- and misuses -- whom. At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him -- a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies." The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures -- shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music -- burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps. Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths -- voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios -- a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words -- through our lives -- while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is. --From the first-edition dustjacketList Out Of Books JR
| Title | : | JR |
| Author | : | William Gaddis |
| Book Format | : | Paperback |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 752 pages |
| Published | : | August 26th 1993 (first published October 12th 1975) |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Classics. Literature. Novels. American |
Rating Out Of Books JR
Ratings: 4.29 From 2620 Users | 304 ReviewsCommentary Out Of Books JR
Among the best I've ever read. Magnificent. Hilarious. Savage. Can't stop marveling... As good as it gets... So many hilarious and anguishing motifs within DFW's Infinite Jest now seem to me to be perfect and just and right and true little valentines to William Gaddis... and what a heartening thought!this book is so damn long a famous american author named johnathan franzen was compelled to write an essay that was too damn long about how long and difficult this book is, and how he couldnt' finish itt. he also said the same thing about don quixote, which makes me think he didn't try very hand since like 400 pages of don quixote is about the don showing his di dong to sancho panza via mishaps involving horses, aand also farting.jr isn't about farting or dingdongs most of the time, sadly, but
U. S. A. is the slice of a continent. U. S. A. is a group of holding companies, some aggregations of trade unions, a set of laws bound in calf, a radio network, a chain of moving picture theaters, a column of stockquotations rubbed out and written in by a Western Union boy on a blackboard, a public-library full of old newspapers and dogeared historybooks with protests scrawled on the margins in pencil. U. S. A. is the world's greatest rivervalley fringed with mountains and hills, U. S. A. is a
JR is simply loads of fun. Don't fall for the Franzen trashtalk about Gaddis being "Mr Difficult." Just fun. And smart. [NEW]--A conversation apropos the Dalkey reissue of JR regarding Gaddis, JR, and Difficulty at Open Letters Monthly.Gaddis Annotations is all you'll need to keep yourself oriented to scene and character. Don't let that unattributed dialogue scare you off -- Gaddis has the talent to individuate each of his characters and you won't have to bother reading a bunch of "he said . . .
I am not a good classics reader. First I would like to thank greg for (not) recommending this to me. I am glad I was aware of it and I am glad I put my best foot forward. and I at this point had more fun then I had not fun with this book. Lets talk about magic mountain. It is 706 pages (this is 726). I called magic mountain on 440 (I'm calling this on 413 I wanted to give him another 50 pages but the fact is I am worried first that I will never finish and second that it will hurt his star
JR is certainly a stylistic masterpiece. As far as Im aware its structure that is, a single, gargantuan, unbroken passage comprised almost entirely of unattributed dialogue has not been attempted before or since. Depending on what you think about the novel, you might interpret this as being indicative of a literary pinnacle, or a dead-end. I think its a little of both. The brilliance of this novel is in how much Gaddis manages to communicate given the constraints of the structure. The settings
Like nothing I've ever read before. At first I wondered where it was going and what the hell it was about, but it earns every page and after finishing it, finally, my first thought was that I needed to read it again in a year or so to catch all the things I missed. Audiobook performance is excellent, adds to the enjoyment of the voice of the Gaddis' work.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment