JR

This massive 726-page comedy in unattributed dialogue is a thick, tough read. I wouldn't say the story is amazing, but it is entertaining enough to keep reading AFTER the first 150 pages which comprises the story's slow, uneventful, and often boring beginning.After spending a month going through it, I think that William Gaddis is a great writer of dialogue and a mediocre storyteller with a good sense of humor. The way he captures spoken American English is simply genius. W/r/t his sense of humor, I did laugh out loud at parts, but didn't think him as funny as DFW. And the story. It's there, and unlike other modern/postmodern works, it's got an ending which is always nice (unlike DeLillo's Underworld or Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow), and an entertaining plot (in stark contrast to Joyce's Ulysses and Beckett's trilogy), but due to the sheer abundance of characters, the story has no focus and I never made any connection and identified with any of them (although I was rather fond of Jack Gibbs). JR is also better than his other works I read - A Frolic of His Own (which was frustrating to read at parts because I thought a lot of the scenes were pointless) and Agape Agape (just an old dying man rambling about his work throughout).Like other modern and postmodern works, the book has everything going against itself to be read by the general public despite winning the National Book Award. Characters and company names abound, story continues without any chapter break as characters' voices come and go, and the business transactions that form the spine of the story are highly complex and difficult to keep track of.The main difficulties in going through this novel are: 1) figuring out who's talking and what's going on from the dialogue, which fortunately gets easier as you slog through the story and get used to the lilt and locution of the characters; and 2) keeping track of all the people and companies' names and business deals and understanding how they are all related to one another.Overall, a good comedy with amazing dialogue. It just takes patience to go through it.

This was the second most difficult book I've ever read (after the Finnegans Wake) but I loved it. As a superficial look at reviews will tell you, at its core, JR is the story of a junior high school student who builds a multimillion dollar corporate empire, at least on paper, out of penny stocks and tax flim flams. What makes it difficult is that it is written almost entirely in dialogue. This dialogue is entirely unattributed (except by context), most of the time is incomplete (because everyone is constantly interrupting or the speaker gets distracted by phone calls or whatever), and often one sided (as in hearing one end of a phone conversation). There are no chapters or sections or other breaks of any kind and scenes flow from one to another with no indications other than the nature of the overheard conversations.While Gaddis' structure and style here will definitely not appeal to all and fact maybe only to a few readers, I found it (particularly once I got used to it), totally appropriate to the insanity that the modern corporate world contains. At times it is laugh-out-funny and at other times depressing in the extreme and addresses not just corporate business but education, art, government, book publishing, sex, and just about anything else you can think of.The book takes a lot of work and there are many (maybe most) including many highly respected and educated writers and critics who will and do hate Gaddis generally and JR in particular. But I personally enjoyed the effort enormously and expects to read this again someday.

Gaddis' 'JR' has my nomination for the best American novel of the last half of the 20th century. It is also one of the two or three funniest American novels I can remember reading, right up there with 'Lolita'. It is composed entirely in dialogue, without any breaks at all, and it is sometimes difficult to tell who is talking, but once into the rhythm of the talk, it becomes clearer. It also helps to have an MBA or some business background, as the business deals it describes, to hilarious effect, are sometimes very intricate. It is the story of an 11-year old school kid wheeler-dealer who builds a gigantic paper empire 'bubble' from some army surplus items ordered from a comic book. He manages to involve various adults, including his teacher, in his capitalist schemes. It is a savage and entirely prescient view of America, foreseeing much of the present stock market madness (and it fact its comic hyperbole does not seem so wild now in light of our own real world stock market 'irrational exuberence'). It is unequalled as a depiction of the warping influences in people's lives caused by the capitalist ethic, where serious artists are devalued by the dictates of the market. If you enjoy Pynchon, Barth, or Joseph McElroy (another undeservedly unknown American writer) you will like Gaddis. This is a book to come back to again---read it now before our stock market bubble bursts!

Given the small number of reviews for this book I thought I'd throw in my two cents. This really is an interesting read and once you figure out who the main characters are it becomes an easy read too. After about 200-300 pages it really starts to click and then things just roll along. It is funny and cynical and just plain entertaining. It has a unique structure where the reader is bounced from one character or group to another. There will be a conversation and then one of the members leaves or runs into someone and then you follow him/her off to another conversation/episode. It is very creative and well done. It's actually a fairly fast read despite 726 pages with no chapter or section breaks.

Wrapping was flimsy and torn, and book arrived with back cover torn.