Volume 41, Number 4 · February 17, 1994
At Home in Babel
By Jonathan Raban
A Frolic of His Own
by William Gaddis
Poseidon, 586 pp., $25.00
Every William Gaddis novel tells its story in such a cryptic and allusive way that it can become a cerebral torture, like a crossword puzzle whose setter is named after a famous inquisitor—Torquemada, Ximenes. Reviewing JR in the New Yorker in 1975, George Steiner called it an 'unreadable book'—a remark that got him into hot water with the professional Gaddisites, a solemn crew themselves given to sentences like 'Read from this perspective, The Recognitions demonstrates the essential alterity of the world, the meta-ethical virtue of agapistic ethics.'[*] Certainly Gaddis tries one's readerly patience to breaking point, strewing the foreground of his fiction with obstacles designed to trip one up, slow one down, and generally bring one face to face with the (as it were) essential alterity of the novel as a willful tissue of words. Scaling The Recognitions and JR, one keeps coming on the remains of earlier readers who lost their footing and perished in the ascent.
Review, 3982 words
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