JR
by WILLIAM GADDIS 726 pages. Knopf. $15 hardcover;
$5.95 paperback. "Money," said Gertrude Stein, "is always there but the pockets change; it is not in the same pockets after a change, and that is all there is to say about money." Stein, who did not have much to say about roses either, apparently meant that money—like gravity and magnetism—is so pervasive and anonymous that it needs no human inferences. Does a fish talk about water?
William Gaddis' long, satirical novel JR could well be a model of such a gestalt theory of money. For 726 pages, the reader is bathed in the sounds of voices talking mostly about loot and business—but actually saying nothing.
Gaddis, however, has much to say.
Twenty years ago, he published The Recognitions, a major postwar American novel that is still largely unknown and unappreciated. In nearly 1,000 pages, the then 33-year-old author took on the godless 20th century. Through his hero, a man who turned from the priesthood to become an artist and then an expert forger of old Flemish masters, Gaddis spun the platonic metaphysics of reality and imitation into exciting fiction.
His message to an age obsessed with the vanity of creativity was actually a disturbing reminder: art is not invention but the recognition of eternal patterns.
Picnic Forks. In JR, the patterns are again discernible, this time in a world where means have few ends—only the creation of more means; where the techniques of doing things have become more important than the things themselves; where language is debased in the service of such perversions. The book generates a cacophony of banalities and corruptions that drown out love, art, and whatever other human activities can be heard struggling beneath the din. At such moments, JR seems derivative of Thomas Pynchon's V and Gravity's Rainbow. But it is more likely that Pynchon was influenced by Gaddis' earlier Recognitions.
JR can be excessive. A hospitalized businessman expounds on capital accumulation while receiving an enema.
Gaddis' prose occasionally shows strain:
"Her brassiere strap hung errant and anomalous." But these lapses are overwhelmed by the novel's bitterly comic vision: a world in which an eleven-year-old boy known as "JR" parlays a bid to supply the Army with 9,000 gross of wooden picnic forks into a multinational conglomerate. Barely literate, he works out of a telephone booth and gets his leads by subscribing to dozens of commercial magazines and catalogues.
JR is that most mysterious and nimble of all entrepreneurs—the middleman. The forks he sold to the Army were actually purchased from Navy surplus.
As he explains: "I got it right out of that spot bid catalogue I traded off you to send in for where the Navy got all these new plastic ones so they like spot bid these here wooden surplus ones real cheap for anybody that wants."
From wooden forks, his business metastasizes wildly through the acquisition of bankrupt companies. By making salvaged assets jump through tax loopholes, the juvenile tycoon gains control of a brewery, a film studio, an untold quantity of frozen pork bellies, an entire New England mill town, a factory that manufactures player-piano rolls and condoms, and much more.