≡ PDF Free JR Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics William Gaddis Frederick R Karl 9780140187076 Books

JR Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics William Gaddis Frederick R Karl 9780140187076 Books

Download As PDF : JR Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics William Gaddis Frederick R Karl 9780140187076 Books

JR Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics William Gaddis Frederick R Karl 9780140187076 Books

This 700+ page novel by William Gaddis (1922-1998) is a splendid work of literature. And in case you're wondering about the title, JR is the name of one of the main characters, a grungy 12-year old boy who happens to be a financial genius working his money-magic from a public telephone booth at school. An alternate meaning of the two huge letters on the book's cover could be `Jabbering Ruck', since the novel is mostly dialogue and, make no mistake, every single person - down-on-their-luck men, flower-loving women, corporate business-types, school administrators, ticket takers, school kids, old ladies - do not possess the patience or capacity to hear one another out. Nearly every sentence in the entire novel is cut off before the sentence is completed. And, equally telling about American culture, everybody stops talking mid-sentence to answer the phone. Interruption as a mode of communication.

There is a quote cited in the middle of the novel: `That a work of art has a beginning, middle and end, life is all middle.' Curiously, from the very first page to the last page, I had the distinct feeling I was in the middle of Gaddis's novel, and for good reason: there are no chapter breaks nor scene demarcations, the dialogue has no character attributions, that is, there are no he said, she said, Tom said, Amy said. Dialogue and descriptions, action and interruptions, connections and misconnection, intimacies and alienation are part of one unending literary gush - novel reading as three weeks of ultimate extreme rafting down white water rapids. Do they pass out awards for finishing JR? They should.

And, man o' man, what a novel: grand in scope, sweeping social commentary, satire, dark humor (yes, be prepared to laugh-out-loud a few times on every page) as Gaddis writes about multiple aspects of the American dream and American nightmare and everything in between - business, commerce, education,, government, sex, love, marriage, divorce, vision, literature, art, music, to name just a dozen - and with some of the most memorable characters you will ever encounter. However, I can see where Jonathan Franzen and other literary types judge JR a difficult book. But, from my own experience, once you follow Gaddis's pace and rhythm, the language is quite engaging and not at all overwhelming. Here is a snatch of dialogue where an old aunt explains some family history to a visiting lawyer:

"Well, Father was just sixteen years old. As I say, Ira Cobb owned him some money. It was for work that Father had done, probably repairing some farm machinery. Father was always good with his hands. And then this problem came up over money, instead of paying Father Ira gave him an old violin and he took it down to the barn to try to learn to play it. Well his father heard it and went right down, and broke the violin over Father's head. We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn't do things that didn't pay."

How about that for insight into the culture? A young boy wants to play violin instead of fixing farm machinery or dealing in money. Well, whack! . . . take that kid. Get back to work so you can hand me some money! Bulls-eye, Mr. Gaddis. And heaven help those adults who don't grow out of wanting to play music or paint pictures or write books. Darn. . . why don't they really grow up and get a real job and do something useful so they can make some serious money?

One of my favorite characters is Whiteback, the school principal, who speaks pure Buffoon-ese. My guess is Gaddiss had great fun including Whiteback. I love the fact Whiteback displays his Horatio Alger award and 56 honorary degrees on his wall. 56! Here is Whiteback meeting with Dan, one of the school testers, and a Major Hyde, a corporate-military type pushing his company's agenda on the school. At one point in the conversation, Whiteback pontificates on the justification of monies being given his school for standardized testing:

"Right, Dan, the norm in each case supporting or we might say being supported, substantiated that is to say, by an overall norm, so that in other words in terms of the testing the norm comes out as the norm, or we have no norm to test against, right? So that presented in these terms the equipment can be shown to justify itself in budgetary terms that is to say, would you agree, Major?
--- I'll say one think Dan, if you can present it at the budget meeting the way Whiteback's just presented it here no one will dare to argue with you . . . "

What a scream. No joke, no one will argue. How do you argue with blustering sophistic double-speak?! Language as an administrate cover-up. Ironically, JR was published during the Watergate era.

In one scene we have Jack Gibbs making his entrance into a ramshackle, crumbling apartment, bottle in hand, to join his buddy. Through Gibbs's rant, Gaddis gives us the myth of the American writer/artist - the surly, gruff, liquor-fueled, poetic, perceptive outsider shooting holes through all the hypocrisy, shallowness, stupidity, self-righteousness and insensitivity of modern American life. It is as if the spirits of Henry Miller, Jackson Pollock, Charles Bukowski and other American tough-guy writers and artists loom over Gibb's shoulder; matter of fact, one could take the words of Gibb's rant and easily transpose them into a number of Bukowski-style poems. My sense is Gaddis also sees these looming spirits and knows the downside of the myth. What real freedom is there when one is tied to the scotch bottle and crusty, hard-boiled cynicism? But, then again, perhaps Gaddis detects some keen wisdom in a crusty cynicism, after all, his novel depicts how modern American cultural fuels one-dimensionality and a constriction of choice, where people are forced to live in a world constantly bombarded by noise, tawdriness, commercialism, land destruction, cesspools and intrusive gadgets.

JR is a challenging book, but a book well worth the effort. And, even if they don't give you an award for finishing, at least you can tell your friends you made it to the end.


Tags : JR (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) [William Gaddis, Frederick R. Karl] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. ABSURDLY LOGICAL, MERCILESSLY REAL, GATHERING ITS OWN TUMULTOUS MOMENTUM FOR THE ULTIMATE BRUSH WITH COMMODITY TRADING JR CAPTURES THE READER IN THE CACOPHONY OF VOICES THAT REVOLES AROUND THIS YOUNG CAPTIVE OF HIS OWN MYTHS. THE DISTURBING CLARITY WITH WHICH THIS FINISHED WRITER CAPTURES THE WAYS IN WHICH WE DEAL,William Gaddis, Frederick R. Karl,JR (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics),Penguin Classics,0140187073,Literary,Boys;Fiction.,Capitalists and financiers;Fiction.,Humorous stories.,Boys,Capitalists and financiers,Classics,Fiction,Fiction Classics,Fiction Literary,Gaddis, William - Prose & Criticism,Literature - Classics Criticism,Literature: Classics,Modern fiction,Humorous stories

JR Penguin TwentiethCentury Classics William Gaddis Frederick R Karl 9780140187076 Books Reviews

-Money.
-That's part of it, yes.
-And power, and lack of it, and control, and lack of it, and will, and lack of it....
-And sound, and too much of it.
-And life in these United States.

Difficult? Maybe. But it's WORTH IT! It is THE great American novel. You don't need the notes on line, you need to read it carefully and think about it while you read. It's funny in the darkest way, and cutting and touching and right to the heart of much of what's wrong, and yet could be right, with our greedy, noisy, Corporate country. Difficult (if it is) doesn't mean bad, it means it's a challenge. Step up to it and enjoy every word of it. Everyone should read it.
This book takes about 50 pages to really get into. However, once you understand the way the novel flows it is a surprisingly easy read. I would also mention that if someone is looking for a good source for human dialogue in literature then J R is arguably the pinnacle in that category.
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.
Granted this book is not for everyone. It does take patience, a patience that is amply rewarded. Mr. Gaddis must have had the best ear of anyone who ever took pen to paper - he unerringly gets the rhythm, pace, voice, etc, right to the point that one can identify this or that character through their speech patterns. No mean feat on the author's part. One can never accuse Gaddis of underestimating the intelligence of his readers, nor of their sense of humor. The man is a master humorist/satirist. And while the novel is mostly satiric in nature, there are some characters one truly feels for (Edward Bast, Amy Joubert, Jack Gibbs, and poor beset upon Dan DiCephalis).
I read his "The Recognitions" four years ago and fell in love with it. Why? It wasn't the plot nor any individual character, but rather the masterful way he uses (or as Whiteback would say "utilizes") the language. There is nothing he cannot do with it, no emotion he cannot express.
When in graduate school I took a class in which Steven Moore was a fellow student. I remember him telling Professor Charney that he'd written a book on Gaddis and that he felt the latter to be the best writer alive. Having by now read all of Gaddis's work, I agree that he must be included in the ranks of great writers. Each book encompasses a world, a world that is a delight to be a part of.
This 700+ page novel by William Gaddis (1922-1998) is a splendid work of literature. And in case you're wondering about the title, JR is the name of one of the main characters, a grungy 12-year old boy who happens to be a financial genius working his money-magic from a public telephone booth at school. An alternate meaning of the two huge letters on the book's cover could be `Jabbering Ruck', since the novel is mostly dialogue and, make no mistake, every single person - down-on-their-luck men, flower-loving women, corporate business-types, school administrators, ticket takers, school kids, old ladies - do not possess the patience or capacity to hear one another out. Nearly every sentence in the entire novel is cut off before the sentence is completed. And, equally telling about American culture, everybody stops talking mid-sentence to answer the phone. Interruption as a mode of communication.

There is a quote cited in the middle of the novel `That a work of art has a beginning, middle and end, life is all middle.' Curiously, from the very first page to the last page, I had the distinct feeling I was in the middle of Gaddis's novel, and for good reason there are no chapter breaks nor scene demarcations, the dialogue has no character attributions, that is, there are no he said, she said, Tom said, Amy said. Dialogue and descriptions, action and interruptions, connections and misconnection, intimacies and alienation are part of one unending literary gush - novel reading as three weeks of ultimate extreme rafting down white water rapids. Do they pass out awards for finishing JR? They should.

And, man o' man, what a novel grand in scope, sweeping social commentary, satire, dark humor (yes, be prepared to laugh-out-loud a few times on every page) as Gaddis writes about multiple aspects of the American dream and American nightmare and everything in between - business, commerce, education,, government, sex, love, marriage, divorce, vision, literature, art, music, to name just a dozen - and with some of the most memorable characters you will ever encounter. However, I can see where Jonathan Franzen and other literary types judge JR a difficult book. But, from my own experience, once you follow Gaddis's pace and rhythm, the language is quite engaging and not at all overwhelming. Here is a snatch of dialogue where an old aunt explains some family history to a visiting lawyer

"Well, Father was just sixteen years old. As I say, Ira Cobb owned him some money. It was for work that Father had done, probably repairing some farm machinery. Father was always good with his hands. And then this problem came up over money, instead of paying Father Ira gave him an old violin and he took it down to the barn to try to learn to play it. Well his father heard it and went right down, and broke the violin over Father's head. We were a Quaker family, after all, where you just didn't do things that didn't pay."

How about that for insight into the culture? A young boy wants to play violin instead of fixing farm machinery or dealing in money. Well, whack! . . . take that kid. Get back to work so you can hand me some money! Bulls-eye, Mr. Gaddis. And heaven help those adults who don't grow out of wanting to play music or paint pictures or write books. Darn. . . why don't they really grow up and get a real job and do something useful so they can make some serious money?

One of my favorite characters is Whiteback, the school principal, who speaks pure Buffoon-ese. My guess is Gaddiss had great fun including Whiteback. I love the fact Whiteback displays his Horatio Alger award and 56 honorary degrees on his wall. 56! Here is Whiteback meeting with Dan, one of the school testers, and a Major Hyde, a corporate-military type pushing his company's agenda on the school. At one point in the conversation, Whiteback pontificates on the justification of monies being given his school for standardized testing

"Right, Dan, the norm in each case supporting or we might say being supported, substantiated that is to say, by an overall norm, so that in other words in terms of the testing the norm comes out as the norm, or we have no norm to test against, right? So that presented in these terms the equipment can be shown to justify itself in budgetary terms that is to say, would you agree, Major?
--- I'll say one think Dan, if you can present it at the budget meeting the way Whiteback's just presented it here no one will dare to argue with you . . . "

What a scream. No joke, no one will argue. How do you argue with blustering sophistic double-speak?! Language as an administrate cover-up. Ironically, JR was published during the Watergate era.

In one scene we have Jack Gibbs making his entrance into a ramshackle, crumbling apartment, bottle in hand, to join his buddy. Through Gibbs's rant, Gaddis gives us the myth of the American writer/artist - the surly, gruff, liquor-fueled, poetic, perceptive outsider shooting holes through all the hypocrisy, shallowness, stupidity, self-righteousness and insensitivity of modern American life. It is as if the spirits of Henry Miller, Jackson Pollock, Charles Bukowski and other American tough-guy writers and artists loom over Gibb's shoulder; matter of fact, one could take the words of Gibb's rant and easily transpose them into a number of Bukowski-style poems. My sense is Gaddis also sees these looming spirits and knows the downside of the myth. What real freedom is there when one is tied to the scotch bottle and crusty, hard-boiled cynicism? But, then again, perhaps Gaddis detects some keen wisdom in a crusty cynicism, after all, his novel depicts how modern American cultural fuels one-dimensionality and a constriction of choice, where people are forced to live in a world constantly bombarded by noise, tawdriness, commercialism, land destruction, cesspools and intrusive gadgets.

JR is a challenging book, but a book well worth the effort. And, even if they don't give you an award for finishing, at least you can tell your friends you made it to the end.