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The
Sunday Times Letting
loose mere anarchy by William Gaddis Viking Pounds 16 pp. 586 |
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William
Gaddis is America’s great novelist of rackets in both senses of the
word. Fraud is his subject: hubbub is his technique. As far back as 1955,
his first novel, The Recognitions, concerned itself with art forgery,
currency counterfeiting, plagiarism, ghost-writing, charlatanism and
imposture. Two decades later, his next book, JR, trained its gaze on
financial chicanery or, rather, trained its ear on it. For like Gaddis’s
fictional excoriation of fundamentalist religious fakery, Carpenter’s
Gothic, the novel consisted almost entirely of dialogue and discord caught
with sizzling precision. That approach as if shoving a tape~recorder into the
pandemonium raging around wheeler-dealing, scams and shams is again put to
lethal use in A Frolic Of His Own. Central to the plot is a film about the
civil war, but the novel itself is almost all soundtrack, and soundtrack
in which speech isn’t only recorded in all its garble and slippage, but
frequently spliced together so that it is not immediately apparent who is
speaking to whom or where. What characters look like is largely to be
deduced from what they say to and about each other. Only one aspect of
their surroundings a tranquil pond in unspoiled countryside outside the
crumbling Long Island house where most of the book takes place receives
regular visual description. Admiring this view from time to time, Christina Lutz,
well-to-do wife of a partner in the prestigious New York law firm, Gwyne
and Dour, is struck by its calm remoteness from the tumult in which she is
plunged. Much of this swirls
like a maelstrom round her hyper-tense stepbrother Oscar, unsuccessful
lecturer in history, failed playwright and disappointing son to an eminent
federal court judge. After scorching his way in earlier books through the
salons and studios of the art world, Wall Street’s money markets, PR
agencies and Bible-belt evangelism, Gaddis now brings his blistering
satiric attentions to the law. The first word of his book is “Justice,,;
the last ones are “help me,,. With zestful disgust, the 586 pages in
between show how recourse to lawyers for the former will inevitably reduce
people to the latter plight. The America this novel tears open is one of
litigation run amok. Three huge law suits ramify through the book:
Oscar’s claim for multiple damages incurred when trying to start his car
by hot-wiring it, his suing of a Hollywood producer for pirating material
from an unperformed civil war play of his (its title, Once At Antietam,
echoes that of a play Gaddis wrote in the late 1950s), and a case
involving a dog accidentally imprisoned inside the warren-like cavities of
a piece of contemporary metal sculpture, Cyclone Seven. Minor court
actions, over everything from faulty breast implants to assault by ketchup
on a chinchilla coat, proliferate, too. In this book’s law~mad milieu,
people flail their way through an endless ticker-tape of depositions and
injunctions, petitions, statutes and expensively processed documents thick
with terminology such as “clouded title”, “malfeasance”, 11 unjust enrichment”, “negative entrustment”,
“foetal endangerment”, “distraint”, “laches”, “escrow”,
“bailment” and “bailor”. Charles Dickens is mentioned several times. And with
its shoals of lawyers, judges, clerks, plaintiffs, defendants and
professional litigants Gaddis’s novel can read like a frenetic,
transatlantic up-dating of Bleak House, a work it also resembles in
presenting callous, acquisitive and often surreally ruinous legal
procedures as outlandish symptoms of a society sick with rapacity.
But it is with modernist, not Victorian, writing that Gaddis’s
book has closest affinities. Its sophisticated arrangements of demotic din
recall Joyce. Yeats is often quoted by Oscar, who unabashedly shares the
modernists’ enthusiasm for inveighing against contemporary coarseness,
stupidity and mass-culture debasement. As drivel jabbers from television and tabloid and the
shriek of developers’ chain-saws rips into the rural peace of the
neighbourhood, Oscar’s end-of-tether diatribes take on more and more
manic, vituperative energy and the novel becomes more and more furiously
funny. Gaddis’s own
scalding exasperation occasionally finds vent in explosions of mere
jeering (a lecherous hypocrite of a politician called orney Bilk, a
festering backwater named Stinking Creek). But, mainly, his book provides
a marvellous cabaret of caustic comedy, especially when its satiric
star-turn Trish Hemsley, a rich socialite of monstrously undeflectable
selfishness, is holding forth. Uproariously, the novel transmits all the bedlam of a
terminally awry society while, at regular intervals, glimpses of natural
history programmes on television predators ingesting prey, carnivorous
plants with barbed lips add a biological dimension to the human veracity.
Historical perspectives stretch back, too: the furore over the
pilfered civil-war scenario doesn’t only unleash legal farce and media
ballyhoo; it also touches on the bases of American civilisation and
different modes of slavery continuing in it. As always, Gaddis excels at
the comedy of consternation: fraughtness, panic, indignation and
exacerbation vibrate through his pages. Deadly ventriloquism of vanity,
vacuity and greed is exercised with his usual scathing skill. But a wider
emotional span is now detectable as well. Inadequacies and insecurities
behind Oscar’s patrician posturings are made sympathetically audible.
Christinals het-up decency keeps introducing a more humane note into
things. Warmth as well as heat distinguishes this demanding, rewarding
novel which, every now and then, lets quieter tones of affection and
concern make themselves heard through the clamour of self-interest it
captures with such harsh hilarity.
Peter Kemp is the chief fiction reviewer of The Sunday Times |