Yesterday's NYT

[christine karatnytsky]

Buried in yesterday's New York Times, amidst endless and numbing tales of
local, national, and global woe, was a tribute on the editorial page
called "Reading William Gaddis."  It reads:

The difficulty William Gaddis presents to a reader is this: learning to
follow the mercurial glance of a writer who gives you no warning where he
will look next but who always looks with rapt attention and who commands
raptness in the language itself.

Now Mr. Gaddis is dead at 75.  He was never as aloof as Thomas Pynchon,
and the outline of his life makes an interesting narrative in its own
right.  But the one essential thing to know about Mr. Gaddis can only be
found in the life of his prose.

He published four novels, "The recognitions," "JR," "Carpenter's Gothic"
and "A Frolic of Hid Own."  Each of them is at once dour and baldly
funny, ironic and scarifying.  But only an intrinsically hopeful man ever
made prose like Mr. Gaddis's, so self-aware, so unyielding and, for a
reader who is happy not to insist on a swift denouement, so generous.  In
Gaddis, every sentence is its own denouement, and that is more attention
to the world and its linguistic echo than many readers can stand.

The secret to reading Gaddis is to read the words one at a time, one
after another, just as he arranged them.  That is all the difficulty
there is, and beyond it lies a sprawling, worldly entertainment.  Before
he died, Mr. Gaddis had finished a new novel.  May it be as fat and rich
as "Don Quixote" itself.  


Chris


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