Carpenter's Gothic

Often this is considered the least of Gaddis' novels, the most obvious reason being that it's the shortest, although that isn't the only reason. Still, in his longer novels Gaddis was always able to work his themes to a fever pitch and stretch them out, playing with dialogue and tone over the course of hundreds of pages, giving you in essence a grand symphony. A depressing symphony, also, mind you, dotted with sparks of black humor but it made each book a rather meaty read. Here he attempts to do all that in like a tenth of the space and while that gives the novel a breakneck pace that isn't really matched by anything else he's ever done (Agape, Agape, maybe, but I'll let you know when I get there), things start off quickly and keep moving. Even this is an illusion, while The Recognitions was a tad ponderous at times and was meant to be read slowly, JR comes across as a mad flurry of action, due to all the competing voices charging head-on in cacophony. Here everything just feels compressed, the characters trapped in a bottle, the setting never really leaving the house that gives the novel its name. With its limited setting and fewer characters, it sometimes can feel like JR-lite but the tone is remarkably different. As I mentioned, there are hints of Gaddis' rather dark view of things but most of the time it was leavened by humor or at least some kind of compassion. In this story, you have none of that. The two main characters, Paul and Elizabeth, are taking care of a house owned by a different man, while Paul works with a Reverend and also seems to be suing a bunch of people due to some kind of airplane crash, while Elizabeth goes to different doctors somehow aligned with the case and generally frets about. Which sets up the main problem with the novel, the two characters are mostly unlikable, the novel begins with Paul berating Elizabeth nonstop while asking her to do stuff for him and it really doesn't relent, just about every scene of them together follows that pattern and it does get rather tedious after a while. Elizabeth isn't much better on her own, while Paul's foulmouthed rants have an amusing component to them, Elizabeth just tends to flutter and frit about and not saying anything of real import, although she does gain something resembling a spine toward the end. Paul's schemes are what drive the narrative but it is hard to figure out what the general thrust is underneath all the ranting, in fact the copy on the inner jacket will tell you more about the plot than the story really does and it's not unheard of for a reader to feel simply snowballed under the mountains of dialogue. Fortunately, Gaddis does dialogue well. Really, really well. Real people may not talk like that but he captures the rhythms close enough and the back and forth chatter is like nothing else is literature. The lack of punctuation marks only immerses the dialogue further into the prose, making it all a sort of weird background noise . . . though i

Gathering storm..Unfolds like a stage play on the floor boards of one rented house....any reader who gives this book a chance will be borne along ever faster and further by the magnificent, ranting dialogue which seems to reach from these rented rooms into every nefarious corner of American mischief; a sinister bible act of the Pat Robertson ilk with an African ministry(the entire rape of Africa is rendered in one amazing four or five page salvo), the unscrupulous wife-bullying moron who decides to act as his P.T.Barnum, and a host of other characters who fall into those two GADDIS categories(not mutually exclusive) of grotesque and disposessed. What a book!Gives evil many faces."As funny as hell"

Carpenter's Gothic is a good book--the harshest criticism ever written on American crudity: illiterate religious zealots, megacorporations and good consumers, the mass media, and the density of the average American mind. Gaddis' dialogue--and _CG_ is nearly all dialogue--crystallizes the idiocy and the vague terror in the hearts of his messed-up characters. It's always spot-on in its parody of stupidity and incoherence (I am a college student, and I constantly hear echoes of _CG_ when other people, or I, talk). However, there are no interior lives of the Proustian or Joycean sort--all is speech, documents, objects. Gaddis writes nothing of what his characters think. While the external emphasis is completely appropriate for late 20th century America, if you're looking for meaningful inner lives, skip _CG_ and go to Gaddis' first book, _The Recognitions_, or jaunt to Joyce. Better yet, go out and make some effort to raise yourself above the intellectual level of the characters in _Carpenter's Gothic_. The spirit of Gaddis might give thanks for that.

Is there a bigger literary crime than the fact that so few read William Gaddis? Before his death in December '98, he may have been the best living American Author. Think of a slghtly more serious, but equally wicked Thomas Pynchon. Carpenter's Gothic is a tense, dense, explosive, beautiful, hilarious, acerbic and taut work of genius. Gaddis' ear for dialogue is frightening. He has few equals. His prose is Faulkner, Hawthorne, Joyce, Beckett - and nasty. Great satire here, targets being American everything, especially fundamentalist religion, foreign policy, and the media... This is easily his most accessible novel. WARNING: not for sensitive Christians!

One of the most brilliant books written in English this century by perhaps America's greatest living writer. Why is he not appreciated more? Why is this book no longer in print?