CARPENTER'S GOTHIC

by William Gaddis ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 1, 1985

Much, much briefer than either The Recognitions or JR--yet almost a distillate of the two, their dazzling techniques, their cynicism, themes, comedy, and also shortcomings. Couched in Gaddis' distinctive alternation between sour, transcribed-sounding dialogue and minutely descriptive, ""panning"" narrative, the plot concerns Elizabeth Booth, 33, an heiress married to a ne'er-do-well, a heel named Paul. A Vietnam vet (an officer fragged by his own troops), Paul is now a free-lance PR consultant, and his main client is a Fundamentalist preacher whose ineptitude and malignity are boundless, from accidentally drowning a convert he's baptizing to evolution-busting in a Southern school system to involvement with the CIA and even eventual nuclear war over bogus mineral rights in Africa. Paul's and Reverend Ude's doings, completely hilarious in small, are apocalyptic in large: thus the allegory of the title--houses built all for show, complication on complication--is shot through the book, both subtly and not. As Paul leeches Elizabeth, insulting her money but liberally going through it, leaving her alone, urging her to pursue phony malpractice suits, she hesitantly responds with a fugitive affair with the burnt-out-case writer she and Paul are renting their ramshackle upstate N.Y. house from--a man who, too, is intricately enmeshed in the fabric of disaster, global and individual, that Gaddis' conspiratorial sensibility sees as flung everywhere. Gaddis, with the skill at philippic, at hysterical and fault-finding dialogue, is in top technical form here. Characters lie, edit themselves, hide in talk; revelation comes in how people talk, rather than in what they say. And this is maybe a good thing--for the melodramatic, political, and sociological attitudes Gaddis longs to expose (about money, vested interest, Christianity) all have a shrillness about them at shorter length that was more diluted in the wider spread of JR. This book reads like a virtuoso nightmare suffered after a careful reading of the morning newspaper. It has a newspaper's imagination: a-contextual, shallow, flashy (and it in fact depends on headlines, photo captions, and the like, as do old Hollywood movies, to let the reader know what's successively come to pass). Gaddis admirers will justly savor the riskiness here, the brilliant methods, the perfect ear. . .but the book's ultimate reverberation is tinny, not as all-encompassing as it aims to be.

Pub Date: July 1, 1985

ISBN: 0141182229

Page Count: -

Publisher: Viking

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1985

Categories: FICTION