Carpenter's gothic Book

Given that William Gaddis towers among novelists of the variety postmodernist, next to whom only perhaps Pynchon and McElroy cast an equal shadow, one would like to know what it's all about, what's going on, what makes Gaddis the kind of Gaddis he is. Carpenter's Gothic is a tempting place to go for answers. It is short. It's action is confined to a typical kind of American fake dwelling structure, a cheap imitation (of wood) of the Gothic stone and iron, designed to be seen from the outside and with rooms placed any old where. But, yes, it is still Gaddis. He's in there. In spades. But if the bulk and density of The Recognitions or J R is found daunting, please do not believe that you are adequately prepared even for the precision of Gothic. And besides, the short is only a predictor of the long when the long is not worth reading.

And given that one should say something about the book. Yes. There are voices here. A dialoguing which would seem to be a hangover from J R, but it's not. Voices. Broken and shattered conversations, interrupting (continuously) telephones, an unfinished novel, a pornographic and an anthropological magazine, the radio, the television, the door, a toilet which tends to flood, an old man across the street with a dustpan containing a few leaves, a library of sorts in seemingly mid- and continual-collapse, a French speaking maid, and the newspaper with its headlines, the mail and bills and summonses and threats.

But you'll get a kick of out Gaddis' polished and precise prose tearing a new one upon the (willful, obstinate) ignoranti who would have us teach creationism in Texas and elsewhere. But you will notice, please, that unlike those new atheists, Gaddis won't smear all religion on account of association, but he goes directly for the cause of corrupted religiosity, i.e., stupidity, willed ignorance. "There's much more stupidity than there is malice in the world." But the attentive reader, the one not fascinated so much quite by the stupidity of the other person, will notice that the issues of imperialistic exploitation and extraction of the mineral wealth of Africa is not a thing of the past, but to which very imperialist practice I owe the computer upon which I am typing this review. The story of Africa is not being told, the wars of oil being rather a bit better rehearsed, this even despite the possibility of blaming the carnage of Africa upon the former European imperialists and present day (only recently official enemy) China. Warlordism won't go away so long as those warlords can fund their projects by selling mineral wealth to capitalists who are only too happy to not know things which citizens of a democratic society ought to know. Follow the money.

You'll maybe like to have the annotations at hand:



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A supposedly silly thing I'd previously said and which rests here, dying, that comments below, numbered .1. through .21. may have some reasonableness granted unto them:

What should have been the cover for Carpenter's Gothic.

[Leave that Like button alone [it's catching!] I've not read this yet. Instead of Liking this link, lambast me for having not yet read Carpenter's Gothic.]