JR Book

Big Business Is For Kids

I grew up just down the road from William Gaddis's home. But I didn't encounter his writing until about thirty years ago, first in his enthralling Recognitions, and then in JR which to me is the most important piece of fiction ever written about business.

JR is a six-grader who builds a business empire from a phone box. He gets to know the tricks of the trade, any trade, by trial and error. Hence he can reveal the real ethos of business as he goes along, without commentary but just the way it is.

Gaddis uses an innovative technique to keep the action going that takes a bit of acclimatisation but is well worth the reader's effort. The centre of narration shifts more or less constantly and without announcement as characters literally brush up against one another. The story is passed on like a sort of secret parcel that one has to watch for continuously. The effect is a literary mimicry of the frenetic but not terribly useful sequence of commercial activities from selling to corporate takeovers. The busyness of business.

Gaddis's point, I think, is the essential puerility of the corporate rat-race. It is a game played by children who, like Donald Trump, may have passed through puberty some time ago. It is a game with fixed rules which make little sense except to the players of the game. It also, alas, is a game that crushes authentic creativity whether in art or other human endeavour.

A dozen years after JR was published, that would be in 1987, someone, possibly Gaddis but I can't confirm it, wrote a supplemental piece entitled JR Goes to Washington. In that piece JR is only an expert witness testifying before a Congressional Committee. Little could any one have dreamed that this bit of slapstick would be a gross understatement of the coming reality of a Trump presidency: