Customer Reviews

Agape Agape

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William Gaddis' Agape Agape is a brilliant, philisophical rumination on the nature of contemporary society and its relationship to art and the artist. It's not really a novel, but rather a 100 page diatribe of a dying man trying to get his affairs in order before the end. He is in a bed somewhere, spilling water, bleeding slightly on his notes, his books. He talks to us about everything from the mundane (the blood) to the deeply philisophical (Plato and many, many others). I read this one one sitting in about an hour because it's that compelling and enjoyable. The conversation seamlessly moves from real estate matters to artistic matters. His commentary will make you chuckle, will make you shake your head in agreement. This is an interesting work and if you are looking from a step up from your average novel. Enjoy.

I have seldom if ever revised my opinion of an author based on a posthumous work-until now. I confess to having found the late William Gaddis' other (and in some circles, classic) novels (J.R., Frolic of His Own, The Recognitions, and Carpenter's Gothic) theoretically interesting and probably brilliant, but always far too long, very self-indulgent, difficult for its own sake and almost unreadable-in other words, they bored me, what I could get through of them.
This prejudice of mine is coupled with a general dislike for posthumous works in general-the kind where a Major Author left a work unfinished at death, and which is years after released and edited with an introduction or forward by some noted Scholar: ("This really IS a great book, all of Fitzgerald's/Hemingway's/Duras'/McGowin's major Themes are here," etc., etc.). Well, they very seldom are great works, and just as the act of Revision seems contrived to some (your Kerouac wannabes, perhaps), I, conversely, find the act of posthumous publication to itself be contrived-again, in general. Glenn Gould, the great pianist, once expressed his intense dislike of "live" recordings being released on record labels with the surrounding hoopla, and said he planned to do a "fake" live album, recorded in the studio, complete with mistakes and overdubbed with audience coughing, etc. Sony of course wouldn't go for it, but I've often wanted to write a "fake" posthumous novel, the Final (unfinished) Work of a Great American Novelist-I'll make it about 100 de-contextualized pages, with 200 pages of forwards, introductions, afterwards, and footnotes. Now that Dave Eggars is a Publisher, he should get in touch.
But in the case of Agape Agape, the Afterward is totally superfluous. The book was finished when Gaddis died, and I don't need to have that explained to me, nor do I care what Joseph Tabbi et. al. Think of it in the overall context of Gaddis' other novels or what it started out as or what Gaddis wanted it to achieve. It's 125 pages, and all of a piece, without section or chapter breaks, the perfect length for what is the most cohesive and affecting book the man ever wrote-the free-associations of a dying narrator who's afraid his lifelong goal to write the definitive history of the player piano will never come to fruition. Into this frenetic and breathless narrative, then, is woven...everything. What begins with the narrator's opinions concerning several aspects of the History and Future of Technology becomes a fictional autobiography the likes of which has rarely been achieved, cemented by the character's grasp of mortality and humanity, and by Gaddis' seamless and masterful narrative drive. He is ON.
This is a one or two-sitting book, and the reader will come away from it reeling. It's too brief for me to go into specifics, for the specifics are the book, the book is the plot-but if you've never read Gaddis, START HERE. And if you need to picture a Literary Precedent, think of Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground, perhaps, or of the best shorter work by Camus or John Hawkes-but only think. Because this book suceeds where Gaddis' other novels drag in that it also makes you feel.

An old man's Beckett-like disjointed rant is a forum for satisfyingly inconclusive and erudite musings on art, music, and individual inspiration in our "age of mechanical reproduction" and mass-market pandering. This small book is full of a wealth of crisscrossing themes. Unlike Gaddis's larger tomes, this is simply structured, has blistering forward momentum and can be read in a few hours. In prose alternately profound and profane, Gaddis has contrived a perfect device to exercise his lifelong preoccupations, creating an impassioned but infirm narrator whose very disorganization engagingly mocks the author and his sprawling subject. Parts are excruciatingly funny. This is a must-read if you're a Gaddis or Beckett or Thomas Bernhard or David Markson fan, or if you ponder the nature of art in this--or any other--age.

William Gaddis will never be an American literary icon on the order of Hemingway or Faulkner, it's fair to say. His novels, written in a fractured, stream-of-conscious hybrid of dialogue and interior monologue, are full of obscure allusions, facts and figures, and in true postmodern glee, often defy thematic description. I found "A Frolic of His Own" to be an absolute riot (maybe because I'm a lawyer)--it was too long, for sure, but smart and true as the best satires are.

This interesting little book has a lot to say about the state of Art in the Age of Technology. Unapologetically elitist, the moribund narrator illustrates how the democratization of art (best exemplified, for Gaddis, by the invention of the player piano) has transformed the genius of creation into little more than a spectator sport. Poking fun at the Pulitzers (the only purpose of which, he observes, is to proclaim the recipient fit for bourgeois consumption), the narrator breathes a sigh of relief on behalf of Pulitzer-less Thomas Pynchon, while commiserating with John Kennedy Toole on his posthumous receipt of the prize. Gaddis bewails a world where every four year old with a computer is considered an artist and sounds a note of gratitude (of which self-gratitude is almost certainly a part) for those who toil in the sweat and anonymity of true creation.

For those disgusted by the Hollywood mentality that exalts the mainstream at the expense of the maverick, that assesses quality in the language of capitalism, this sly little book provides a welcome critique, nurturing the inner elitist in us all.

Reminds me of nothing so much as Lucky's inspired tirade in Waiting for Godot in which the ends and odds of Western civilization are stitched up and stuttered nonstop in one fell swoop. Dense and dead funny.

Having never read Gaddis, but intrigued by the comparisons to several of my favorite authors (Joyce, Pynchon, etc) I decided to read him. Like many teachers putting forth _Dubliners_ or _A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man_ or _The Crying of Lot 49_ as the simpler, smaller books by a "great" author, I chose the shortest one. This book was written at the end of Gaddis's long life, and is the distillation of a lot of his themes and concerns and ideas that populated his earlier, more celebrated works. Apparently. Maybe I shouldn't have picked this book. It was only OK in my opinion. The stream of consciousness thing has been done before, and at times, I thought I was reading a book written in 1928, not 1998 because of the technique. The thing is, I couldn't really tell you what the book was "about." Its an interior rant about an old dying man who is hung up on the nature of art and technology really, but sometimes it made more sense on the page by page level than the global level. The writing and structure and vocabulary and reputation are enough to make me want to read more of his work, but I think I'll go read some Brits first.