Carpenter's Gothic (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics) (Paperback)

by William Gaddis (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action--revealed in Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialoge--is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad--and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers" (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).

"An unholy landmark of a novel--an extra turret added on to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion Gaddis has been building in American letters" --Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review

"Everything in this compelling and brilliant vision of America--the packaged sleaze, the incipient violence, the fundamentalist furor, the constricted sexuality--is charged with the force of a volcanic eruption. Carpenter's Gothic will reenergize and give shape to contemporary literature." --Walter Abish

About the Author
One of the great masters of the twentieth-century novel, William Gaddis was born in 1922 in New York City and grew up in Massapequa, Long Island. He attended Harvard but was asked to leave the university, under mysterious circumstances, during his senior year. After working as a fact-checker at The New Yorker, he traveled through Europe, Africa, and Central America. During this time he wrote his first novel, The Recognitions (1955), a massive, dense, highly allusive work about the fraudulence that pervades contemporary life. Both critics and the public either ignored or dismissed it.

Gaddis took various jobs over the next twenty years to support his family, speechwriting for corporate executives, scriptwriting for government films, and working in public relations for a pharmaceutical company. These experiences informed his second novel, J R (1975). Consisting almost entirely of fragmentary dialogue, the book is a stinging satire of American business, charting the rise and fall of a huge financial empire assembled by an 11-year-old boy.

Although it divided critics, J R won the 1976 National Book Award. Considerably shorter and more intimate, Gaddis's third novel, Carpenter's Gothic (1985), is perhaps his darkest work, focusing on the anguished lives of a miserable heiress and her husband, a scheming Vietnam veteran. A Frolic of His Own (1994), the winner of another National Book Award, delineates the absurdities of the law and the legal profession.

A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Gaddis received a MacArthur grant in 1982. He died in 1998. His last novel, Agap_ Agape, a monologue about the destructive effects of corporate culture and technological innovation on the arts, was published in October 2002, along with a collection of his critical essays.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Penguin Classics (March 1, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0141182229
• ISBN-13: 978-0141182223
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #132,674 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The most breathless novelist of all time?, May 25, 2000

By	E. Hawkins (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Gaddis must give Thomas Bernhard a run for his money. While Bernhard specialises in the ranting monologue -- and denies the reader the breathing space of a single paragraph-break -- Gaddis plunges us into a cacophony of competing voices. Passages of description and narration are few and far between, and even when we get them, they're written telegraphically, almost as a stream-of-consciousness, with only the most minimal punctuation. I'm an advocate of lucidity in prose as a rule, but Gaddis's energy does away with the distinctions between lucidity and obscurity -- after a single page of this novel, you know you're in the hands of a master, one of the greatest writers of dialogue the novel has known. (He makes David Mamet seem quiescent by comparison.) The material of the novel seems terribly unpromising. It's set almost entirely in one house (full of false walls and chimneys unconnected to fireplaces -- a sure sign that everything is not as it seems) and the protagonist, Liz, is a nervous wreck. None of the characters really communicate with one another -- or at least not while they're talking. The plot is inordiantely complex, and we're often given information that doesn't make sense at the time. And Liz is the only person who really manages to elicit any sympathy from the reader. But it's still a thrilling read, because Gaddis stokes the rhetorical fires unceasingly and with unflagging wit. A good starting point for his three larger novels.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars sinister masterpiece, April 13, 1999

By A Customer

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"

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Challenging, but well worth it..., February 15, 2002

By	Steven Q. Dump (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Carpenter's Gothic (Hardcover)

Having heard so much praise for Gaddis' work and having read excerpts from all four of his novels, I decided to give "Carpenter's Gothic" a try. I must say that I was not at all surprised to find that everything I've heard about Gaddis' virtuoso prose and dialogue is absolutely true. The man was an absolutely brilliant writer. His dialogue is the best I've ever read. I also can see why he never really became popular: he's not the easiest writer to read. A book like this has to be read at least two times in order for the reader to catch up on a lot of what is going on. Not that this would be much of a chore. In fact, I think that anyone who has read this book would look forward to a second go-round!