William Gaddis is an author that people say they read. At least, certain kinds of people. His name carries a pretentious exchange-value, acting like a flirtatious intellectual currency traded among precocious college students eager to get laid. Gaddis is usually lumped in there with Pynchon, McElroy, DeLillo, D. F. Wallace, Vollman—those encyclopedic, cryptic-tome-manufacturing authors of 20th-century American fiction. In fact, his first book, The Recognitions, was rumored to be ghostwritten by Pynchon when it came out in the 1950's. But I've only ever read his posthumous, monophonic novella, Agapē Agape. That book was effectively an homage to Thomas Bernard—specifically, his novel Concrete—and tinged throughout with Benjaminian attacks aimed at the stultifying effects of 'mechanical reproduction' on the uniqueness of individual artistic expression, a persistent theme of Gaddis' work.
His second novel, JR, has been sitting on my bookshelf for a while now. At 726 pages, it's composed almost entirely of discontinuous speech. It's of interest to reader-response theorists, considering much of what would pass for exposition has to, instead, be filled in or 'concretized' by the reader out of Gaddis' polymorphous display of American vernacular. Besides it's formal complexity, JR delves into the transmogrified world of 1970's corporatism, complete with an eleven-year-old capitalist at its core. The farthest I've gotten into the book is about 12 pages.
But Lee Konstantinou of the Los Angeles Review of Books has decided to consciously ripoff the Infinite Summer collective reading project that took place a few years ago around Wallace's Infinite Jest. This time, the goal is to read through Gaddis' JR by the end of August, blogging and tweeting through it all. He's calling it #OccupyGaddis, inspired by the thematic connection that JR has with the Occupy movement.
