Book Reviews

Tabbi contends that few writers better diagnosed or demonstrated than Gaddis (and Gaddis no better than in J R) how a world “without the authority of religion, and without moral absolutes, could easily be overwhelmed by a corporate culture where all differences become relative, all human relations negotiable, all ‘others’ just like us and hence reducible to exchange according to market value” (65). [...]for Tabbi, Gaddis’s way into this world is also a way out, since a necessary premise of Gaddis’s style is that if readers “want [their] experience to be literary, [they] need to participate in the construction of meaning” (5). [...]reading a Gaddis novel becomes a secret schooling in reimagining the state apparatuses that dominate modern life. Tabbi’s Gaddis gives the reader a sense of hegemony in miniature, of the ways economies, religions, and states condition life by codifying and promulgating their value systems upon the world: whether that be an attempt to “eliminate the very possibility of human failure as a condition for success in the arts” (209) in The Recognitions, a “new, hypertrophied capitalism” (11) in J R, or, across Gaddis’s oeuvre, a rising “culture of simulation in which technology has become the only imaginable solution to problems it created in the first place” (211). Where Pynchon and Salinger view(ed) their fiction and artistic output as in some way concomitant with their need to be out on the weirdos’ wavelength or at home practicing devout religious rituals, respectively, Gaddis was more comfortable and visible in literature’s social circles, and, as Tabbi shows, he was as much a figure within the corporate takeover of American life as he was one who wrote against it.