A Frolic of His Own Critical Essay | A Frolic of His Own

Critical Review by Zachary Leader

SOURCE: "Jarndyce USA," in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4757, June 3, 1994, p. 22.

[In the following, Leader favorably reviews A Frolic of His Own.]

William Gaddis is now only obscure in one sense. At seventy-two, after long years of neglect, he has become a visible presence in American fiction, a modern—postmodern? modernist?—master. Gaddis has written four fiendishly clever and demanding novels: The Recognitions (1955), JR (1975), Carpenter's Gothic (1985), and now A Frolic of His Own, itself a comparative frolic at 586 pages. JR (726 pages) won the National Book Award in 1976, and last year, along with The Recognitions, was reissued as a Penguin Twentieth-Century Classic. Both volumes contain extravagantly admiring critical introductions and an impressive list of "suggestions for further reading". Gaddis himself, meanwhile, has won a MacArthur Fellowship, been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and was recently appointed official state author...
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