Apocalypse in the Living Room

By R.Z. Sheppard

William Gaddis is the author of The Recognitions, a massive 30-year-old novel noted for its high style and erudite handling of religion and art. The book has been compared with Joyce's Ulysses and Gide's The Counterfeiters and credited with inspiring Thomas Pynchon's V. Yet as the novel's reputation grew, its author seemed to vanish. For 20 years Gaddis taught, lived on grants and wrote literature for business and industry: annual reports, speeches for executives, memorandums. In 1975 he reappeared with JR, a lengthy, knowledgeable satire about an eleven-year-old boy who becomes a corporate tycoon. JR won that year's National Book Award for Fiction, and Gaddis went back to doing whatever it is literary comets do on their elliptical journeys between publication dates.

One thing he did was teach a college course on the theme of failure in the American novel. Not so coincidentally, Carpenter's Gothic is about losers in a competitive society. Gaddis reveals his characters in snatches of dialogue: "--Will you listen to me? Trying to tell you they're taking you to court here, anybody comes to the door don't open it. Stumpp serving a summons on you some seedy process server comes to the door tell them a mile away, some down at the heels hopeless looking bastard they get seven dollars a summons he has to hand it to you, has to touch you with it, see some burnt out case out here on the doorstep you open it and all he says is Mrs Booth? hits you with the paper and that's it, don't open the door."

The words belong to Paul Booth, a former Army officer fragged by one of his own men in Viet Nam. He is mean-spirited and abusive. His wife Liz is an asthmatic heiress whose money is tied up in a complex trust fund. She is also the captive audience of a talky geologist named McCandless, who has rented his house to the Booths.

The eavesdropping reader gets an earful of the couple's private life. There is much about debts and the obstacles that keep Paul from success. There is something about injuries that Liz suffered in a plane crash and oblique details about an international business deal with geopolitical implications. Booth is in public relations. His clients include the Rev. Elton Ude, founder of the Wayne Fickert Bible College and leader of an evangelical movement in Africa, and a mining company interested in mineral deposits in the area where Ude is harvesting souls. A U.S. Senator is also involved, as is McCandless, who prepared the original geological reports of the site.

The action of the novel is restricted to the McCandless house, located in a Hudson River town not far from New York City. The design of the residence is carpenter's gothic, "a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions... a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing even on this small a scale." This description is a key to Gaddis' own architecture: a self-conscious scaling down of his earlier books, in which issues of decline and fraudulence were elaborately developed.

Paul Booth is a lout but no villain. Gaddis assigns that role to a shadowy alliance of religion, business and government represented by Ude and his associates. The real preacher of the novel is McCandless, a bitter rationalist who hurls brimstone in the general direction of Southern fundamentalists, creationists and flag wavers. "You take the self hatred generated by original sin turn it around on your neighbors and maybe you've got enough sects slaughtering each other from Londonderry to Chandigarh to wipe out the whole damned thing."

It boils down to who will cater the Apocalypse: true believers with their illogical positivism or nihilists like McCandless with their spiteful yearnings for oblivion? When it comes to the care and feeding of cataclysms, Gaddis prefers to side with the black humorists. Booth's stream of invective is reminiscent of the desperate humor of Lenny Bruce: "You think Mississippi wants a history book that tells the kids Nat Turner was anything but a coon show?... You think any publisher that wants to stay in business is going to try to peddle a fourteen dollar biology textbook to these primates with a chapter on their cousins back there banging around Lake Rudolf with their stone hammers?" If this sounds dated, there is also Liz, choking on information theory left over from Marshall McLuhan: "Yesterday's headline or the day's before, of no more relevance then than now in its blunt demand to be read, building the clutter, widening the vacancy, driving it elsewhere, anywhere."

In a technical sense, this novel for mixed voices is crafty and impressive. Like a fine jazz musician, Gaddis knows how to improvise within a tightly controlled framework. He also excels at dramatizing domestic nastiness: the anxious squabbling, the reflex rudeness, the instinct for the sore spot. But the connections between connubial blood sports and international power games are indistinct and consequently not as savagely humorous as intended. Ude & Co. begin and end as remote and faceless abstractions. For all its sound and fury, Carpenter's Gothic could use some convincing gargoyles. --By R.Z. Sheppard