--Probably does, have you ever seen him when he wasn't scratching himself somewhere?
--Oh I know yes, I have felt he doesn't bathe often but, no there's something, something else, when you talk to him he doesn't look at you but it's not as though, not like he's hiding something. He looks like he's trying to fit what you're saying into something utterly different, some world you don't know anything about he's such an eager little boy but, there's something quite desolate, like a hunger...
J R Vansant is an eleven-year old from Massapequa, on New York's Long Island. He has an obsession with sending away for things, the free periodicals you get from people who are trying to sell you something. His sixth-grade class buys, as a collective project, a single share of a company called Diamond Cable during a field trip to Wall Street. It's this single share, in J R's possession, that will become, over the course of 800 pages, an upstart corporation that controls shipping companies, toilet paper companies, companies that make matchbooks and wallpaper, factories, a brewery, a film studio, and acres of land that belong to a First Nations tribe in Alberta, among dozens of others.
How does he do it? I could barely tell you. J R has a reputation as a "difficult" novel, but that's as descriptive as saying it's a novel made out of words: what makes J R difficult is that it boasts some thirty-odd principal characters and 99% of it is in pure, unattributed dialogue. "French scenes" blend seamlessly from one to the next, leaping over days and miles, and there are no chapter or scene breaks of any kind. Much of that dialogue is a dizzying kind of businessese that Gaddis learned from his day job, either in J R's voice or the many plutocrats and apparatchiks that get sucked into the orbit of the J R Family of Companies--none of whom know their boss or business rival is in the sixth grade. I'd honestly love to hear someone knowledgeable unpack the actual business moves that J R uses to build his empire. It starts with a shareholder suit J R pursues with his class' single share of Diamond Cable, I know that much, but when that's spun off into a tangle of debentures, mining rights, leasebacks, and liens, I could barely make heads or tails of it. And yet the novel has no interest in being understood, not in that way; what it's interested in is the sheer music of an indefatigable American idiom. What's most amazing about the novel, maybe, is that it manages to make the dreariest American jargon, Wall Street jargon, something of a thrilling circus ride.
J R is not a genius. He's a fairly ordinary eleven-year old; his dirty clothes and torn sneakers suggest that he is thoroughly neglected by absent parents. He thinks that the Inuit models in the American Museum of Natural History are stuffed, and when he instructs the company lawyer to incorporate in Jamaica, he believes it's the one in Queens. But neither is he purely lucky, like the Horatio Alger heroes the story cribs from. His superpower is a relentless philistinism, a child's inability to see past an obsession--in this case, an obsession that the country works tirelessly to inculcate in him. Twice during the novel, adults implore J R to look away from taxes, bonds, and securities and pay attention to something intangible. His class teacher, Amy Joubert, begs him to look at the moon: "Is there a millionaire for that?" she asks. Another teacher, the composer Edward Bast, who becomes J R's unwilling sidekick in the venture and is actually much closer to what one might call a "main character," tries to get him to listen to a tape of Bach. (J R thinks the German opera singer is singing "up yours.") But J R, a good American in training, simply cannot understand that there is such a thing as an "intangible asset."
I might give the impression that J R is a constant presence in the novel, but actually, the title character--though the engine that drives the events of the book--disappears for hundreds of pages at a time. Other characters fill in the space: teachers, businessmen, generals, senators, writers, painters. The heart of the novel might actually be a trio of failed artists--Bast and two writers, Gibbs and Eigen--who rent a small apartment on East 96th St. to work in. It's this apartment that becomes the headquarters of the J R Family of Companies, and which quickly fills up with unstoppable shipments and stacks of mail. J R's business has a way of sucking people in; in this apartment, it literally crowds them out. J R's "big idea" might be put very simply: money is the death of art. Bast, who dreams of being a great composer like his father (J R tells a magazine profiler he was a "famous conductor on the Long Island Rail Road) dreams of writing an opera, and over stages his dream shrinks: an opera, then a cantata, and finally, at the novel's end, a "piece for unaccompanied cello."
What do Bast and the others receive for the death of their artistic dreams? Nearly nothing; Bast spends half a time trying to chase down a salary from J R, who ties his employee's compensation up in unsellable stock options. But there's nothing to gain, because the J R Family of Companies is a paper tiger, collection of acquisitions that are spun into acquisitions, mostly in the hopes of being written off for tax purposes. The scheme never seems to generate any income for anyone, but it leaves a lot of destruction in its wake, squashing pension funds, defrauding indigenous nations, and even igniting sectarian war in a small African nation. No other novel captures so perfectly, or humorously, the great gaping hole at the center of American capitalism. I found myself wondering as I read what Gaddis would say about cryptocurrency or NFTs, those newfangled instruments that seem so transparently empty to everyone except those whose mania drives their "value" up. Some people may get rich, but mostly the people who are already rich; the rest of us, like J R and his associates, will get caught up in a flurry of empty noise and false promises.
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