The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Paper Empire: William Gaddis and the World System, edited by Joseph Tabbi and Rone Shavers
reviewed by James Crossley

 

William Gaddis hasn’t exactly been ignored—as Joseph Tabbi rightly points out in his introduction to Paper Empire, he was internationally feted and won multiple awards, and his reputation as a neglected and difficult author is often exaggerated—but his novels are still too little read and the critical response to his work has always been more of a trickle than a flood. As such, any new book about Gaddis is worthy of notice. It’s fortunate that this one has merit beyond its mere existence. Paper Empire is an excellent overview of almost the entire Gaddis canon, featuring contributions by fifteen commentators that mainly focus on individual novels, with only A Frolic of His Own somewhat lacking individual attention. Most previous studies have treated Gaddis’s final work, the posthumous Agape Agape, as a kind of appendix, but here it’s treated as a significant part of his career, very appropriately, since its concerns occupied him for decades. While an academic audience won’t be troubled by the occasionally abstruse prose of most of the essays, an intelligent lay reader may not find all of them fully pleasurable to read. Thankfully, there is a healthy portion of the book that can be enjoyed by those who aren’t just looking to add a citation to a paper, and it’s there that the real highlights of the volume can be found. Steven Moore offers an account of the long gestation of Agape Agape, Crystal Alberts provides a biographical précis and a tour through the Gaddis papers being held at Washington University, and Anja Zeidler explores the musical references in his work. Best of all, Joseph McElroy makes an appearance to briefly analyze Gaddis’s technique from the perspective of a working novelist. You might have to go all the way back to Melville’s tribute to Hawthorne to find the equal of this, one genius of fiction paying homage to another.