The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis's Fiction of Longing by Christopher J. Knight
Thomas Hove

Christopher J. Knight. Hints & Guesses: William Gaddis’s Fiction of Longing. Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 302 pp. Paper: $24.95.

This is the most complete study of Gaddis’s fiction to date, and it provides highly stimulating readings of his four novels. To his credit, Knight avoids enlisting Gaddis in exclusively academic debates that in no way concern him, such as the hermetic cottage industry obsessed with defining what counts as postmodern. Instead, Knight examines themes and topics explicitly developed within Gaddis’s fiction: the role of the artist and the aesthetic in contemporary society, along with the question of “what is worth doing” in a socioeconomic system that seems to be running us rather than we it (The Recognitions and JR); the hope of transcending humankind’s chronic stupidity, evil, and violence (Carpenter’s Gothic); and the possibilities of realizing ideal standards of justice, or at least of following the established procedures of worldly law (JR and A Frolic of His Own). Knight’s readings occasionally launch into excursuses on “extramural” matters like history, philosophy, politics, and economics, but in each case the digression is highly worthwhile. Along with the pioneering studies of Steven Moore and John Kuehl, Knight’s book should prove to be a valuable introduction to one of the most important novelists alive today, one who is not only the most talented ventriloquist of various forms of American speech but, as Knight forcefully argues, a profound satirist who always returns, with encyclopedic breadth, to the oldest but still most urgent questions of ethics: How should we live and how might we work against the self-destructive tendencies of human history? [Thomas Hove]