Carpenter's Gothic

by William Gaddis

This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission. At the still center of the breakneck action--revealed in Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialoge--is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad--and Armageddon comes rapidly closer. Displaying Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers" (Malcolm Bradbury, "The Washington Post Book World" ).
"An unholy landmark of a novel--an extra turret added on to the ample, ingenious, audacious Gothic mansion Gaddis has been building in American letters" --Cynthia Ozick, "The New York Times Book Review"
"Everything in this compelling and brilliant vision of America--the packaged sleaze, the incipient violence, the fundamentalist furor, the constricted sexuality--is charged with the force of a volcanic eruption. "Carpenter's Gothic" will reenergize and give shape to contemporary literature." --Walter Abish

Genres: Fiction, American, Novels, Literature, 20th Century, The United States Of America, Literary Fiction

262 pages, Paperback

First published July 22, 1985

About the author

William Gaddis was the author of five novels. He was born in New York December 29, 1922. The circumstances why he left Harvard in his senior year are mysterious. He worked for The New Yorker for a spell in the 1950s, and absorbed experiences at the bohemian parties and happenings, to be later used as material in The Recognitions. Travel provided further resources of experience in Mexico, in Costa Rica, in Spain and Africa and, perhaps strangest to imagine of him, he was employed for a few years in public relations for a pharmaceutical corporation.

The number of printed interviews with Gaddis can be counted on one hand: he wondered why anyone should expect an author to be at all interesting, after having very likely projected the best of themselves in their work. He has been frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and especially Pynchon.

Gaddis’s first novel, The Recognitions (1955) is a 956-page saga of forgery, pretension, and desires misguided and inexpressible. Critical response to the book ranged from cool to hostile, but in most cases (as Jack Green took pains to show in his book of rebuke, Fire the Bastards!). Reviewers were ill-prepared to deal with the challenge, and evidently many who began to read The Recognitions did not finish. The novel’s sometimes great leaps in time and location and the breadth and arcane pedigree of allusions are, it turns out, fairly mild complications for the reader when compared with what would become the writer’s trademark: the unrestrained confusion of detached and fragmentary dialogue.

Gaddis’s second book, JR (1975) won the National Book Award. It was only a 726 pages long driven by dialogue. The chaos of the unceasing deluge of talk of JR drove critics to declare the text “unreadable”. Reading Gaddis is by no means easy, but it is a more lacerating and artfully sustained attack on capitalism than JR, and The Recognitions.

Carpenter's Gothic (1985) offered a shorter and more accessible picture of Gaddis's sardonic worldview. The continual litigation that was a theme in that book becomes the central theme and plot device in A Frolic of His Own (1994)—which earned him his second National Book Award and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. There are even two Japanese cars called the Isuyu and the Sosumi.

His final work was the novella Agapē Agape which was published in 2002. Gaddis died at home in East Hampton, New York, of prostate cancer on December 16th, 1998.

Reviews

[Guille · Rating 5 out of 5]

La vi en el escaparate de una librería cercana a mi centro de trabajo. No sé porqué me llamó la atención, ni el título (hace referencia a esas casas americanas, frágiles y vistosas por fuera y caóticas por dentro) ni la portada son llamativos. Días después leí una muy buena crítica en Babelia y el día del padre apareció por casa.

Este autor, del que no tenía ni idea de su existencia, pese a ser ganador de dos National Book Award, me ha conquistado absolutamente con esta obra. La trama no es nada excepcional, toda la novela es dialogada, casi como una obra de teatro (un Tennessee Williams moderno que nos acerca otra vez a ese sur norteamericano, profundo, apasionado y contradictorio), pero el lenguaje, confuso, cortado, a saltos, es fascinante en su tremenda capacidad para transmitir emociones.

En cierto modo me recuerda a Lobo Antunes. También aquí es el lector el que tiene que ir reescribiendo el relato a partir de las pinceladas que el autor nos va mostrando, muchas veces apiladas unas encima de las otras, o no terminadas o no definidas. La carectización a través de los diálogos de los personajes, inadaptados, siempre al borde del precipicio, es soberbia; el ambiente (toda la novela se desarrolla dentro de la casa) claustrofóbico; la sociedad retratada, absolutamente desquiciada; el final desesperante.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of those novels that one has to give oneself to completely and utterly. No wandering thoughts here, and I needed zero interruptions too - even the sound of faint traffic and the odd dog barking I found to be a pain in the ass. A bunker with only the sound of my own heartbeat would have been perfect. This clocks in at under 280 pages, but it took a lot longer than a book of this length would normally take - just 20 or so pages at a time seemed to take hours. This is not a breeze to get through - it's all about patience and time. And by God was it worth it in the end, as I was awestruck by Gaddis' narrative style, his merciless and intricate scheming and deceptions, and stunning use of dialogue - and there is a hell of a lot of it. I swear I could even feel the vibrations of the characters vocal cords - especially the husband, Paul. (I'd be surprised if Gaddis doesn't hold the record for the most use of 'God damn' in any work of fiction. You will not find much happiness here when it comes to marriage - this is a storm of a novel; a complex thing of beauty, where Gaddis is a bit like Christopher Nolan in the sense that he doesn't treat his audience like a bunch of muppets and spoon feed the reader. I am both petrified - 900+ pages - and eager to read his debut novel The Recognitions. Although I doubt that will come this year, with Infinite Jest on the horizon.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

There was no way I was going to start my Gaddis experience with his 976pp Olympic marathon The Recognitions, not having sampled his style first. Unfortunately, there is nothing in this short novel to repel me from said monolith except perhaps the disorienting dialogue and scene changes (of the four characters in this novel no one formally enters or exits, nor conducts the same conversation), but the man’s prose is unique, mellifluous and (could it be?) readable. What! you say. You mean it isn’t an even more densely packed Recognitions, or like Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49—all the extraneous readable prose cut completely, leaving only the cult-forming unintelligible gibberish? No, sir! This novel offers a series of brief interviews with hideous men, with heiress Elizabeth at the centre, whose life with her one-expletive-only husband, leeching brother and slippery landlord forms the “crux” of the piece—so much as this “piece” has a “crux”—taking us on an inventive satirical bus tour of American . . . greed? religious propaganda? men who behave like a world-class assfaces? dehumanised dudes in search of the dollar? All this and less. Mr. Salvage sums it up rather well, “bitter and loud.”

[Paul Bryant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This novel is the entry point into Gaddisworld for the feebleminded like myself, since it’s only 260 pages and all his other novels are 900 pages minimum, but darlings, it was very tedious and annoying. I know this is by the great Mr Difficult himself but it wasn’t that difficult, it was just yawny. I was like a kid in the back of the car. Are we there yet? How much further?

So we have a situation here. We have a thirtysomething couple in a posh coastal rented house. They are nearly broke. She is the daughter of a dead father who made squillions mining in Africa but her dough is tied up in a trust. Cue pages of fuming and banging around by annoyed wheelerdealer no-account husband, a motormouth who thinks he’s just found his own golden ticket by becoming the media manager of a black evangelical preacher who recently drowned a young boy during a river baptism. This hubby is parlaying that tragic event into a money-spinning opportunity using the old fast shoe shuffle and banking on the limitless credulity of evangelical Christians.

So she’s in the house all day long fielding phone call after phone call (No he’s not… who did you say you were… I’m sorry I have no infor---) then he comes rushing in periodically (Give me a clean shirt – any shirt – what? Couldn’t you find a better one than this? Gimme a coffee, I’m in a rush) and he pauses only to deliver pages of ranting about the desperate venal utterly fucked state of a) humanity, b) American humanity and c) American religious humanity and d) his dire financial situation. He barks a few orders at his wife (If Slotko calls tell him he’ll get his $200 Friday latest, got that?) and rushes out.

Meanwhile she is only leaving the house to visit various doctors to prove she’s suffering from a sexual malfunction after a plane crash. This is so that Paul the husband can bring a fraudulent lawsuit against the plane company.

Then she gets visits from her brother Billy, another motormouth loser. If you close your eyes, you can’t tell the difference between the husband and the brother. They are both professional complainers with a fresh new hard luck story every time they appear, so full of contempt and indignation about pretty much everything that moves.

Then she gets random visits from the landlord of the house, and - no surprise - he turns out to be a guy who can bloviate for pages at the drop of a hat, continually spinning paranoid maybe-fantasies about murky doings by government agencies and complicated CIA type stuff he was formerly involved in when he was a geologist in Africa. Your eyes may be forgiven if they glaze over at this point. Three moaning complaining male fantasists in one novel is two too many, I think.

And Mrs Doormat gets to say stuff like “Well—” or “But---” or “I’m sorry---”

The targets of this novel are very familiar to us – toxic masculinity, as we now call it; American neo-colonialism; and how religion exploits the poor and gullible. Mr Difficult is not finding exciting new ground here.

The difficulty of this book is that 95% of it is dialogue with no indication of who’s talking. You can easily figure that out, but it’s harder to figure out what these guys are talking about, harder still to figure out if what they’re talking about is supposed to be real, and even harder still to care one way or the other. Of the 5% that isn’t ranting male voices, we have stuff like this :

Where she woke, coming over on her back, pulling away sheet and blanket for the warmth, or the sense of it, dappling the room walls and ceiling in a gentle rise and fall of reds, yellow, blazing to orange brought her to her elbows to the foot of the bed and the window in the frolic of flames through the branches outside.

There’s no doubt Mr Difficult has great verbal energy and a flair for the meaty interconnectedness of the woof and the weft of life itself, but it wasn’t enough.

SOUNDTRACK

Subterranean Homesick Blues : Bob Dylan

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MGxjI...

Oh, get born, keep warm
Short pants, romance
Learn to dance, get dressed, get blessed
Try to be a success
Please her, please him, buy gifts
Don't steal, don't lift
Twenty years of schoolin'
And they put you on the day shift

Too Much Monkey Business : Chuck Berry

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ohtxg...

Runnin' to-and-fro, hard workin' at the mill
Never fail in the mail, yeah, come a rotten bill

Salesman talkin' to me, tryin' to run me up a creek
Says you can buy it, go on try it, you can pay me next week, ahh

Blonde haired good lookin', tryin' to get me hooked
Want me to marry, get a home, settle down, write a book

Same thing every day, gettin' up, goin' to school
No need for me to complain, my objection's overruled, ahh
Too much monkey business, too much monkey business
Too much monkey business for me to be involved in

Get a Job : The Silhouettes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKhb...

Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Sha na na na, sha na na na na
Yip yip yip yip yip yip yip yip
Mum mum mum mum mum mum
Get a job, sha na na na, sha na na na na

Black Diamond Express to hell : The Rev A. W. Nix

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FW2RB...

Next station is Liar's Avenue,
Wait there, and let all the liars get onboard.
Have a good crowd of liars down there,
Have some smooth liars, some unreasonable liars,
Some professional liars, some bareface liars,
Some ungodly liars, some big liars,
Some little liars, some go to bed lying, get up lying.
Lie all day! Lie on you and lie on me!
A big crowd of liars!
You go to Hell on the Black Diamond Train.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Given that William Gaddis towers among novelists of the variety postmodernist, next to whom only perhaps Pynchon and McElroy cast an equal shadow, one would like to know what it’s all about, what’s going on, what makes Gaddis the kind of Gaddis he is. Carpenter’s Gothic is a tempting place to go for answers. It is short. It’s action is confined to a typical kind of American fake dwelling structure, a cheap imitation (of wood) of the Gothic stone and iron, designed to be seen from the outside and with rooms placed any old where. But, yes, it is still Gaddis. He’s in there. In spades. But if the bulk and density of The Recognitions or J R is found daunting, please do not believe that you are adequately prepared even for the precision of Gothic. And besides, the short is only a predictor of the long when the long is not worth reading.

And given that one should say something about the book. Yes. There are voices here. A dialoguing which would seem to be a hangover from J R, but it’s not. Voices. Broken and shattered conversations, interrupting (continuously) telephones, an unfinished novel, a pornographic and an anthropological magazine, the radio, the television, the door, a toilet which tends to flood, an old man across the street with a dustpan containing a few leaves, a library of sorts in seemingly mid- and continual-collapse, a French speaking maid, and the newspaper with its headlines, the mail and bills and summonses and threats.

But you’ll get a kick of out Gaddis’ polished and precise prose tearing a new one upon the (willful, obstinate) ignoranti who would have us teach creationism in Texas and elsewhere. But you will notice, please, that unlike those new atheists, Gaddis won’t smear all religion on account of association, but he goes directly for the cause of corrupted religiosity, i.e., stupidity, willed ignorance. “There’s much more stupidity than there is malice in the world.” But the attentive reader, the one not fascinated so much quite by the stupidity of the other person, will notice that the issues of imperialistic exploitation and extraction of the mineral wealth of Africa is not a thing of the past, but to which very imperialist practice I owe the computer upon which I am typing this review. The story of Africa is not being told, the wars of oil being rather a bit better rehearsed, this even despite the possibility of blaming the carnage of Africa upon the former European imperialists and present day (only recently official enemy) China. Warlordism won’t go away so long as those warlords can fund their projects by selling mineral wealth to capitalists who are only too happy to not know things which citizens of a democratic society ought to know. Follow the money.

You’ll maybe like to have the annotations at hand:
http://www.williamgaddis.org/gothic/i...


____________
A supposedly silly thing I’d previously said and which rests here, dying, that comments below, numbered .1. through .21. may have some reasonableness granted unto them:

What should have been the cover for Carpenter's Gothic.

[Leave that Like button alone [it’s catching!] I've not read this yet. Instead of Liking this link, lambast me for having not yet read Carpenter's Gothic.]

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the fourth or fifth (firth of fifth?) time I’ve read this short novel, and I cannot understand for the life of me how it isn’t considered one of the GREAT Vietnam War novels. Sure, it’s not overt; the absolutely brilliant usually aren’t. But, goddam, the War is in the marrow here. As the son of a Vietnam vet, it all just seems so obvious—and, as it’s Gaddis, so perfectly calibrated to the ear.

[João Reis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Origem do exemplar: Biblioteca.
Língua da edição lida: Português.
Tradução: Boa.
Género: Ficção; literatura; romance.
Avaliação: Bom.
Gostei moderadamente do livro. A combinação de diálogo, ao longo de quase todo o livro, com um tom pós-modernista (ou seja, duas coisas de que, em geral, não gosto) não me permitiram apreciar por inteiro o absurdo das relações e pretensões humanas e o pessimismo patentes na obra.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

I must warn you, I have no qualms calling Gaddis the greatest novelist of the later twentieth century, and perhaps ever. I am an unrepentant fanboy. So my star rating is completely untrustworthy. Anyway, on to my thoughts.

This is the shortest and best titled of Gaddis' real books (I don't count Agape Agape). Carpenter's Gothic, one of the characters tells us, is a style of American architecture. The builders tried to imitate European neo-gothic, but did so from the outside in: the houses have turrets and towers, they're pointlessly tall but rarely spread out into all that land that American houses have to spread out into. The inside is a hodgepodge, because what the architects cared about was how it looked from the outside. So the rooms are divided in irrational, silly and unhelpful ways; there are false walls and weird shapes. Examples of neo-gothic include Westminster in London and the Cologne Cathedral. It's often considered to be an adjunct of political or theological conservatism, vs the liberalism of neo-classical architecture. You can't actually squash such buildings down into a house shape, and nor should you.

Gothic is a literary mode that Austen mocked wonderfully well in Northanger Abbey, and that lives on in various forms today (i.e., all that vampire and werewolf fiction). The original gothic novels often take place in a neo-gothic country manor, and involve (doomed) romance and fantastic or inexplicable events, with improbable, convoluted plots and twists.

You see where this is headed: CG takes place in a 'carptenter's gothic' (modern American analogue of the) country manor. It involves romance, an improbable, convoluted plot, and a mysterious concluding twist. But whereas gothic authors will either leave the actual cause of the mysteries unclear (think: James' 'Turn of the Screw'), or explained them as simple natural phenomena, Gaddis explains the mysteries by way of American overseas neo-colonialism and general masculine stupidity. Using old literary forms in new ways to criticize real world things gets me very hot under the collar (compare also: McCarthy's use of epic tropes in 'Blood Meridian' and Robinson's use of spiritual autobiography in 'Gilead').

But I get positively *steamy* when a novel includes very little descriptive prose, a lot of dialogue, rants about the state (i.e., bad) of the world, and a high degree of irony about its own heart-felt rants. Check, check, check.

Liz sits in the middle of an awkward love quadrangle, between her husband Paul, drunken self-righteous mansplainer and general symbol for American litigiousness, fiscal religiosity, rapaciousness, and (borderline) rape; her landlord McCandless, a hopeless self-righteous liberal who owns the carptenter's gothic and knows everything but does nothing because everything's f*cked anyway, and whose rants about other people's guilt make very clear that he's as guilty as the rest of us if not more so; and her brother Billy, a grasping self-righteous post-hippy who is *totally* not to blame for his own failures. They all insist on being very, very different from each other but the differences are minimal to non-existent: they hector Liz at every opportunity, about different things, sure, but that makes no difference to her as she lies around more or less incapable of leaving her house except to see a doctor.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the United States of America, designed to look like a grand, albeit conservative Olde Europe, but from the inside nothing but a mess, inhabited by the sick/dying, and three kinds of self-righteous horror.

McCandless screams with rage that "the greatest source of anger is fear, the greatest source of hatred is anger and the greatest source of all of it is this mindless revealed religion anywhere you look", and, from within his locked room in the carpenter's gothic mansion, mocks "their deep religious convictions and that's what they are, they're convicts locked up in some shabby fiction doing life without parole". He's right that religious violence is revolting, right that the endemic conflicts of Africa are down to "money from the West and guns from the East," but won't do anything about it. As Liz finally tells him, "you're the one who wants Apocalypse... you're the one who can't wait! The brimstone and fire and your Rift like the day it really happened because they, because you despise their, not their stupidity, no, their hopes because you haven't any, because you haven't any left." Liberal America.

Paul is more or less incoherent and concerned only with greed and the conspiratorial liberal god-damned media who have all the power... with the powerless, useless McCandless as their representative. American Conservatives.

Billy hates his father, tries to solve the problems in African and (spoiler) dies in a plane crash. American Radicals.

So in short, Gaddis is smarter than us, writes better than almost anyone alive (if you even kind of like DFW, read Gaddis, who got in earlier, did it better, and knows much more about the world), and is funnier than almost everyone. Of his three first books, this is the worst. Just imagine that: this is just okay by Gaddis's standards.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dear Reader:

"–what do you think it is, rich intoxicating prose? poignant insights? exploring the dark passions hidden in the human heart? Rhapsodic, God knows what, towering metaphor? thwarted genius? that little glimpse of truth you forgot to ask for?"

On this dark continent, with madness coming one way and stupidity the other, humor and rage are the last bulwarks. Not only houses, but everything from the individual human to the curiously flattened and vacuous history of a landmass is designed from the outside: imposing and formidable, but resoundingly empty, ill-fit, and crumbling inside. Man is the measure of nothing.

"It’s not a handful! You call half the country a handful? Almost half the damned people in this country, more than forty percent of them believe man was created eight or ten thousand years ago pretty much as he is today? they believe that? Two versions right there in the first two pages, have your choice. You get the animals first and then man around the sixth day, male and female created he them, or you get man from the dust and then the animals show up lined up like kids at summer camp to get their names and finally Miss America made from a spare rib.”

To be blunt, I revere Gaddis. His writing embodies the boiling, breathless, suffocating, riotous, unstoppable experience of fighting through everyday life where the very weapon one uses to keep insanity at bay is in fact the same thing one can only hope to momentarily find: a glimpse of something worth holding on to, living for, making sense.

“We’re comic. We’re all comics. We live in a comic time. And the worse it gets the more comic we are.” (from The Recognitions)

And nearly 40 years since publication, things have gotten so much worse it's not even funny. We can't even rely on the aesthetic distance of irony that used to console us, "The joke's on them." The transparent lunacy and cravenness are hilarious, right up until the wingnuts and demagogues and fearmongers occupy real positions from which they set to reversing every faltering step away from deliberate stupidity and punishing further attempts.

“...they can’t wait to see the sun darkened, the stars fall, hailstones and fire, the cities crumbling, the seas turned to blood I’ll tell you something Billy, the whole damned thing’s a self fulfilling prophecy, I’ll tell you something right now. The greatest source of anger is fear, the greatest source of hatred is anger and the greatest source of all of it is this mindless revealed religion anywhere you look…”

When reality is stranger than fiction, fiction itself becomes a haven for truth. Whether that's tragic or comic redemption, time will tell. Maybe, but probably not.

“That all that kept me from losing my mind was knowing I was losing my mind but that it was there, the gold was there… this fiction’s all your own, because you’ve spent your entire life at it who you are, and who you were when everything was possible, when you said that everything was still the way it was going to be no matter how badly we twist it around first chance we get and then make up a past to account for it…”

[Max Nemtsov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Этот спуск в ад в вихре мусорных синтагм требует такого же неистового темпа чтения — «Плотницкую готику» лучше всего читать в реальном времени, не отрываясь на сон, еду и прочие занятия. Потому что иначе воздействие как-то стушевывается. Но вряд ли сейчас кто на такое способен.

По сравнению с «Джей-Ар», третий роман Гэддиса — вещь практически камерная, эдакий музыкальный нуар (упс, мне кажется, получился спойлер), прозрачная и гораздо более доступная для понимания. Однако пристальное внимание Гэддиса к мелкому мусору неинтересных американских жизней — то же самое, что у Дона Делилло в «Белом шуме», — конечно, создает определенный комический эффект, но в этом и перчатка, бросаемая читателю. Он вообще пишет не для слабонервных или брезгливых и полностью отчуждает свои тексты от нашего сострадания. Но, по сравнению с Делилло, все это звучит гораздо убедительнее, потому что у Гэддиса гораздо меньше литературных фильтров — он не «пишет» линейно, он конструирует из detritus unadorned.

Интересно еще и другое. Особенность текущего момента на этих территориях такова, что практически все читаемое из нормальной литературы, воспринимается как актуальный комментарий к этому самому моменту, вне зависимости от того, когда было написано. Так и тут. Наступление темных веков, клерикализация сознания, мракобесие под видом образования. Штаты это пережили полвека назад (переживают и сейчас, но не с такой остротой явно), а .рф из этого состояния не выберется, видимо, никогда. Влияние жупела, будь то марксизм или православие, на массовое сознание соотечественников по-прежнему огромно. Это для любой власти очень выгодно, конечно, — такая манипуляция сознанием в массовом масштабе. Об этом, в частности, нам рассказывает и «Плотницкая готика».

Африка ХХ века в романе — довольно точный образ того, что происходит сейчас между .рф и Украиной: полностью оболваненное население пытается выжить под натиском обезьян с ракетными комплексами с обеих сторон. Гэддис отчеканил по этому поводу прекрасную формулировку: «Глупость — сознательно культивированное невежество». Невежество лечится, глупость — нет. Ко всему относится, между прочим, хоть это знание и не утешает.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I shall simply quote Cynthia Ozick in her wonderful review:

"We have run into these fictional scalawags before, rotted-out families, rotted-out corporations, seedy greedy preachers and poachers, either in cahoots with or victims of one another, and sometimes both. They are American staples; but ''plot'' is Mr. Gaddis's prey, and also his play. Triteness is his trap and toy. He has light-fingered all the detritus that pours through the news machines and the storytelling machines - the fake claims, fake Bible schools, fake holy water out of the Pee Dee River spreading typhus, a bought-and-paid-for senator, an armed ''Christian survival camp,'' fake identities (Paul, pretending to be a WASP Southerner, is probably a Jew), the mugger Paul kills. Plot is what Mr. Gaddis travesties and teases and two-times and swindles."

Which can be found here: http://www.nytimes.com/1985/07/07/boo...

On a side note, if you a reading this and have not read any of her books, please rectify the situation immediately as she is a genius. The Puttermesser Papers is a masterpiece.

[Sentimental Surrealist · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm of two minds about this book. As I discussed in my review of A Frolic of His Own (shameless self-promotion time: read it! https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...), I don't buy the conventional "major Gaddis/minor Gaddis" thing that puts his first two novels on top and his last two novels on the bottom; it suggests that Gaddis stopped growing as a novelist he got the two famous ones out of the way, which just plain isn't true. Yet if you check my Gaddis ratings, you'll notice I've given the first two fives and the second two fours, so in a way I as well have enforced this dynamic. Basically, I prefer Gaddis' first two as being these perfect convergences of plot, character, motifs, prose and form, but I wouldn't discount what his third and fourth novels have to offer as well.

Since Carpenter's Gothic and A Frolic of His Own are both presented in the mostly-dialog format Gaddis introduced with JR, it's tempting to compare the three to each other with an eye for how one led to the other led to the third. On the other hand, since Carpenter's Gothic is half the length of Frolic, a third the length of JR, and a quarter the length of the Recognitions, it's tempting to consider it the least ambitious of Gaddis' works. Yet because it's the next logical step after JR, I'd refute that. Carpenter's reveals its ambitions in other ways. It's a book with a complex symbolic language; for starters, its setting seems to mirror its vision of America. Furthermore, it takes the capitalist system JR skewered and connects it to other systems, namely religion and imperialism, creating this complex net of world conflict. These conflicts parallel the conflicts of the characters, who are all of course wrapped up in these systems. Add these aspects to the apocalyptic undertones, and from there add the structure (accurately compared to a fugue, albeit a discordant one - the subplots never quite cohere, and that's the beauty of it), et voila! A huge novel embedded in a small one and an attempt on Gaddis' part to grow beyond what he'd already established.

Yet there's still something vaguely unsatisfying about this novel. Gaddis' first two novels are exemplary for several reasons, and his last two contain many of those same exemplary aspects - enviable prose, startling insight, formal daring, and oh those symbols and motifs. And I don't think a complex character is the be-all end-all of fiction, but the bottom line is that the Recognitions and JR had more complex characters than Carpenter's Gothic and A Frolic of His Own. Carpenter's Gothic is especially weak in that regard; the opportunistic TV preacher is worth skewering, but he's also just short of a stock satiric figure; the same goes for the Billy, the Buddhist hippie who doesn't get Buddhism. He has a few funny lines but never moves beyond the butt of jokes. Gaddis plays well with how antihero Paul is perceived - depending on which of the two unreliable characters you ask, he's either an idiot who's secretly pulling the strings or an idiot who's not-so-secretly along for the ride - but there isn't much to him, either. Liz is a little more complex, although her portrayal verges on misogynistic; there are moments where she seems stronger than she lets on. McCandless, who spends the first couple chapters of the novel cultivating mystique and the rest earning it, is the most compelling character here, and even then he's in some ways a stand-in for Gaddis, which makes it frustrating when he delivers a lengthy speech in the middle of a chapter which, while true and insightful, still kills the momentum.

So if I was gonna diagnose Gaddis' third, I'd say it was great at analyzing the big but missed out on the small, where the Recognitions and JR exemplified both. Still, as a broadening of JR's cultural critique and an example of how you incorporate symbols and structural experimentation into your fiction, it's as brilliant as anything else Gaddis wrote. Well worth the couple days it'll take to read, but held back in some ways.

[Darwin8u · Rating 5 out of 5]

Goddamn! Feels relevant 49 years later. As New York Times would (and did) say: William H Gass is a genius. Oh, wait Liz, I mean William Gaddis.

[Tony · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Carpenter's Gothic, we are told, is all designed from the outside ... they drew a picture of it and squeezed the rooms in later. Yes, I don't know either. All I meant was ...having seen our puzzled looks, it's a hard house to hide in. Thank you for clearing that up.

This is written in Gaddis' trademark style: primarily unattributed dialogue. As if he's so taken with his invented structure that this had to look a certain way, and, you know, he squeezed the rooms in later.

Gaddis skewers 1985 America: Vietnam vets, politicians, the CIA, the media. A lot of it resonated, although served in caricature form. Gaddis is too angry to display the humor found in most satire. It's almost as if the reader isn't sure he's allowed to laugh. Here:

--Oh! she pulled away, up on that damned elbow again --have you read Faulkner much?
--A long time ago. If then.
--What?
--Never mind. He'd sat straight up, one foot off to the floor.
--But, I mean don't you like Faulkner?
--I don't like Faulkner. I don't dislike Faulkner. He'd got hold of his trousers, --I just don't know why in the hell we're talking about Faulkner.
........
--I mean I didn't mean to upset you about Faulkner I thought you were talking about Faulkner, and I mean I don't know if I've read Faulkner much either. Except The Heart of Darkness, I think I read that once.

It's Elizabeth who, in that post-coital dialogue, is confounded. She is chatting and annoying McCandless, who is definitely not her husband Paul. Paul never hits her, but his bullying lashes harder. It was painful to watch, really.

--Just asked you if there's any God damn mail, ask you if there's mail if there's been any calls we don't even know what time it is, here... he turned to obliterate Haydn's Notturno number five in C nagging at his back with a twist of the dial that brought them words of hope for hemorrhoid sufferers everywhere, --find out what the hell time it is... and he put down his glass but held to it, tight, against a sudden tremor in his hand.

This novel is like a play, in that everything happens inside the Carpenter's Gothic house that Paul and Elizabeth are renting from McCandless. The rooms? They're where Americans go to unravel. McCandless, a geologist maybe, could tell you, and actually did tell you, that the unraveling is not new, and will not end when the house falls down.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

A torrential onslaught of pure fucking literature. About as perfect an encapsulation of what the medium can uniquely do as a film like "The Seventh Seal" did for cinema, which is of course something the book has in common with "The Recognitions" yet Gaddis succeeds with flying colors in scaling back the sprawl of that novel to a single house in Upstate New York and somehow crafts a novel as universe-encompassing as his debut. The prose is pure music - the dialogue is as real and gut wrenching as any emotional conversation that happens in reality - the narrative beats and the rich symbolic detail are finely tuned to perfection with not a word of fluff - the commentary on masculinity and its relationship to the profit motive and warfare is a master of satire at the peak of their powers - the story forces you inside the heads of its tormented characters in a way that I think it should just be considered a given that only books are capable of. And I think what elevates it above all else is that all of these combine to make a book that's just utterly fucking ferocious, it is a supernova of pure white hot creative energy that reads so urgently that I can almost feel Gaddis' pen about to poke holes in the manuscript just from how powerfully this is written - and I think this is a key to some of the best literature - if it reads like the author had to write it, then I by extension am compelled enough by its urgency to read to the end. "Carpenter's Gothic" fires on all cylinders conceivable, like it's a cataclysmic force of nature barreling down on me, like it knows how investing it is, and this is certainly a page turner despite its difficulties. And to think this is considered by critics to be a lesser work - make no mistake, this is a genius of the 20th century in action.

The glue that holds it all together is Liz, the wife of an abusive Vietnam veteran who is embroiled in the political mechanics of a capitalist preacher in Africa. Liz, like Wyatt, is one of Gaddis' downtrodden heroes, forced to navigate life as a victim of abuse and do whatever she can to handle her existence as the men around her crumble into their own paranoias and weakness. Liz is treated by the men in her life as a vessel for their frustrations, but on so many turns she reveals herself as the only source of light among the main cast - someone whose shine [and thus emotional needs] goes completely ignored by men who can think of nothing but themselves, who see her as an extension of themselves. Liz may have the single most well developed voice I have ever read in literature, there is so much insight into this woman's life and mind without a single instance of interior monologue, a technique which Gaddis has perfected since TR. She is meek, but expressly capable of righteous anger and attempts at self-preservation; she has been taught to do everything for others, but there is only so much she can take before she breaks, which she does many times throughout the story; she is smart and pays attention, but trips over her words, loses focus, retreats into her own mind when the people around her won't listen. Every conversation, I felt for her, as though I was her; every mindless rant from Paul I felt my frustration and sadness rise with her, feeling like I was being ignored as much as she; every time she stood up for herself, I sighed in relief, only to have my guts twist again when the couple's conversations circled the drain back to its abusive pattern. I've never felt like I was fighting the same battles as a specific character before; her voice's cadence, her expressions in reaction to things, her anxiety and fear, I felt it and saw it and heard all of it as though I was watching incredibly talented actors in a film and nowhere was it more potent than in Elizabeth Booth, she is undoubtedly one of the rawest examples of humanity I have ever read in fiction.

Voice in general is the highlight of this novel, in fact between this and The Recognitions I'd venture by this point to say Gaddis has the most consistently good dialogue of any author I've read, there is not a single wasted line or unnecessary flourish here, even when these characters are going into rants that are almost entirely inane. McCandless especially is another highlight; Gaddis really just put in a self-insert OC to roast the fuck out of himself and I was absolutely here for it the entire time. While Paul's belligerent emotional abuse is easier to name for what it is, McCandless represents a more insidious type of dominant masculinity that's more difficult to identify in day-to-day conversation; he is outwardly composed and "civil", but is smug, completely self-concerned and thinks only in terms of what benefits him - even his rants on education and religion's effects on academia are written in a way that shows that all he's really thinking about here is how it effects him, how it insults his ego and intelligence specifically. He takes this ire toward religion for what on the surface are good reasons [Gaddis as always skewers right wing religion thoroughly in this book], and projects them outward onto others, especially Liz, who as with Paul is reduced from her humanity and into his emotional dumping ground. And when she shows interest in his life, much like her husband shuts her out as though she's not even there, like the very idea of her being an intellectual equal is beneath him. Gaddis takes American masculinity and the [direct, underlying] violence it spreads to trial here, and the fact he does this so potently through a self-aggrandized mansplaining asshole who bears many resemblances to himself is one hell of a bold move. In an age of accountability for abusive men [or at least, we're getting there hopefully], this book and this character especially resonates so heavily it's crazy.

The actual texture of the conversations [and rants] here is interesting to note. A lot of the bureaucratic jargon went over my head, but I also think that's kind of the point. The novel's structure is basically composed by staking it to various points of informational intake - conversations flit chaotically, with only the briefest breaks in action, between phone calls, the radio, in-person arguments and long-winded rants containing so much disparate [and connected] information that I think the purpose is to make the reader feel as disoriented and overwhelmed as Liz is - she's surrounded by men who don't care about her other than to stroke their own egos, conversations that circle the drain and go nowhere that shirk her emotional needs, and all she wants to do is escape the torrent of violent information and sensory overload but she is trapped amidst a suffocating world of information she doesn't want to hear, doesn't want to be around but has to. The parallels to the modern world should be clear here, which is something Gaddis excels at between both this and TR. This endless stream of info [or as we like to call it online, content] is one of claustrophobia where we can't ever unplug ourselves long enough to escape its tidal wave.

And I think the glue that really holds this narrative together is indeed that fiercely political substance. The novel not only outlays the manifestation and repercussions of hegemonic masculinity, but it probes at the roots and the underlying systems in place. All the domestic toxicity in the novel is directly traceable back to the horrors of war and colonialism, which the book never once truly deviates away from. Like The Recognitions, the novel is much concerned with sin and how the idea of sin is manifested in societies predicated on the ugly chimera between neoliberal capitalism and Christian fundamentalism - bloodshed is justified in the name of God [who is in capitalism simply a disguise granted to the true god, the Almighty Dollar], and the cycle of trauma is perpetuated; because the patriarchal and capitalistic systems enabling war are not challenged, this overseas violence as a result becomes recursive, and it leaks all the way back into the home, the one place in which Americans erroneously think they are safe. Liz' suffering is her own, but hers is also the suffering of everyone who toils beneath the heel of wartime violence and its inherent relationship to dominator masculinity - in a system whose goal is the maintaining of power for power's sake, no one can escape such widespread evil unscathed.

This is a bleak and angry novel that doesn't provide clean cut answers to the problems it portrays, which is something that I in theory should be sour on; but artists are not philosophers, so they shouldn't be expected to provide all-encompassing solutions to the feelings they want us to sit with in their stories. But despite being black as pitch, it is a distillation of pure humanity at its core, and the tragedy and desperation that unfolds when all of us are ensnared in a system that is traumatic by its very design. I think its bleakness functions as a rallying cry to be better, despite Gaddis' own conservativism which he takes to task in this book; to see people like Liz, and see how they suffer and say "something about this has to change", because people like her are suffering in the world, in their billions, at any given time, and Gaddis is implicating all of us - including himself - for our ideas that we, in this society of rugged American individualism, can do this all alone, because we can't. But above all else it is just literature down to its very essence; the prose is some of the most lyrical realism ever put to paper, the narrative and especially its characters are stunning and nearly impossible to pull away from, the form and structure itself is a work of unfiltered, raw artistic energy. If you like fiction, this is absolutely unmissable.

[Patrizia Galli · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gotico Americano è uno stile architettonico del New England, un rivisitazione molto più economica del legno gotico vittoriano. L’abitazione dove si svolge tutta la vicenda narrata è proprio in questo stile.
Pubblicato nel 1985 questo romanzo può essere riassunto come una feroce critica alla religione e al capitalismo, a maggior ragione quando questi si uniscono assieme dando origine ad un fanatismo religioso a scopi di lucro. Ma Gotico Americano non è solo questo. Nelle sue 279 pagine fitte di dialoghi che si svolgono tutti all’interno di una stessa abitazione riesce a toccare i temi più svariati in maniera eccelsa: colonialismo, fanatismo religioso, corruzione, spettacolarizzazione, finto perbenismo, apparenze, soldi, incomunicabilità…

Protagonista del romanzo è principalmente Liz Vorakers, una 33enne figlia di un magnate dell’industria mineraria suicidatosi e la cui sconfinata eredità è temporaneamente congelata; Liz è sposata con Paul Booth, veterano del Vietnam, ferito in guerra, ex portaborse del padre di Liz, alla continua ricerca di nuovi mezzi per fare soldi, ma completamente incapace di guadagnarseli. Il primo paradosso tra i due, che comprendiamo bene fin dalle prime pagine del romanzo, è che più parlano tra loro e meno si capiscono: Liz, per quanto onesta e moralmente inquadrata, è completamente succube del marito, non riesce a mantenere una posizione, si fa soggiogare dai suoi continui tranelli, sotterfugi ed evidenti menzogne; Paul, dal canto suo, cerca di uscire come vittima da ogni situazione, ben consapevole, invece, di essere un misero faccendiere, un pesce molto piccolo, assolutamente sacrificabile sull’altare del Dio Denaro. In particolare nel romanzo troviamo Paul PR del reverendo Ude, un fanatico capace di approfittarsi mediaticamente dell’annegamento di un bambino durante un battesimo di massa, che vorrebbe costruire una “missione” in una zona dell’Africa per convertire al cattolicesimo tutta la popolazione (nonché approfittare della presenza di una miniera d’ora per arricchirsi). Paul e Liz si sono appena trasferiti in affitto nella casa in cui si svolgono tutti i dialoghi e l’ultimo personaggio rilevante che incontriamo è il proprietario, il geologo McCandless, colui che ha scoperto il giacimento minerario in Africa.

Il romanzo è bellissimo, c’è poco da aggiungere. La capacità di Gaddis nello scrivere i dialoghi tra i vari personaggi è indiscutibile: sono frammentati, ridondanti, ripetitivi, esaltati, estremizzati, assistiamo continuamente ad interruzioni che non ci danno mai un quadro completo della situazione, ma svelano il tragico scenario delle vite dei personaggi un pezzo alla volta. Scrivo tragico perché qui nessuno si salva, nemmeno Liz, che per quanto buona di cuore altro non rappresenta che il fallimento della sfera famigliare in questo desolato palcoscenico. Gaddis si serve di ogni personaggio per criticare con un’ironia tagliente tutto ciò che la società americana e il fanatismo di destra hanno generato. Critica ferocemente la religione e il creazionismo, che, nelle parole di McCandless «è l’ultimo rifugio dell’ignoranza davanti alla ragione», è «l’arma della stupidità contro l’intelligenza». Paul al contrario rappresenta l’arrivismo di un società dedita al solo scopo dell’arricchimento: lui nemmeno ci crede nella famiglia, Liz l’ha sposata solamente perché ricca ereditiera. La fine del romanzo non lascia scampo a nessuno, non c’è lieto fine ovviamente, come potrebbe? Chi prova a resistere soccombe sotto i colpi della corruzione e della debolezza.

Ci sarebbe molto altro da dire, per esempio della bravura di Gaddis nel costruire e dipingere personaggi che ci vengono descritti solo tramite stralci di conversazioni con altri: quando Liz o Paul parlano al telefono, per esempio, non leggiamo mai le parole di chi si trova all’altro capo, ma solo di chi si trova all’interno della casa; ci vuole una bravura immensa per riuscire a farci odiare/amare un personaggio così. Oppure della sua bravura a costruire un intero romanzo fatto di dialoghi sul paradosso che tutti parlano, ma nessuno ascolta davvero. Non c’è nessun tipo di empatia tra di loro, nessuna via di scampo, e questa è la tragedia più grande di tutte.

[Julie Kuvakos · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is bleak, despairing, anger fueled and made me feel sick. It is described as a sort of fugal style of writing as we seem to shift frequently from one perspective to another and they always seem to miss each other. Miscommunication and constant distractions seem to hit the storyline from beginning to end.

The main story line of this book is about this couple (Paul and Liz) who are never listening to one another and go off on one another with long winded heated monologues. Paul is constantly accusing Liz of never listening to him. Perhaps his need to feel heard though unjustifiable with his actions did trigger his toxic way of communicating. We are not really sure who is reliable though and the longer the book went on you see this more and more… “There’s a very fine line between the truth and what really happens”

This is a book about America, debt and money issues in marriage, miscommunication, religion, and Gaddis is not afraid to get dark and bitter with it.

The tiresome monologues were fueled by so much anger that I hated reading this book for long periods of time. It wasn’t that I disagreed with the points the author was making but it just didn’t feel good and I needed some frequent breaks. Kind of in a way similar to how I felt reading The Tunnel by William Gass. It frustrated me and made me feel helpless and angry. To me this is a testament to the authors strength in writing. It is a style that I cannot frequent personally but I truly appreciate how deeply it can bring these emotions out of me.

Gaddis seemed to me to want to peel back the layers of this American idealized dream in this novel. Simply put things inside are not how they appear on the outside. This image of their Carpenters Gothic style home is filled with symbolism. The image of an idealized home with an ornamental outside image and “no concern with the original structure.”

I loved this description I found off the Britannica website:
“Carpenter Gothic, style of architecture that utilized Gothic forms in domestic U.S. architecture in the mid-19th century. The houses executed in this phase of the Gothic Revival style show little awareness of and almost no concern for the original structure and proportions of Gothic buildings and ornamentation. Much of this work could never have been executed if the scroll saw, also called the fret saw, had not been invented.”

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. Another amazing American classic from William Gaddis.

At first I admit I was a tad disappointed. The dialogue was quite similar (especially the blowhard character Paul and all of his self-centered, never-get-a-word-in-edgewise wheeling and dealing) to so much of/so many of the characters of JR that I thought, well, poor Gaddis, after writing the two greatest American novels of the 20th century, he was plumb out of ideas by the 1980s.

But, my bad--rather it's a slow burn, a handful of snow tossed down the side of Mt. Everest and it just keeps on building in intensity, ire, and bitter honesty until the series of wallops that make up the ending. Totally unlike either The Recognitions or JR. Superb. Dramatic. Politically perspicacious without being polemic--although patriots will hate it as it's about human beings instead of the tin idiots the Republican party keeps shoving illegitimately in our faces.

And, to coin a cliche, the problems it examines are still with us today only moreso (Groucho Marx), only deeper, only more desperate. Writing this on Memorial Day--or should I say, State-Sanctioned Terrorist day?

This little Iran-Contra novel would go well read side-by-side with American Psycho. The 1980's, the decade of American psychosis at home and abroad. Despite Ronnie's Alzheimer's some of our authors remembered not to forget the decade that toyed with death as a distraction from materialism and, if possible, as a means of generating more revenue.

[Vicente Ribes · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gaddis era una cuenta pendiente siendo como soy fan absoluto de Pynchon y Salinger; y estaba claro que algún dia tenía que caer. He empezado por sus obras más cortas antes de afrontar tochos como "JR" O " Los Reconocimientos".
Como bien sabrá cualquier lector de escritores postmodernistas, su lectura no suele ser tarea fácil y Gaddis no es una excepción.
La historia gira en torno a una joven pareja,Liz y Paul, que se acaban de mudar a una bella casa de estilo victoriano. Pero no todo es felicidad ya que Paul emprende muchos negocios que fracasan y Liz, que intenta ayudarle, es víctima de sus continuos sermones. Toda la obra esta construida a través de sus diálogos y los de los demás personajes que entrán en escena. Esa situación nos pone siempre como si fuéramos testigos no autorizados de conversaciones de las que no conocemos bien quiénes son, puesto que el narrador apenas interviene a lo largo de toda la historia más que para situar el movimiento en las conversaciones o para, puntualmente, cambiar de estancia.
El hecho de que el narrador apenas aparezca para explicarnos algo de lo que sucede, pone las cosas algo más complejas al lector que en una novela común. Evidentemente, todo cobra sentido según vamos leyendo, pero al principio la información es fragmentada y escasa: sabemos que Liz va al médico, no se sabe bien por qué, y que Paul tiene negocios cuanto menos dudosos con un tal reverendo Ude.
El resultado es una novela extraña, casi experimental, de la que a día de hoy no sabría deciros de qué trata. La trama o no existe o importa poco, lo que sí vemos es a un grupo de personajes amorales, interesados en ganar dinero a toda cosa, ejemplos de white trash de manual, que se animan entre sí a llegar a sus propósitos, que mienten y creen que el fin siempre justifica los medios.
Una novela confusa que exige atención, un reto al elctor pero también una voz propia y característica que te hace querer leer más del autor.

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 5 out of 5]

прекрасний роман, із якого варто починати знайомство із Ґеддісом. можливо, не всі нюанси сюжету тут зрозумілі з першого разу, але письменник майстерно показав Америку 1980-х з її засиллям ЦРУ, протестантів і різнокаліберних ділків, яких усіх поглинає клятий капіталізм. мовний бенкет, що часом скидається на зламаний телефон чи почварне радіо, але тільки так і можна перетворити живі голоси на справжню літературу.

[Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Were the stars ever in doubt? Gaddis proves here that he doesn't need bulk to create a pristine piece of work. Don't get me wrong, his big boys are where it's at, but this is at the least equal to Frolic imo (if not above it). Gaddis has hit my top 3 for sure.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s very frustrating when a writer as great as Gaddis writes a book like this. It’s full of his strengths: naturalistic dialogue full of humor; information revealed casually, gradually taking the shape of a plot; political anger and big, cultural ideas - but unfortunately, the subject matter just isn’t all that interesting here. I found myself rushing through the book so that I could read something else, which is strange considering that The Recognitions and J.R. are each three to four times as long as Carpenter’s Gothic, yet they never dragged quite as much as it does. Perhaps my biggest issue is the limited scope, as Gaddis works best when he’s sprawling, not limited to a single, claustrophobic setting. Maybe that’s the point? Doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

I sound more negative than I am. This is still worth reading for fans of Gaddis and it’s only made me more interested in the direction his career took from this point on. My reservations would mostly apply to anyone who hasn’t read his first 2 novels and is considering starting here because it’s shorter, as this would be a poor first impression.

[Christopher · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hoppin’ with flavor

[od1_40reads · Rating 5 out of 5]

I recently heard ‘The Recognitions’ likened to opera, and I agree, it is a work of operatic proportions. ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ would then be intricate, fugal and contrapuntal chamber music.

William Gaddis’ third novel often gets lost in the shadows of his previous two monolithic works ‘The Recognitions’ and ‘JR’, and perhaps also hides behind it’s successor ‘A Frolic of His Own’. I’m sure this is largely due to its shorter extent; at only 262pp it barely covers the opening sections of his first two books. But this is unfair, as it’s a little firecracker of a novel, equally deserving of its place in Gaddis’ genius body of work.

The entire book is set in an old Carpenter Gothic style house (hence the book’s title) on the Hudson River, upstate New York. Due to it’s singular setting, and the fact that pretty much the whole book is dialogue, it feels theatrical, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it had been drafted as a play, as I think ‘A Folic of His Own’ originally was. Gaddis’ virtuosic use of fast-paced dialogue is clearly his literary brand, honed in ‘JR’, with initial sequences appearing in the party scenes of ‘The Recognitions’. And it’s no small feat to pull off. It’s a masterclass in characterisation.

In CG, the book’s small cast are startlingly vivid, brought to life entirely through their own dialogue. No background profiling is necessary, we’re given everything we need simply through conversations, arguments and monologues (i.e. rants). I would say to any writers out there who haven’t yet read Gaddis, why the hell not?

The book is ultimately about humanity, and how we’re intent on f**king everything up, often under the vail of religious causes. I can’t find the exact quote, but Mr McCandless, one of the main characters, a few times says something along the lines of ‘in one direction is ignorance, and the other stupidity, both coming to meet head on.’ Cynthia Ozick said in a review, “In ‘Carpenter’s Gothic’ the world is a poisonous organism, humankind dying of itself.”

Not one to be underrated or overlooked!

[Aiden Heavilin · Rating 1 out of 5]

Carpenter's Gothic is a mean-spirited, dull novel. It is one of those books about arguing, where characters constantly storm up staircases, glowering and yelling at each other. Those few occasions where conversations take place without arguments are generally filled with long tirades against "stupid religious folks"; conversations whose bitterness and hatred I might assume was that of the characters, not the author, had William Gaddis not said in the interview that he considered titling the book "The Dark Continent" and claimed it was "Christian fundamentalists" who made the continent dark. In the end, Carpenter's Gothic is a book of complaining; Characters complain about each other, about life, about religion, about anything they can put their hands to. Worse, the "plot" as is contains an incredibly convoluted conspiracy that robs the book of the clarity which might have rescued it.

The book is told primarily in dialogue, and although Mr. Gaddis has been roundly praised for "realistic dialogue", I found it very difficult to believe. The characters are caricatures, cowering, oppressed wives or blustery, cantankerous husbands who are constantly lighting cigarettes and muttering to each other about money-problems. The dialogue struck me as having been sapped of all the life and strangeness that inhabits real world conversations.

I generally would say I read fiction to gain new experiences, such as the type offered in certain dreams, sensations I have truly not felt before. Carpenter's Gothic merely presents a cruel world lacking not merely hope, but also any ideas or reflections that might offer a new perspective on unhappy marriages and stress-filled modern life. In the end, this book does not present a new or interesting perspective on the world, it doesn't even attempt to present it realistically; instead it drains life of its energy and vivaciousness, leaving only a sad dead husk of empty dialogue and angry complaints against the forces they cannot control.

I think of David Foster Wallace's magnificent "The Pale King"; that book too presented harried, stressed people, unhappy marriages, and the drudgery of modern life. Yet rather than raging and complaining about these evils, Wallace sought to remedy them, to provide a way out, to show us how to navigate the shoals of boredom. Gaddis in "Carpenter's Gothic" only outlines (rather poorly), the problem; it never even attempts an answer.

[Aleksandra Bekreneva · Rating 5 out of 5]

только что с удовольствием дочитала Плотницкую Готику роман Уильяма Гэддиса где горлица жена муж, её брат, Африка прокуренный домовладелец опавшая листва Хэллоуин виски холодная курица и горошек
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не мыслите широко мозги растекутся
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нет запятых поток сознания яснее эмоции чувства состояния интонации все внутренности готической постройки беспомощная женщина наглые мужчины, рыжая
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комната заперта не открывайте, убийство ветеран Вьетнамской войны всё поглощает затягивает необычно странно. хочется несколько раз перечитать что бы
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ощущение распада, гниёт не только листва никто никого не слушает горлица в мусорном ведре

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good God it's more Gaddis! He's off to the races again in this one a hundred miles per hour dialogue tearing ass over teakettle telltale tidbits and mumbling hierarchies of madness it's pure joy, joy of reading joy. More to follow prob.

INTERVIEWER
Carpenter’s Gothic?
GADDIS
Well, that was rather different. I cannot really work unless I set a problem for myself to solve. In Carpenter’s Gothic the problems were largely of style and technique and form. I wanted to write a shorter book, one that observes the unities of time and place to the point that everything, even though it expands into the world, takes place in one house, and a country house at that, with a small number of characters, in a short span of time. It became really largely an exercise in style and technique. And also, I wanted to take all these clichés of fiction to bring them to life and make them work. So we have the older man and the younger woman, the marriage breaking up, the obligatory adultery, the locked room, the mysterious stranger, and so forth.

[Barbarroja · Rating 4 out of 5]

Con lo que a mí me gustan los signos de puntuación, va Gaddis y se los pasa por el forro.

Reconozco que en ocasiones el fluir desordenado de la narración (de los diálogos, pues la novela se sustenta totalmente en ellos) consigue un efecto agobiante que, sumado a la claustrofóbica atmósfera de la casa de estilo gótico carpintero donde se desarrolla toda la acción (un momento, ¿qué acción?) de la novela, y a la caracterización cruel y anfibológica de los pocos personajes, establecen un marco estilístico y narrativo muy rico, casi académico; pero este estilo, muy bien conseguido y con mérito artístico y literario, remarco, no me acaba de convencer. A mí, claro.

Creo, por otra parte, que esta es una buena novela, y que Gaddis es un autor de altos vuelos. No descarto volver a él en un futuro.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

And here we have Gaddis at it again: the falsity at the bottom of our pious surety; the hypocrisy beneath the headlines; the churning disgust we put outward and onto one another. But here, as opposed to the richness of The Recognitions, we have no struggle toward the meaningful, no moments that are necessarily funny without the indulgence in the caustics of cynicism, no actual human connection. We are left instead with the extended metaphor of the Carpenter's Gothic: that the belief systems of people are made like sketches asymptotically approaching the graceful archetype of the Old World's stone-and-mortar-Gothic permanence, but that the rooms of the ideological building itself are filled in shoddy and after-the-fact without forethought and with second-rate building materials. It is all about the appearance of organized grace, and none of the substantive or sustainable planning that goes into making a structure that is truly lasting.

All of the characters, and we as readers, are implicated in these motions of what Gaddis seems to see as intellectual failure and moral hypocrisy—our reading itself shifts along with whichever voice speaks as it spouts its own sketch of how the world comes together (all the details behind the architectual elevation are secondary to the niceties of the elevation itself, its own convincing sense of unity and solidity, really how good it sounds to the ear, and the dialogue here [of which the book mostly is] certainly sings). It makes for conspiratorial (and actually very gripping) reading trying to figure out who is fooling who in the backroom-deals of politics, business, and truth, but what it really ends up convincing you in its resolve is that it ultimately makes no difference who "wins" because they all eventually consume one another. The reader is left in mind with the emblem which began Gaddis' literary career: the Ouroboros. It is the selfsame Ouroboros of our shifting illusions which can always offer us a different perspective but can never deliver us from the hell we make for each other in the process.

As an addendum: this book is about so so SO much more than that America "really, really, really sucks" as Jonathan Franzen flippantly summarized this entire book in his infamous essay on Gaddis. It is worth reading, and its loss of a star on my part as reviewer is simply due to how bleak the whole thing ends up—it's disheartening! Franzen was correct in the above-mentioned essay in that regard: Gaddis never got soft, only more vitriolic and bitter—which is not to say he's any worse at what he does, just harder to swallow.

[Stephen Durrant · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine three or four Thomas Bernhard characters talking to one another and you have the style of this Gaddis novel. Each character, but perhaps one, has a particular rant, with none of them really listening to the others (we've all been to dinner parties like this but they don't typically last more than maybe two hours). Moreover, since the speaker is rarely identified, one sometimes feels a bit lost, and since the novel is almost all dialogue, what has happened needs to be constantly reconstructed from the accounts of these unreliable, self-obsessed speakers. This is not an easy read, but it is definitely a work of talent. One can understand how some critics argued that early Pynchon works were really written by Gaddis under a pseudonym! The vision here is bleak, with the ranting characters representing different American voices. The two most important are Paul, a archetypal American con-man, who is trying to ride a wave of right-wing religious fanaticism to his own personal advantage, and McCandless, who feels that all religious belief can be dismissed as dangerous stupidity. Caught between these two voices is Paul's abused wife Liz, who is basically trying to keep some grasp on reality in a world gone made. McCandless manages to strike some tones that will reverberate with readers of my background: "Revealed truth is the one weapon stupidity's got against intelligence and that's what the whole damned thing is about" (p183). For more direct attacks on my childhood religion see pp. 128, 157, 186 and elsewhere. Why only three stars? If one reads the strange labels that go with the "Goodreads" system, one discovers that three stars means "I liked it" and five stars "it was amazing." Well, in its own way this books is "amazing" . . . but I was glad when it was over, can't say I liked it all that much . . . so what does one do?