Books: Carpenter's Gothic, by William Gaddis

I dread blogging this book because I have so little to say. While this may be merely aftermath of my successful attempt (It's quantity, not quality! as one of my favorite films insists) at my nine day novel, for which I clocked it over 8,000 words on my best days, my lack of motivation, I insist, comes from this book's own uninspiring quality.

It's a little book, a third or so the length of J R (which other Gaddis novel I read with great enough relish to add it to my top ten books ever list), but it took me equally as long to read, and I read it with zero relish (and not even a silly dollop of pedestrian ketchup). There is narration, of which there isn't much in J R, and it is at times elegiac (not unlike what Woolf was probably trying for all those times)—it is, in fact, the best aspect of the novel.

What makes C's G so different from J R, and, concomitantly, so tedious, are the characters. There are basically only four speakers (compare with J R's 40ish): the neurotic heiress wife, the drunken disaster-area husband, the violent and angry brother, and the drinking, smoking mystery man. Each of these character types appears to a greater or lesser extent in J R (an argument could probably be made, in fact, that C's G is something of prequel to J R), but they are the least interesting characters. More importantly, C's G all takes place in one house, while J R runs rampant through a variety of apartments, offices, train stations, hick towns, etc., each of whose speakers have their distinct quality—which distinction is what makes reading Gaddis so fun.

In J R, Gaddis builds a paper empire, and the world whirling around it, whereas for C's G, he does little more than over inflate a marital argument between stock characters. Spoiler! Killing the heiress at the end does little to make up for it.