''JR'' is indeed worthy of Swift. The sixth grade of a Long Island grammar school goes on a field trip to Wall Street, where the children are to be given the sensation of ''investing in America'' by being allowed to purchase one share of stock. JR, a scruffy 11-year-old, demonstrates his financial acumen by cheating his classmates out of the share and using it to win a stockholder's suit.
With lease-backs and write-offs and tax deductions, he puts together a crazy but formidable corporate empire of junk merchandise and used-up properties that is a paradigm of the jumbled chaos of American financial life.
Irving Thalberg, the genius of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, was said to have sat alone in a darkened room while he trained his mind to become that of a 13-year-old - the mental age he deemed closest to that of the average American adult. Gaddis puts the level even lower.
In The Paris Review, he says of JR: ''The reason he is 11 is because he is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral, with a clear conscience, dealing with people who are immoral, unscrupulous, which implies that they realize what scruples are but push them aside, whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal. He thinks this is what you're supposed to do, and he is not going to wait around. . . .''
But how, even in a satire, could an 11-year-old put together so gigantic a fortune? If it were all magic and fantasy, it would soon become a bore, particularly in a 726-page book. This is where Gaddis's knowledge of business affairs (unrivaled among American novelists except by Michael Thomas) stands him in such good stead. In turning the American dream inside out, he wanted to have his facts right.
JR, he explains in The Paris Review, ''buys defaulted bond issues simply because they're cheap - it says $1,000 up in the corner, but selling at 7 cents on the dollar, so he's getting them for $70 apiece. So it's simple, cheerful greed. Then, when finally the corporation is thrown into bankruptcy, and he emerges as the largest bondholder, and they wipe out all of the stock, all the equities, he becomes, then, the largest holder of preferred stock and takes control pretty much by default.''
And so it goes, through a dozen or more fantastic but basically credible deals. The capitalist system, which is so often oblivious to sensitive morality, operates with the enthusiasm of a child. Gaddis would preserve it. He believes that free enterprise is the least-dangerous economic system yet devised by man, but he would regulate it. He might make an excellent member of the Securities and Exchange Commission.
That he knows the voice of the investment counselor is shown in this dialogue between Edward Bast and his financial adviser about the portfolio of the former's maiden aunts who simply want a little income to live on: - See where we sold their telephone company right here yes, and this Nobili you people have been buying into, got them a block here at 31, averaged down with another block here when it dropped to 23 and got them out at 16, gives them a nice little tax loss. - Oh. - Yes and here, another nice tax loss in Ampex haven't we, averaged down at 20 yes and again at 14, the rate management was handing out false figures to the analysts there was enough to make your hair curl, able to get them out at 6 though before it hit bottom. -Oh what was, bottom . . . - Selling at around 5 yes and it may be one of the better bargains right now if you think your aunts would . . . - No but, but what's this one, FAS . . . - Famous Artists yes, correspondence courses in the arts photography that sort of thing, thought they might find it a bit more congenial than these humdrum industrials. - Oh, is it a tax loss too? - No matter of fact they may enjoy a complete write-off with this one. * Surrounding JR is a huge cast of adult characters, who are lured to his corporate empire by the hope that there may be something in it for them. It is not always just money that they seek. It is understanding, appreciation, acceptance. But the society in which they live has few rewards to offer them but money, and not very much of that - just enough, often, to corrupt them.
JR himself, wistful, likable, essentially well-meaning, is the only one not contaminated by the avarice of the corporate operations, but that is because he is totally insensitive. When one of his teachers, Amy Joubert, who comes as close as any of the adult characters to being a person of good will, tries to make him see something other than profit in the world around him she fails. - Just stop for a minute! she caught an arm round his shoulders - just stop and look . . .! - What? at what . . . - At the evening, the sky, the wind, don't you ever just stop sometimes and look? . . . Is there a millionaire for that?
As is said in David Madden's anthology ''Rediscoveries,'' the most frightening implication of this massive comedy is that JR is the sanest character of the novel. Perhaps that is because he is the simplest - one might actually hope to make something better of him. It is admittedly a frail hope to put in the rushing path of the entropy of our civilization.
Gaddis's techniques to express his terrifying conception of this entropy - the tendency of a system to disorder - is to create his novel almost entirely by conversations in which the speakers are not immediately identified. The reader must make do without the usual exposition of facial expressions or mental reactions. He has no way of verifying whether a character is speaking falsely or sincerely or sarcastically, except by what the character actually says.
However, this makes it sound much more difficult than it is. One soon picks up the style, certainly the cliches, of the individual speaker, and after a bit one reads the dialogue almost as easily as if it were accompanied by the ''he said'' or ''she said'' of conventional fiction.
What then, it will be asked, does Gaddis gain by putting his reader through this exercise? He gains the eerie effect of identifying our civilization with all of its jargons.
Reading ''JR,'' I feel at times as if I were lying alone on a desolate plain under a dark cloudy sky from which come the mumbles and throbs of human speech in every sort of dialect and slang, replete with self-pity, smugness, officiousness, swagger - in short, every banality the brain of man can devise to evade thought.
[end of excerpt]
Carl Remick
-----Original Message----- From: Louis Proyect [mailto:lnp3 at panix.com] Sent: Thursday, December 17, 1998 2:24 PM To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Gaddis
Apparently there was more to this guy than met the eye, according to the NY Times obit:
Gaddis was born in Manhattan on Dec. 29, 1922, grew up in Massapequa, N.Y., and went to boarding school in Connecticut and Farmingdale High School on Long Island. He studied English literature at Harvard University, and wrote stories, poems, essays and reviews for the Harvard Lampoon. In his senior year, he was asked to resign from the college after he and a friend were involved in an altercation with the police. . . .
In New York, he worked as a fact checker at The New Yorker, and spent his free time in Greenwich Village with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and other writers of the Beat Generation. Leaving New York, he traveled through Mexico and Central America, joining insurgents in Costa Rica during a brief civil war. Subsequently he went to Spain and Africa, gathering experience and material while working on "The Recognitions." . . .
The title character of "JR" is an 11-year-old who becomes a wizard of Wall Street. In a Paris Review interview, Gaddis explained why the character was so young. "He is in this prepubescent age where he is amoral" and "dealing with people who are immoral, unscrupulous," he said, "whereas his good cheer and greed he considers perfectly normal."
Louis Proyect
(http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)