American fiction – Mysterium Coniunctionis

JR is the third Gaddis novel I’ve read, following The Recognitions (which I recently re-read with great delight) and Carpenter’s Gothic.

It took me nearly 4 months to read JR, but this was largely by design. I read multiple books at a time and decided back in the summer to limit myself to 10 pages a day of this behemoth, and there were many days where I managed only 5 pages per day.

It’s not an easy book. There are no chapter breaks, and the novel is about 99% dialogue (the last novel I remember reading which was virtually all dialogue was The Awkward Age by Henry James). Characters speak often without any identifying information other than what they are saying–it takes some time and effort to shake out who exactly the characters are and how they relate to one another, and sometimes it requires close analysis to understand who is speaking and to whom. Almost every bit of dialogue is interrupted by interpolations from other characters, or phone calls, or delivery drivers. Nothing internal about the characters is shared, simply their dialogue.

But the difficulties of JR are worth it. I laughed out loud repeatedly. Gaddis produced one of the great satires of American style capitalism, and managed it BEFORE American capitalism truly went off the rails and into the even more unimaginable excess and corruption we see now.

There are only a few settings in the book. One is the genteel house of an upper-crust family whose business is falling apart and being raided by their own attorney. Another is the principal’s office at a city elementary school, where corporations have been given free reign to test out closed-circuit TV and pro-business curricula. There is a bizarre small studio apartment where the tub and sink faucets are broken stuffed to the rafters with the detritous of corporate schemes and adverts which becomes the nerve center for a global corporate entity run by an 11-year old boy. There is the administrative office of the previously mentioned family business where the secretaries film pornographic videos off-hours. In every setting commerce and the concerns of big business and Wall Street rudely and repeatedly interrupt everything. Gaddis portrays the impossibility of having true human interactions in a system devoted to greed and the continual grasping after unnecessary objects. And the artist? There are several artists in the novel, including writers and painters and one very important composer. All of them struggle to survive in a system which has no values or meaning beyond acquisition and consumption.

The elites in predatory capitalism are exposed and lampooned repeatedly for their disgusting racism, their unwarranted sense of class superiority, their interference in other countries and in politics to maximize their own profits regardless of the cost to humans or the environment. Everything is commodified, turned into a packaged convenience and thence to trash which litters and chokes a rapidly burning down global order.

JR is a sixth grade boy who has become interested in the business world and builds a global empire despite his sheer bumbling incompetence. He manages it with determined chutzpah and lots of mail-order freebies. JR could be any number of “genius” billionaires currently ruining Earth who imagine themselves examples of superior evolution, when in fact they were born lucky and have a moral capacity beneath that of a sea slug.

Unlike the other Gaddis novels I’ve read and re-read and am planning to re-read, I’ll probably not read JR again. I can simply watch world events play out to see this plot in action.

Brian Aspinwall becomes at age 27 a teacher at a prestigious private boys’ school in New England. He is recruited suddenly in 1939 to fill in for a master who has gone off to Canada to enlist in the RAF. It is primarily through Brian’s diary that we learn about the school Justin Martyr and its famous founder Reverend Francis Prescott. Immediately Aspinwall is awestruck by Prescott and comes to admire him and his accomplishments. He seeks to understand what makes Prescott and his world-class upper crust school tick, and The Rector of Justin takes off.

Aspinwall seems surprised to learn that Prescott is an intellectual and a progressive given the focus on sports, strict discipline, and religious tradition at the school. But many more surprises await. As the novel unspools we learn from other sources who come into Aspinwall’s orbit. Eventually Aspinwall is given files and documents by others and he takes on the task of possibly writing Prescott’s biography.

The book is breezy and warmly inviting, despite its substantial and ethically weighty themes. I found it an absolute pleasure. The characters are all interesting, and in particular the Rector himself. There are hints that Justin Martyr was founded out of some dark repressed desires. The WASP identity of the school proves problematic later on as Prescott has an epiphany about the kind of people running the board at his school, and the true values of the wealthy and influential class who send their kids to Justin Martyr. I could in fact trace many of the concerns Reverend Prescott has about his students and their morals down to the ethical catastrophe in current US politics.

Because the novel is from the 60s but set in the 30s and 40s we get groovy stuff intellectuals were into at the time, like Freud. The novel is saturated by Henry James but is not as dense and soupy as The Master’s.

I’d previously read only one other novel by Auchincloss–The Book Class. I remember quite liking that one but nothing about it has stuck with me after 3 decades. I do recall that both novels were given to me by Dan Bouchard in a box of remainders in perhaps ’94? I still have one more book by Auchincloss on the shelf–a collection of short fiction. I look forward to it.