JR (Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: William Gaddis
- First Published: 1975
- Type of Work: Novel
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: Teaching or teachers, New York, 1980’s, Business or business people, Success or failure, Money, Composers, Wall Street, Corporations
- Locales: New York
In JR, the society of “middlemen” has spread, virus-like, and the resulting depreciation of all values is Gaddis's main theme. The characters’ desires for commercial and aesthetic success highlight a crisis in values: Artistic significations (words and musical sounds, for example) are conflated with money, and a monetized culture further governed by the principal of usury (the extracting of “interest”) diminishes things all around. In this novel, therefore, money almost literally talks—and does so in relentless, rapid-fire sentences that threaten to drown out...
[The entire page is 1134 words long]
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