Adventure! How may one avail oneself of it in a culture gone mad with comfort and dreams of safety? I think there are two broad avenues radiating from the modern American self toward the perpetually fluorescent horizon of modern American adventure: one is law and the other is medicine. White-water rafting, mountaineering, alligator wrestling—certainly these activities are exciting and put one at risk, but they seem hobbylike compared to the harrowing, soul-chilling thrills of engaging in multiple lawsuits, or of contracting a fatal, high-profile disease and being at the mercy of the dark gods of insurance and technology. American adventures are adventures of money.

Two extraordinary novels, A Frolic of His Own, by William Gaddis, and Butterfly Stories, by William Vollmann, are dramatic cases in point, and constitute, in themselves, genuine (if literary) adventure. Resembling each other in almost no way (subject matter, structure, style, voice), the two novels share a great deal fundamentally. They are both sui generis, unmistakably and uncompromisingly original. They are technically innovative. They are dark, rich, solid, and occasionally sordid (especially the casually provocative Butterfly, but Frolic too, in a kind of helter-skelter subtext), comedies that make tragedies, even the best ones, seem lugubrious, lurid, and lead-footed, altogether the more pretentious and ineffective vehicles for transformation of human woe and catastrophe. And, most importantly, they are both, to quote one of Gaddis's characters, "trying to rescue the language."

A Frolic of His Own (the title is taken from English common law and refers to a deed committed by a servant that is not within the scope of his employment, that is not in the service of or at the behest of his master; e. g., an office worker shooting paper clips and putting out an eye, or, more broadly, writing a novel) is the story of one man and a handful of connected lawsuits. They range from personal injury and accidental death to divorce, plagiarism, and infringement. The lawsuits are initiated by a variety of plaintiffs: a small boy whose dog has been trapped in a horrific, menacing modern outdoor "public art" sculpture; the artist who created the sculpture and gets an injunction against its dismantling/destruction to save the dog; and the city, which wishes it to be removed permanently (these parties will reverse their positions 180 degrees before the novel is over). In another case, the Episcopal Church sues Pepsico, Inc., whom they claim is infringing on their trademark name with an anagram of it: Pepsi-Cola. The cases are conducted by a swarm of lawyers, from those who advertise on matchbook covers, to those on the run from the law themselves, to lawyers who are not really lawyers at all, to partners in prestigious "white shoe" firms and judges on the U.S. District Court.

The primary suits revolve around Oscar Crease, a playwriting professor of history at a community college on Long Island, whose father is a federal judge and whose grandfather sat on the Supreme Court. The first suit goes like this: Trying to hot-wire his car (a "Sosume"), Crease runs himself over. He then decides, since he is both the accident victim and the owner of the car, that the best course of action is to sue himself.

At first glance merely a bit of parody and slapstick, the ironic whine of the episode is amplified by the turn of nearly every page so that by the end of the novel it has become a howl of madness and despair. Crease wants "justice"; he wants his hospital bills paid, he wants a new car, he wants compensation for his injury and incapacity, he wants wants wants and believes that justice is getting getting getting. The irony, of course, depends on Crease's unwillingness to acknowledge his culpability. But this is precisely the acknowledgment that cannot be made in America. This is a no-fault world, a world of remote anonymous third-party reimbursement (someone else is paying, slice off a hunk, pad it, jack it up, put it on the tab), a world of money growing on trees and magician gardeners in those trees wearing suits and ties, hooting and rustling the leafy bills and keeping the branches just out of reach of frothing, leaping, wild-eyed victim/perpetrators. This is Frolic's central image and base melody (as I see and hear them).

The second suit has to do with Crease's play Once at Antietam, in which he tells the story of his famous grandfather, a Southerner who inherits a lucrative mine in the North and who ends up paying men to be his substitute in both the Union and Confederate armies (a common practice). The play, submitted years before to a TV producer in New York, turns up as a monster-budget Hollywood extravaganza, featuring state of the art sex acts and special-effects gore: The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Similar in many ways to his play, Crease charges its makers with a variety of crimes. Once at Antietam is a work of art, he insists over and over again; he wrote it because he is a civilized man who values philosophy and poetry, and all he wants is justice, as symbolized by lots of money.

A goodly portion of the play is reproduced in the novel (it may seem a little stately to readers used to Rabe, Shepard, Mamet, and Guare, but its counterpoint is both pleasing and necessary), and suffers close reading in one of the book's many tour de force legal parodies, a deposition of some fifty pages that raises a number of interesting questions about art, commerce, and ownership of intellectual property. Claiming that his work has been stolen and travestied, Crease, we soon realize, has himself borrowed from O'Neill's Mourning Becomes Electra, who in turn borrowed from Euripides, and owes a good deal to Plato, too, a lot of whose Republic pours (unattributed) from one of his character's mouths.

The complexity, depth, and range of Frolic are, I hope, clear enough. One of the marks of the great novel is its resistance to summary description, and Frolic (like all Gaddis's masterpieces) is overpowering in this regard. With its incredibly intricate weave of dramatic text, legal documents, and virtuoso dialogue, all connected with feverishly beautiful passages—or sinews of description—reading Frolic is something like listening to a life insurance salesman and biblical prophet—one who knows world literature forward and backward—interpret your wildest dreams.