Time has never been kind to the novelist William Gaddis. In the '50s his first novel, The Recognitions, helped inaugurate an era where so-called difficult writers were lionized. But while the Pynchons and Gasses and Coovers—writers with similarly dark visions who forsook traditional ways of telling a story—reaped the benefits of his labors, Gaddis toiled on in relative obscurity. Two decades later he published JR, and again he was ahead of the curve. That vicious satire of American business was the perfect '80s novel. Unfortunately, it appeared in 1975. Reviews were good, but sales were meager. In 1985, a similar fate befell Carpenter's Gothic, in which he savaged fundamentalist religion.

Now Gaddis has published A Frolic of His Own, an extended satire on America's increasingly litigious ways. Surely no theme could be more timely? Surely, too, we've grown accustomed to unusual narrative strategies. A novel written almost entirely in dialogue with no quotation marks—that's not too daunting these days. As for Gaddis's gloomy vision of American life, the greed, plagiarism and self-absorption that he describes would not look out of place on an episode of Roseanne or The Simpsons.

But there's the trouble. We've seen these literary somersaults and heard these jokes too often. And while Gaddis helped break such stylistic ground, the harsh truth is that here he hasn't met his own high standards. There's something too easy about this book. Its knee-jerk cynicism sounds unearned, its complications unwarranted. Intellectually and literarily, it's a lazy book.

The story of Oscar Crease, a dilettantish academic who fecklessly sues a movie company for pirating his Civil War play, the novel piles complication upon complication, lawsuit upon lawsuit. It is an orgy of chicanery that begins in frustration and ends in despair. In between, it is a tapestry of talk. Oscar, his lawyers, his family, his friends never stop yapping, rarely listen and refuse to learn. Periodically, Gaddis inserts legal briefs and excerpts from Oscar's lousy play, Once at Antietam.

Taken page by page, a lot of the writing is brilliant. Gaddis has a wonderful ear for the way people talk at each other, and he can mimic an insurance agent's spiel or a socialite's prattle with unsettling, hilarious accuracy. Near the end, he writes of an old judge's love for the law and the language: "because when you come down to it the law's only the language after all … and what better loves could a man have than those to get him through the night." That's one of the more heartfelt passages—it jumps out because passages like it are so rare. Most of the time Gaddis busies himself making litigants look like jerks or wearying the reader with jokey monikers like Jonathan Livingston Siegal.

At a writers' conference in 1985, Gaddis sought to distinguish himself from the likes of Danielle Steel by saying that she wrote books while he wrote "literature." Such arrogance would be easier to swallow if Gaddis gave his readers more for their trouble. But when you've slogged through 586 pages with a bore like Oscar Crease and learned little more than "people will do anything," you're apt to wonder if Ms. Steel's fans don't have the better part of the bargain.