William Gaddis stands alone. No other American novelist takes on the modernist challenge with comparable rigor or success. Few bother at all, beyond an easy self-reflexivity or the occasional insertion of Joycean interior monologue; most are content to explore 19th-century developments. The result is a conservative literary climate (albeit liberal politically) in which plot presides and innovation is adjunct to subject matter, not style. I don't mean to denigrate the importance of literature that breaches social barriers. I do, however, like to be reminded now and then of what drew me to literature in the first place. Gaddis, about once every 10 years (four novels since 1955), does this.

His latest work, A Frolic of His Own, challenges the reader from first page to last. Its dialogue is mostly unattributed, its descriptive passages are dense with events, allusions, everything but punctuation. Always difficult and occasionally exasperating, the novel is also immensely funny, moving and encyclopedic in its embrace of current concerns.

The central character, Oscar Crease, inhabits a dilapidated estate on Long Island. Housebound after running himself over while attempting to start his car, Oscar is nevertheless in the thick of events of national interest. The accident has made him the plaintiff in one lawsuit, and the release of a movie based on his grandfather's life has led him to file another, for plagiarism of his unpublished play. In the course of things Oscar's father, a Federal judge, hands down a couple of hilarious decisions—on a death by drowning during baptism and the fate of a dog trapped in a huge steel sculpture. And there are a dozen or so other suits, encompassing Oscar's girlfriend Lily's divorce and abortion, and his brother-in-law Harry's defense of PepsiCola's right to its name.

Gaddis jams a deposition, Judge Crease's written decisions and numerous other legal documents into the text, along with excerpts from the play Oscar had written years before and charges was ripped off. The documents are priceless pastiches. The author takes obvious pleasure in couching some of his sharpest barbs in the formal strictures of legalese. When the sculptor seeks compensation for harm he alleges the dog has done to his creation, Gaddis sneaks in the perfect rejoinder:

On the related charge of damages brought by plaintiff the standard for preliminary relief must first be addressed … the court takes judicial notice in directing such claim to be made against the Village Board and the dog's master in tandem, since as in the question posed by the Merchant of Venice (I, iii, 122) "Hath a dog money?" the answer must be that it does not.

Reading the sculptor's further (unsuccessful) charge of character defamation, one can't help feeling Gaddis has past reviews of his own books in mind: "… yet to the court's knowledge none of this opprobrium however enviously and maliciously conceived and however stupid, careless, and ill informed in its publication has ever yet proved grounds for a successful action resulting in recovery…. In short, the artist is fair game and his cause is turmoil."

The book serves in some ways as a torts primer, touching on legal concepts such as proximate cause, product liability, wrongful death, and other incarnations of negligence. Even the title, explains one of the many lawyers we encounter, derives from a legal notion holding that an employee injured while working cannot recover damages if his injury results from an action inappropriate or unrelated to the task at hand.

As with the particular fields of endeavor that marked his earlier novels—art in The Recognitions, business in JR—Gaddis turns the law here into a vehicle for comments about a broad range of issues. Thus we get keen observations on (and not-so-oblique references to) the contemporary state of literary criticism, multiculturalism, pop culture fetishism, violence in movies, religious fundamentalism, the hiring policies of corporate America, tabloid journalism, and activists of every stripe. Brother-in-law Harry might be speaking of Iran-contra:

What you see in the headlines out of Washington every day, isn't it? caught redhanded destroying evidence, obstructing justice, committing perjury off on frolics of their own and when they get off on some technicality, everybody knows they're guilty but there's not enough there to prove it so they can proclaim they've been proved innocent, wrap themselves in the flag and they're heroes because now they believe it themselves.

An ongoing dialogue about art and its audience is particularly intriguing. Gaddis, after all, has spent much of his career maligned or ignored; although recently well-reviewed, I suspect he remains little read. His protagonist seems at times a buffoonish version of himself: Oscar's play is unread (except once, by the movie producer accused of plagiarism), he is unwilling to compromise, yet he thirsts for recognition and justice. Oscar's father, meanwhile, is excoriated by the local population for prohibiting the dog owner and the township from carving up a disliked avant-garde sculpture to save an animal. Gaddis milks this case for all it's worth—even bringing in a Southern Senator named Orney Bilk who says of high art: "Product of warped sick minds, sexual deviants, degenerates and foreigners…." Sound familiar?

Not that the author comes down squarely on the side of exclusivist art. In fact, I can't help feeling he's reflecting his own goals when he has Oscar declare that Shakespeare "played to both the stalls and the pits."

That is not likely to be the happy fate of Frolic. It is tough going. Lack of punctuation ("He said he's not hungry for us to go ahead and eat. He's in there now watching some mystery with a peanut butter sandwich") is the least of its hurdles. Blink and you'll find yourself in mid-flashback, unaware of how you got there. Blink again ("And so she turned now to her guest over tea and coffee cups …") and you'll miss an indication—the "now"—that you've returned from the flashback to the novel's present. There are no chapter divisions and few page breaks to clue the reader in to shifts of time and place.

The unattributed dialogue, jammed against the rapid-fire narration composed as often as not in long and frequently runon sentences, created in my mind an effect of incessant ranting. This verbal assault would be merely an annoyance were it not full of cutting humor ("Out in the country oh I know, it restores your faith in human nature not having to see anyone") and charged with manic energy ("All that, before a bottle of Chablis smoothed their way for the lobster, butter running down his thumb onto the white tablecloth, before the light and aerator were installed and the plants submerged in the [fish] tank, before another delivery brought more bills and anonymous personalized invitations and a script indecently titled from a playwright hopeful thirsting for production…." Occasionally Gaddis even is willing to risk a dose of straightforward advice verging on wisdom, as when Oscar's brother-in-law attempts to assuage Oscar's guilt over his father's death: "Oscar can't you see!… What he tried to free you from while he was alive and now his death has finally done it, you're liberated! That's what this is all about, what a father's death is all about, any father, mine was a, when I was in law school he died…."

Frolic is also rich in mundane detail—family spats, elaborate meals, off-color exchanges. Here is Gaddis' rendering of the climax and aftermath of a sexual encounter between Oscar's sister Christina and her husband Harry:

… and his all panting earnest concentration on the burst that left his head buried on her shoulder, eyes closed, hers wide, as they slipped back in desultory concert to what remained of the day, of the lemon chicken and the shrimp in black bean sauce, the pointless flicker of dinner jackets and backless gowns on actors and actresses long dead and the papers, letters, briefs and memorandums—I mean do they have to be scattered all over the house, Harry? until at last the lights went out.

Such passages convey a sense of how time really passes, how one moment is replaced by another that gives rise to memory and complaint and on and on, unchecked and unstoppable. By novel's end I found myself thinking in the rhythms of Gaddis' prose. Although that sensation faded as well, I was glad to have experienced it. Anyone who invests the time that reading A Frolic of His Own demands will, I think, feel properly rewarded.