[An American critic and educator, Moore is author and editor of several works on Gaddis. In the following highly laudatory review, he discusses the experience of reading A Frolic of His Own and questions the validity of critical assessments that denigrate the novel for its ostensible "difficulties."]

The phrase "literary event" has been dulled by years of misuse by glib publicists; but no other phrase describes the appearance of a new novel by William Gaddis, one of this country's true literary giants. The review media's response to this literary event [the publication of A Frolic of His Own] has been disheartening, however, as if nothing has changed in the forty years since Gaddis's first novel, The Recognitions, was panned. Then as now, the main charge is "difficulty," yet only in literature does this seem to be a sin. One rarely sees a music critic complain that Philip Glass expects too much of his listeners, or reads that Merce Cunningham expects too much from his audience. In diving competitions and magic acts the degree of difficulty is admired. But let a writer execute a difficult task with breath-taking technique, and mostly what's heard is heckling—whining and moaning about how much effort is involved in watching the artist work. What should be a privilege is treated like an affront.

In her review for the daily New York Times, the usually hardy Michiko Kakutani said the novel made for "laborious reading" and that "Mr Gaddis's provocative vision of modern society is purchased at a price, the price of hard work and frequent weariness on the part of the reader." In the Sunday New York Times Book Review, Robert Towers also felt compelled to warn the unsuspecting reader that "One must not underestimate the obstacles that lie in the way of the appreciation, to say nothing of the enjoyment, of this remarkable novel," going on to call some of the obstacles "gratuitous, even perverse," (It's always the author's fault.) Sven Birkerts used the d-word as well in his New Republic review, though he was sharp enough to note that the neglect of Gaddis because of his alleged difficulty "somewhat indicts us as a culture." But he makes Gaddis sound like the strictest kind of taskmaster: "let the attention slip for a second and you pay by having to work back to get it all straight." Frank McConnell in the Boston Globe warned of "the holy arrogance of the demands it makes on the reader. The book dares you to struggle with it, and on every page taunts you that you may, after all, not be up to the fight." Toward the end of his review McConnell says, "This is a very hard book to read, but it works," though by that point most readers have probably been scared off. Running against the grain was a rather snotty squib in Newsweek by Malcolm Jones Jr., who took the opposite tack and complained that the book was too easy, too lazy, and chided Gaddis for not giving "his readers more for their trouble."

Is A Frolic of His Own that difficult, that exhausting? I devoured it in a weekend in a state of exhilaration and delight. Yes, you do have to keep your wits about you when reading Gaddis, but it's a rare privilege these days to be taken this seriously as a reader. Like Henry James, William Gaddis wants the kind of reader on whom nothing is lost. He doesn't talk down or assume you can't make connections. He expects that you've read a few books in your time, read the papers. This is literature, not a TV sitcom.

The point is not whether Gaddis is difficult or not but whether difficulty is such a bad thing in literature. Those who prefer easy listening may want easy reading, but others should find a novel bracing, challenging. In Gaddis's second novel, JR, Jack Gibbs is asked if his work in progress on technology and the arts is difficult, and he answers, "Difficult as I can make it." The difficulties Gibbs undergoes to get this book written, the breadth of his research and length of time he devotes to the task (after seventeen years he still isn't finished), show what sort of pact should exist between serious writers and serious readers.

Gaddis knows he's difficult (Gibbs is one of his personas in JR), and consequently lightens the task somewhat by making his books very funny, filling them with all forms of humor, from limericks and low puns to learned wit and Olympian ironies. The absence of a comic element can make some difficult literary works a real grind—Pound's Cantos, say, or Broch's Death of Virgil—despite their other virtues. On the other hand, the comic element is what makes extremely difficult novels like Joyce's Finnegans Wake and Julián Rìos's Larva such a pleasure to wrestle with. And yet few reviewers convey the idea that Gaddis is essentially a comic novelist and that his books can be great fun—rather than an exercise in masochism—to read.

The charges of difficulty have plagued Gaddis all his career. In Fire the Bastards! (1962), a scathing attack on the critical reception of Gaddis's first novel, Jack Green has a section called "The 'Difficult' Cliché" in which he quotes half a dozen reviewers voicing the same complaints about Gaddis as the current crop. (Green points out that a novel is difficult only if you read it like a textbook, in which each paragraph has to be mastered before moving on to the next. He also argues that a rich novel is always difficult, and asks "unless you hug impoverishment why worry?") Gaddis's JR, which is indeed his most difficult (though it is also the great American novel if ever there was one), seemed to prove most difficult for sophisticated mandarin reviewers like George Steiner in The New Yorker; those in the provinces, like Alicia Miller in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, had a wonderful time with it. Because of its shorter length, Gaddis's third novel, Carpenter's Gothic, got off comparatively easy, though there were those who complained of the close attention the novel demanded. The new book may be Gaddis's best mixture yet of complex and hilarious matters, of high art and good entertainment.

A Frolic of His Own is both cutting-edge, state-of-the-art fiction and a throwback to the great moral novels of Tolstoy and Dickens. That it can be both is just one of the many balancing acts it performs: It is bleak and pessimistic while howlingly funny; it is a deeply serious exploration of such lofty themes as justice and morality but is paced like a screwball comdey; it is avant-garde in its fictional techniques but traditional in conception and in the reading pleasures it offers; it is a damning indictment of the United States, Christianity and the legal system, but also a playful frolic of Gaddis's own.

The plot is too wonderfully complex to summarize here; suffice it to say, it concerns an interlocking set of lawsuits involving the Crease family: Oscar, a historian and playwright; Christina, his stepsister, married to a lawyer named Harry Lutz; and their father, Judge Thomas Crease, presiding over two cases in Virginia during the course of the novel. The story unfolds by way of Gaddis's trademark dialogue, so realistic it reads like unedited transcripts but which artfully conveys much information that normally would be consigned to expository narration. Here, for example, is how Oscar's flaky girlfriend, Lily, is introduced. Oscar asks her where she got the new BMW that Christina saw her driving, and she responds: "—It's just this person I borrowed it from Oscar. To come over and see you, I only wish she didn't dislike me so much. She just always makes me feel like a, she's so superior and smart and her clothes, she's just always so attractive for somebody her age and …" This occurs early in the novel, before Gaddis has described Christina, and now he doesn't need to: Lily has. JR was conveyed entirely in dialogue, but in A Frolic Gaddis includes passages from Oscar's play—necessary for the plot, but often tedious reading—and various legal opinions, brilliantly rendered in the majestic language of the law. One of them, first published a few years ago in The New Yorker as "Szyrk v. Village of Tatamount et al.," is especially dazzling and contains one of the most eloquent defenses of venturesome art in our time. Noting that "risk of ridicule, of attracting defamatory attentions from his colleagues and even raucous demonstrations by an outraged public have ever been and remain the foreseeable lot of the serious artist," Judge Crease is another of Gaddis's personas, and it is this sense of artistic mission that makes Gaddis essential reading for our culture. He is the oldest of that generation of meganovelists that includes John Barth, Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, and while his artistry is as relentlessly inventive as theirs, he is more adept than they at cracking the whip of corrective satire, more concerned with rescuing American culture from itself by exposing its inherent contradictions and weaknesses. The next century's historians and sociologists will learn more from Gaddis than from any other American novelist of our time what went wrong with this century.

Despite its preoccupation with the law, A Frolic of His Own has nothing in common with the current crop of legal fictions. There are no courtroom scenes: Gaddis isn't interested in the histrionics of courtroom drama but rather in the role the law plays in attempting to impose order on disorderly conduct.

Justice, order, money and the law: Each of these nouns appears on the first page and together they form the compass points of the novel. The same concepts were at the heart of JR, but while there the emphasis was on money, here it is on the law. In the world according to Gaddis—made up of that devastating barrage of malice, madness and malfeasance reported nightly on the news—the law is less a system to insure order than a weapon that ridiculous, greedy people use to make "other people take them as seriously as they take themselves" (also quoted from the first page; like an opera composer, Gaddis announces all his themes in the overture). Justice, order and the law are not synonymous terms, nor are they enough: The missing term (and thus absent from the first page but appearing later) is, simply, what is "right."

The novel is a stupendous achievement, filled with so much outrage, wit, wisdom and artistry that it makes other novels published in the past ten years look tepid and underachieved. (Despite his reservations, Sven Birkerts admitted that it is "leagues ahead of most so-called 'serious' novels that are published these days.") If you find it difficult you should be grateful, for you'll be engaged at the top of your abilities, discovering reading muscles you'd forgotten you ever had. And any exhaustion you feel afterward will be the good kind, as after sex or an invigorating workout. Go for the burn.