If you want to dip your little toe into the waters of Gaddis's work, this is where to start. You get a sense of his humor and cleverness from this book without the huge investment his other longer books require. It's a good book but probably not a great one. ( )

Just started. I've owned this book for many years, think Gaddis is the greatest American novelist of the latter half of the 20th c. (but I repeat myself), and this is very, very much Gaddis. It's a delight so far.

And, now, finished. A wonderful, rich, delightful, sad, emotional, unique except to Gaddis novel. ( )

To me, this is Gaddis' most accessible work. It's lively, funny, and not nearly as obscure or as bewildering as his other novels. As a law teacher, I love the opening line: "Justice?--You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." Too true! ( )

There’s the makings of a terrific work of satire here. I only wish the author, William Gaddis, had made some different choices (or an editor had forced him to do so) … like stripping away about 250 pages of narrative overkill and sacrificing the whole pretentious “no punctuation” thing in the name of readability, which combination seriously impaired my ability to appreciate Gaddis’s wit.

I get what Gaddis is trying to accomplish here. This story of a curmudgeonly old academic who’s simultaneously embroiled in two lawsuits (in one, he’s trying to sue the manufacturer of his car after he somehow manages to drive over himself; in the other, he’s trying to sue a big-name Hollywood producer over his gratuitously gruesome new Civil War film, the screenplay of which Oscar believes to have been plagiarized from his own Civil War play) is a witty skewering of modern society - primarily our convoluted and inherently unjust legal system, but also Hollywood, the marketing/advertising profession, wealthy upper class liberals, artists, gold-diggers, tree-hugging PETA liberals, the real estate industry, television, and the relentless march of suburbia. In college I remember studying the great Augustine satirists – Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock), John Gay (The Beggar’s Opera), and Jonathan Swift (whose “A Modest Proposal” explored the idea of turning the Irish into food, thereby solving the “Irish problem” and alleviating hunger simultaneously) – and am comfortable positing that in the afterlife, Gaddis will be welcomed with open arms within their ranks.

So what’s my problem with this? My first issue, as I mentioned earlier, is that it’s at least 250 pages too long. Slogging through all 500+ pages of this felt like sitting through a 40-minute fireworks show: eventually, no matter how dazzling the pyrotechnics, there comes a point where you start checking your watching and wondering if the grand finale will ever come. Gaddis’s looooong narrative diversions – the 40pg long transcript of Szyrk v. Spot (in which an oddly obtuse dog wanders into a statue and can’t be bothered to extricate himself, provoking the townfolk to sue the artist for permission to destroy the statue to remove him), the 40+pgs of excerpts from Oscar’s play – are especially tedious; one wishes an editor had had the nerve to remind Gaddis that satire is best served fresh and steaming, never dragged out so long that it cools and grows stale.

My other major quibble with this novel? Gaddis’s deliberately laborious narrative style. I get that it takes a certain genius to create characters with voices so distinctive that they don’t require identification, which Gaddis has accomplished here. This doesn’t, however, justify his decision to entirely abandon the use of quotation marks and dialog tags. The effort required to ensure one understands who is speaking at any given time slows the pace of reading to a crawl. (See my previous remark about satire needing to be served fresh and steaming.) But apparently this is Gaddis’s “shtick” – or so I gather from this passage lifted from a New York Times review: “With "JR" (1975) Mr. Gaddis developed and ruthlessly exploited a technique of almost nonstop, scarcely punctuated dialogue, which he continued to employ in his next two novels. It is a technique that demands unflagging vigilance on the reader's part.” Again, one wishes that an editor had had to nerve to suggest to Gaddis that, having already earned his National Book Award, he might lighten up a little and cut his readers some slack in this outing.

There is genius here, I don’t dispute. (For instance, there’s this on-going bit about a lawsuit between the Vatican and RC Cola over the rights to use the initials RC (“Roman Catholic”) that eventually devolves into discussions of a joint marketing campaign – which should be outrageous but which, like all authentically acerbic satire, leaves the lingering taste of bile in one’s throat as it goes down). But whether the payoff was worth the time I spent slogging my way through all 500 pages of this, I’m still not entirely convinced. ( )

Amazing, long, funny send-up of litigious society... interesting writing style, with very long run-on sentences... ( )