BOOKS

Gaddis-speak

James Wolcott

"As it enters the ear, does it come in like broken glass or does it come in like honey?" asked Eddie Condon about jazz. William Gaddis's third nov-

el. Carpenter s Gothic (Viking), enters like broken glass. Nearly all dialogue, the book is a radio play for the mind, a stereophonic skull session, a hostile ricochet of voices. The title refers to a Victorian mansion on the Hudson River, a setting as symbolic as George Bernard's Heartbreak House (the outside "a patchwork of conceits, borrowings, deceptions," the inside "a hodgepodge of good intentions like one last ridiculous effort at something worth doing"). Halloween is approaching, and the reds and golds of the autumn leaves appear to be crying out in their coloration, inflamed with hysteria. Except for an occasional sniff of the air. Carpenter's Gothic never strays from the house; all of the big action happens offstage, the news brought to us in bold headlines:

SENATOR DEAD IN RED PLANE SHOOTDOWN.

Onstage, the characters are busy mopping up spilled drinks, bickering, and answering a telephone that rings as insistently as the one that bedeviled Barbara Stanwyck in Sorry, Wrong Num-

ber. Chapter One even ends with the discovery of a dove, which might have flown in from Chekhov.

But if the dove is from Chekhov, the dialogue is from David Mamet. Technically, Gaddis achieves some wizard effects. Compared with his previous novel JR (which is being reissued in paperback by Penguin, along with The Recognitions), Carpenter's Gothic is a more portable contraption. But it too requires a bearing-down of attention, an ability to swing with the razory rhythms. Dashes introduce the dialogue, which itself pays little heed to grammar or decorum. "—God damn it Liz will you, look Billy take your God damn karma and shove it, shave your head give you a red blanket stand you out on Tu Do street with a God damn bowl you ever seen a monk barbecue?" Doing most of the ratty talking are Paul, a piece of hustler sleaze; Liz, his putupon, porcelain wife; and Liz's sponging brother, Billy. When Billy visits their mother in a nursing home, his report is funny-grim in the Mamet manner: "—all these spaced out old cruds they had them around this long table making nut cups for Halloween, I mean it was like nursery school at the wrong fucking end of the line." Nearly every character in Carpenter's Gothic is a spaced-out young crud, making not nut cups but iffy, shyster deals. Like Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, Carpenter's Gothic is a mountain of talk which eventually yields a vein of quick-kill intrigue—the real estate under dispute here being a bleak patch of land in southern Africa said to be rich in mineral deposits. Doves panic and crash as the sky darkens with buzzards.

Carpenter's Gothic has a thick film of tension. It stretches and frays the nerves suspensefully. But finally this novel proves what JR proved—electric ingenuity is not enough. Carpenter's Gothic is both a marvel of craft and a leaking bucket of acid feeling. Like Thomas Pynchon, another avant-gardist who builds bombs in his backyard, William Gaddis is a big exploiter of paranoia and megadeath, and Carpenter's Gothic is fundamentally a book that doesn't believe in anything but its own nihilism. Capitalism is earth rape, religion is theater for the gullible, politics is a protective condom donned before power thrusts, nature is gashed and grieving ("The fruitless torment of a wild cherry tree, limbs like the scabrous barked trunk itself wrenched, twisted, dead where one of them sported wens the size of a man's head, cysts the size of a fist"), and America is a nitwit giant ("The prevailing IQ in this country's about a hundred, did you know that? Good God, talk about a dark continent"). I don't expect novels to be sunny and life-affirming, but Carpenter's Gothic is so monochromatic in its sour fatalism that Gaddis seems to be bending every nail with his whacks. This is the sort of book where the only sympathetic character is killed off so that Gaddis can show us how tyrannical, how unsparing life is. Dramatically and thematically, the book suffers from too much stage direction. To indicate Liz's shredded nerves, Gaddis has her constantly tearing and twisting a paper towel, and that dove at the beginning of the novel? I'm afraid it really does represent Peace. (Pink and slain, it's tossed in the trash.)

William Gaddis isn't merely reporting the thunder in Carpenter's Gothic, he's manufacturing it. He's taxing his eardrums and ours with a lot of sky-is-falling hullabaloo. But in making his distress call, he isn't very sociable. He seems to want the bomb shelter all to himself.