Free Books Online JR

Itemize Books Concering JR

Original Title:	J R
ISBN:	0140187073 (ISBN13: 9780140187076)
Edition Language:	English
Characters:	J R Vansant
Literary Awards:	National Book Award for Fiction (1976)

JR

William Gaddis

Paperback | Pages: 752 pages

Rating: 4.29 | 2620 Users | 304 Reviews

Representaion As Books JR

J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor--a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses -- and misuses -- whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him -- a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn. Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures -- shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music -- burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world . . . the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others . . . the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths -- voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios -- a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words -- through our lives -- while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

--From the first-edition dustjacket

Specify About Books JR

Title	:	JR
Author	:	William Gaddis
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Anniversary Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 752 pages
Published	:	August 26th 1993 (first published October 12th 1975)
Categories	:	Fiction. Classics. Literature. Novels. American

Rating About Books JR

Ratings: 4.29 From 2620 Users | 304 Reviews

Evaluate About Books JR

I've now read three articles (two of them introductions to Gaddis' own books) on this author that concern the purported difficulty of his work: one by Rick Moody, one by Jonathan Franzen, and my personal favorite, William H. Gass' intro to The Recognitions. Rick Moody wants us to believe that this, widely seen as one of the hardest novels ever written, is actually a fun time, and he's not too far off the mark. Franzen wants us to believe that reading Gaddis is a brain-destroyingly difficult

Among the best I've ever read. Magnificent. Hilarious. Savage. Can't stop marveling... As good as it gets... So many hilarious and anguishing motifs within DFW's Infinite Jest now seem to me to be perfect and just and right and true little valentines to William Gaddis... and what a heartening thought!

JR is certainly a stylistic masterpiece. As far as Im aware its structure that is, a single, gargantuan, unbroken passage comprised almost entirely of unattributed dialogue has not been attempted before or since. Depending on what you think about the novel, you might interpret this as being indicative of a literary pinnacle, or a dead-end. I think its a little of both. The brilliance of this novel is in how much Gaddis manages to communicate given the constraints of the structure. The settings

Well he, of course he did yes I, because it's one place it's the one place an idea can be left here you can walk out and close the door and leave it here unfinished the most, the wildest secret fantasy and it stays on here by itself in that balance between, the balance between destruction and and realization until..."Talking day to night Barbie power suits. Nine to five to pour a cup of rat poison in your kid's cup of ambition. I don't understand money except that I don't have any. I don't

I mean why should somebody go steal and break the law to get all they can when there's always some law where you can be legal and get it all anyway! William Gaddis, JR How do you rate this adequately heh? Four stars allows that humanity (or Gaddis) might reach a little higher, dance a little quicker, squeeze a little more juice out of the GD lemon, but sitting here now it also seems like I would have to go and downgrade all previous fours if I only gave it four stars. Five it must be. Besides,

No no listen look, first time in history so many opportunities to do so God damned many things not worth doing (477, JR)I take this rating system way too seriously, and therefore need to explain myself because I have to admit that I did not love this book. I'm not even sure I liked it. But for me to give JR anything less than five stars would also misrepresent my reading experience, and since five stars equals amazing, I'm going with that. When I was reading JR I thought a lot about pleasure

this book is so damn long a famous american author named johnathan franzen was compelled to write an essay that was too damn long about how long and difficult this book is, and how he couldnt' finish itt. he also said the same thing about don quixote, which makes me think he didn't try very hand since like 400 pages of don quixote is about the don showing his di dong to sancho panza via mishaps involving horses, aand also farting.jr isn't about farting or dingdongs most of the time, sadly, but