JR

By: William Gaddis

Narrated by: Nick Sullivan

Length: 37 hrs and 41 mins

Publisher's summary

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity training, JR captures the listener in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths. The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, and stumble through our words - through our lives - while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes JR the extraordinary novel that it is.

©1975 William Gaddis (P)2010 Audible, Inc.

Amazing performance

I first read JR when it was published back in 1975 and again a decade or so ago, but when I happened upon some of the rave reviews of the audio book, I dove back in for a third time. Nick Sullivan's reading is truly amazing. The sheer number of characters handled creatively and with nuances of personality leaves me in aw.

How do you rate this adequately HEH?

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, if I rate it as five now, I can always downgrade it later, after reading The Recognitions* and use the carry-forward star loss to offset the capital gains on my outstanding shares of stars.

I'm not sure my wife loved it, since it proved once and fore..., well unequivocally, that I'm a bad father yes, inadequate husband yes, don't sleep much hey and this may be (let all the F+ing challengers just try and knock it down) my GD favorite GD books in the whole GD world. This morning, with 100 pages left, part of me just wanted to loop the SOB and start reading it again once I finished. That 3am euphoria has since passed, luckily.

Recommendation to friends who read this after me ... try to read about 200 pgs/day, because GDs this book almost requires you read it GD fast. I read somewhere online (yes there it is GD Paris Review**) that Gaddis said the secret to reading J R was "it was my hope -- for many readers it worked, for others it did not -- that having made some effort they would not read too agonizedly slowly and carefully, trying to figure out who is talking and so forth. It was the flow that I wanted, for the readers to read and be swept along -- to participate. And enjoy it. And occasionally chuckle, laugh along the way." Well, GD, the flow thing kinda works. It also helps that I have a GD series 7 and the financial stuff all made perfect f+ing sense.

A Detritus Masterpiece

The endurance and range of the narrator, Nick Sullivan, are incredible and one can only wish (beyond realism) that he was well paid for his admirable performance. 


Compelling through the first half, this tome of  the corporatized pandemonium really sags from the 50% to 80% point,  mitigated only by the incredible hippie, Rhoda in Schraff's apartment, as she observes and interacts with the increasing entropy of the series of commercially embroiled artists that tenant the cesspool. Picks up in the last 4 chapters.  A worthwhile book, for sure, but characters are complex stock types with almost no range of motion, save that of general enervation and decay, past the static role in which they are placed. That, and the general cultural decay of art and passion subordinated to a system of hegemonic commerce and the money powered media within which we are commercialized is Gaddis' point: but one that is overemphasized for at least 250 pages too long.  I would have preferred a 500 pager without the sagging stasis of the aforementioned.

Though, perhaps upon reflection, I'll savor those wry string of vomituous quips and foregrounded mistakes flying through 750 pages--literally, without exaggeration, seriously--of constant, "goddamn," as Jack would have it,  interruptions (all of whose perpetrators protest, at some point, of the universal crime...and if a single symbolic leitmotif could ever be emphasized so religiously as to undergo a conversion into the concrete, this was the proof of concept: we are comprised at the ultimate core,  of a squalid messball of interruptions... the kind that life becomes when you're busy making other plans).  Perhaps I'll savor the boring,  inundation section as that's where the sweet reprieve of jokes coming into focus from wry repetitions of strings in former sections are passed around like consolation cigarettes on the 15 min break of a thankless job. Gaddis had to grind through it in real life, and God dammit, so damn well will his readership. 


Kali Yuga, age of distraction---the Hindus pinned the tail on the donkey, just as the European Renaissance was rolling into the station. 


One realizes that Gaddis's aims are beyond those of traditional satire... they are the aims of cultural revenge...a revenge of mockery upon the reader...and more than that: a punishment  Punishment of noise and we it's myriad subjects which, as far as misanthropy is concerned, is quite a feat, and laudable, as-- to quote JR--someone had to do it, so why "get mad" at Gaddis for being the first, after Quixote (which, doesn't dig in with the backmark fingernails of Gaddis).


He is to be applauded for his innovations in dialogic texture--it turns out everyone,  bulldog to mouse, has a verbal crutch (yaaas, erm, well, you see,  top flight talent, just this,  goddamn, maaan?, yes sir, stop that, hey?)--and to be credited for his keen and comic demonstration of signal decay and accident accumulation in the noise-money order (imagine the game of telephone multiplied by 1,000 and crisscrossed, each game over the other in a clusterf@#$ of pixie sticks, and sprinkled with salt n' peppah, greed and litigiousness, and you have the novel), but, for all that virtue: there is too much of a good thing.


The Detritus Masterpiece is ultimately a kind of well-dramatized essay...since it offers no transcendence and cannot be relegated to jeremiad or cautionary tale.  It is an over-exposed and unrelenting, wide-format photo panorama of what is, high school principal to company principal, to textbook principle to mortgage principlea, as wearily relevant and apt today, where several of its dark hyperboles are now realities, as it ever was in 1975...but we are ultimately in the same episteme of decay (sans the angry unions of stagflation, who are clearly not Gaddis' animus) and resignation as a society as we were then.  McTrump USA is very G. Ford USA: a stupid, moneyed hack in charge with a class act sociopath cabinet and corporate-elect congress to steel the helm of this pathetic, sinking ship of noise through the giant ocean gyres of trash in which we float and drag the world into, kicking or laughing as its various portions may fall.


JR, like father like son: we the people are the same rag doll throwaway people of then,  a few flowers amid the ever-augmenting profusion of weeds, trampled in steel bootprint, outsourced production pair on sale for a limited time offer of 12.99, money back gaurunteed (for 30 days after purchase, see overside for terms and limitations).

One of the Best Books of the Last 50 Years

It's a challenging book, perhaps more difficult than any in the postmodern encyclopedist tradition. This audiobook makes it digestable, understandable, and while it's pretty long, if you can't follow it, that's like on you, man, as Rhoda would put it.

Money and art and love and beauty and having all those things and losing all those things and some getting them back is what this book is all about. Gaddis predicts our ad-soaked future, our nation of lobbyists, our impractical education reforms, while also showing our inattentiveness to true art, our class-five-rapids-economy, and the mess that comes when we follow the letter of the law while ignoring its spirit. What's legal isn't always moral, and if someone else is just going to do it if you don't, should you?

Finally finished it!

Gaddis is difficult to read as it’s just a cacophony if unattributed voices. But listening to it is a great experience. Kudos to the performer who often inflects things that are unclear in the text.

Phenomenal Audio Rendering of True Work of Genius

Would you consider the audio edition of JR to be better than the print version?

We owe Nick Sullivan a debt. His work here is unquestionably the best I've ever heard on an audiobook. Bravo.

Great performance

I think this is one of those books that is really helped by being in the audio format, I really don't think I would have enjoyed it as much or understood as much had I read it in paper.

Unrivaled Masterwork that helps the Read!

Was this a struggle to finish?

Yes, but after but after getting both the text and the text and audio book, this became a literary experience like no other! The way the reader becomes a literal Participant in the book is a Great Metaphor for Capitalism & Money itself, as something you make real only thru ur cooperative imagination. The kind of book I wish I read in college!

A Text of Genius, A Reading of Genius

What made the experience of listening to JR the most enjoyable?

Reading or listening to a work of genius is more than enjoyable.Given our times, we don't really have a word for a book (or any art) that asks for your total effort to enter it, fills your world when you are in it, and changes you forever by having read it. "Edutainment" is banal and pompous. "Enthralling" is dumb. "Transformative" sounds like psychobabble.

Takes lots of energy; gives even more back.

Gaddis never had our tragically-hip, soul dead irony of pretending never to believe in anything. Whatever...he's dead now. It's up to you to decide if he's worth reading.

William Gaddis is a challenging read. Boot Camp for your mind. His writing is also laugh-out-loud-in-the-middle-of-the-night funny, really funny, brilliant, and his genius burns with a dark insight, a life-changing power.

I'll settle by saying _JR_ is partly an apocalyptic combat between artists and businessmen. The artists in JR are sure that high culture and great art (art where enjoyment and big-time beauty takes effort but gives back more than lesser art) are ideals worth preserving and fighting for, despite the fact that their ideals will always be a minority position. Gaddis believed it, and shows you that the ideals are never dead, that they can be real to you...if you want.

Think Zombie Financial Apocalypse. Now imagine the zombies are alive.

Gaddis is often pigeonholed as a "postmodernist writer" by academics. I think it makes more sense to think of him as a highly inventive modernist. He uses spot-on dialogue and monologue--his ear for dialogue is amazing--and frames the narrative exposition by concentrated, lyrical pure poetry, to insert his intensely-imagined characters into narrow plotlines that spiral toward satiric chaos.

Who was your favorite character and why?

In the apocalypse of JR, the struggling heroes Edward Bast, Gibbs, Eigen, and Amy Joubert stand out against the vividly trivial Whiteback, the impotent lawyer Beamish, or the managerial maniac Davidoff. All are absorbed into the slowly-building cyclonic fury of chaos created by sixth-grader J. R. Vansant.

What about Nick Sullivan’s performance did you like?

The virtuoso reading of JR by Nick Sullivan cannot be praised enough. Working on Gaddis’s monumental text, Sullivan created a monumentally dramatic and sympathetic reading. Through nuanced accents and precise timing, Nick Sullivan conducts an orchestra of carefully shaped character voices that always persuade the listener to the heart of the book. Nick Sullivan’s reading of Gaddis’s masterpiece is itself a masterpiece. Together, Gaddis’s text and Nick Sullivan’s realization of it deserve more stars than any rating system could provide.

Who was the most memorable character of JR and why?

Because there are so many memorable characters in JR, I cannot answer the question of selecting one. So I'll mention two profound influences that other artists had on JR. In structure, the novel carries intentional similarities and allusions to Richard Wagner's Ring Cycle opera. In plot dynamics, it resembles Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Any additional comments?

JR is the second of William Gaddis’s great fictional masterpieces. In chronological order, they are: The Recognitions, JR, and A Frolic of His Own. Each of these books is an apocalypse: The Recognitions is an apocalypse of broken integrity, JR a financial apocalypse, A Frolic of His Own an apocalypse of law.

Stunning performance, great story

This audio version is more like a screen play or a small, local theater production-- done very well. You know, you go to a play at a dumpy local theater expecting not much and the show blows you away. That's what this audiobook is like. It doesn't come at you all fancy but soon you'll be in its grip. To be honest, it is a little slow at first. Give it some time. You'll be richly rewarded.