Carpenter's Gothic (Penguin Twentieth-Century Classics)

Rating:
Summary: Like a Creative Writing Student Aping the Real Gaddis
Review: After having read A Frolic of His Own, this one came as a real disappointment. Sure he skewers American culture but doesn't he take his potshots at some easy targets? The typical Gaddis dialogue is used to very little purpose here and I don't think the characters are at all as well developed as in Frolic. Maybe this book isn't long enough. Frolic, JR and Recognitions are all epics. It seems like he tossed this one of in a week or so to fulfill a contract. It's a good book but Gaddis can do this in his sleep.

Read A Frolic of His Own instead. There he turns the legal profession inside out rather than scoring easy points against obvious targets like Southern preachers and big corporations.

Rating:
Summary: sinister masterpiece
Review: Gathering storm..Unfolds like a stage play on the floor boards of one rented house....any reader who gives this book a chance will be borne along ever faster and further by the magnificent, ranting dialogue which seems to reach from these rented rooms into every nefarious corner of American mischief; a sinister bible act of the Pat Robertson ilk with an African ministry(the entire rape of Africa is rendered in one amazing four or five page salvo), the unscrupulous wife-bullying moron who decides to act as his P.T.Barnum, and a host of other characters who fall into those two GADDIS categories(not mutually exclusive) of grotesque and disposessed. What a book!Gives evil many faces."As funny as hell"

Rating:
Summary: a pretentious criminal atrocity
Review: this book was terrible. it is nothing more than a twisted and messed up story that is supposed to have some meaning and substance to it. but it doesn't. it goes nowhere, does nothing. there are merely characters, that do meaningless things, and that's about it. besides the obvious title theme, there really are no useful themes.

it is written in a style that is quite difficult to read, which is fine with me, but afterward you question why you wasted all the effort and concentration in reading when the book wasn't worth it anyway.

the only good plus i can see in this book is if you want to read it, and pretend you like it, just so you can discuss it in a pretentious book group and get with a pretentious girl or boy. other than that it really has no value.