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the complete review - fiction

Agape Agape

by
William Gaddis

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

B+ : effective rant, convincing rambling

See our review for fuller assessment.

  Review Consensus:

  No consensus, not always entirely sure what to make of it

  From the Reviews:

• "There are many fine passages, even if Gaddis's prose, for my money, doesn't always stand comparison with Bernhard's. It's not a book to rush through but to savour, and here and there you get to glimpse the greater mountains in the distance." - Alan Marshall, Daily Telegraph
  
  
• "(A) plotless, posthumous 96-page spew of what we're obliged to call "postmodern thought." " - Troy Patterson, Entertainment Weekly
  
  
• "There is very little sense of community in this work, but the engaged relationship between text and reader is offered as an alternative model to passive consumption. Gaddis, though, is more subtle yet." - Peter Dempsey, The Guardian
  
  
• "Fortunately, unlike the rest of Gaddis's output, it isn't very long, but there are more than enough impacted arguments about the decline of western civilisation (...) to keep the reader cross-eyed for quite some time." - Alfred Hickling, The Guardian
  
  
• "Agape Agape is also composed as a collage of texts, though it is much leaner than the others, a last delirious solo. More than the other books, this one makes a subject of its own (un)making, and dramatises the predicament of the author in the process." - Hal Foster, London Review of Books
  
  
• "(D)ie Suada eines alten Mannes, der vom Furor seiner Jugend nichts verloren hat. (...) Vom Esprit und von der Dynamik des polemischen Monologs ganz abgesehen, ist bemerkenswert, wie Gaddis seine Abrechnung mit der amerikanischen 'Technikbesessenheit' instrumentiert hat." - Uwe Pralle, Neue Zürcher Zeitung
  
  
• "Despite its slimness, it can still be exhausting at times. As always, Gaddis plays with punctuation, his sentences are splintered and repetitious, quotes and half-quotes and references float into and out of the monologue like water. Yet there’s something on virtually every page -- an idea, a turn of phrase, a bit of invective, a peculiar historical note -- that stopped me for a moment." - Jim Knipfel, New York Press
  
  
• "(I)ts every strange sentence carries full disciplined intention, hurtling toward synthesis even as it writhes and rails. (...) Agape Agape is not, even by the most generous allowance, a novel. A thinly veiled autobiographical rant does not a fiction make. But neither is it just a brimstone tract." - Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "This is not a hard book, but a rich one. It is not like an onion or Russian doll whose hidden depths reveal new mysteries. It is a precisely cut diamond whose brilliance appears at first glance but whose myriad facets -- a dance of light and shadow -- multiply through reflection." - J. Peder Zane, News & Observer
  
  
• "Gaddis enthusiasts looking for anything particularly original in Agape Agape will be disappointed. But for anyone who wants to see the familiar Gaddis references and themes played out one last time, it’s an extremely interesting final testament of a great artist facing that most ruthless of all democratizers, death" - Thomas Hove, Review of Contemporary Fiction
  
  
• "(E)ither the last true masterpiece of the 20th century or the first of our new millennium. (...) Agape Agape is a book to savor, to read aloud, to repeat as desired." - Andrew Ervin, San Francisco Chronicle
  
  
• "Veering wildly from cogent argument to rant, the narrative tone is brilliantly realised, and yet the central thread remains clear. (...) Although not in itself an original idea, the way in which Gaddis expresses it is striking not only for its force but also for its paradoxical coherence." - John de Falbe, The Spectator
  
  
• "Gaddis's most revealing affinities lie with nineteenth-century authors, such as Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Melville and Emerson. (...) Reflecting all that has been left out and the collapse of a larger project, Agape Agape derives much of its poignancy from its status as the last word of one of the most significant American authors of the last century." - Stephen Burn, Times Literary Supplement
  
  
• "(A)s difficult and pleasurable as its title. It is many things: a gloriously messy précis of his decades-long obsession with the player piano and the sundering of the communal love (agape) he believed it signaled; the materialization of a book by the same name that JR's Jack Gibbs toils over; and a feedback-leaking cover version of Concrete, a 1982 novel by the Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard" - Ed Park, Voice Literary Supplement
  
  
• "Agape Agape was written by Gaddis with the understanding that it would be his last published act as an author. That crushing awareness of his own end nearing is palpable on every page. As a consequence, the writing is as deeply melancholic as it is direct. Thoughts are expressed without frills and with the utmost urgency." - Paul Maliszewski, Wilson Quarterly

  Quotes:

• "The book is mainly a free-form rant, however, with the sentences, yes, run the sentences, run together, make it choppy, even easier than it looks but no what no, what matters is the art. (...) The novel did manage to stab me with its final note (...) but I was moved for the very reasons that Gaddis denigrated throughout his career: because I was touched by the human shambles. I was thinking of the artist, not the art." - Jonathan Franzen, The New Yorker (30/9/2002)

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       The words of the title, Agape Agape, are both the yawning chasm (and open-mouthed wondering) of the English word, and the early church love feast (as Gaddis calls it) that is the Greek word (with a distinguishing diacritical mark over the ultimate e). Agape -- the Greek one -- is one of the things the narrator misses in the contemporary world, and especially the contemporary arts, where imitation and mindless reproduction often and easily pushes aside true innovation and creativity:

That natural merging of created life in this creation in love that transcends it, a celebration of the love that created it they called agape, that love feast in the early church, yes. That's what's lost, what you don't find in these products of the imitative arts that are made for reproduction on a grand scale

No but you see I've got to explain all this because I don't, we don't know how much time there is left

along comes Bentham with "Pushpin is as good as poetry if the quantity of pleasure given is the same" see that word quantity ?

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Links:

• Penguin publicity page
• Agape Agape at The Gaddis Annotations

• Buchkritik.at (German)
• Entertainment Weekly
• Fractious Fiction
• The Guardian (1)
• The Guardian (2)
• Leselust (German)
• Publishers Weekly
• RainTaxi
• The Readerville Journal
• San Francisco Chronicle
• taz (German)

• The Gaddis Annotations
• Interview from the Review of Contemporary Fiction
• Remembering Mr. Gaddis by Steven Moore, at Conjunctions
• Last Words of William Gaddis by Paul Maliszewski, at the Wilson Quarterly

• J R
• The Recognitions
• The Rush for Second Place
• See also Jack Green's Fire the Bastards !

• See Index of Contemporary American fiction

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About the Author:

       American author William Gaddis (1922-1998) won two National Book Awards (for J.R. and A Frolic of His Own) and a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship.

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