Carpenter’s Gothic

The test is subtractive, and it mostly fails to find anything idle. One house, one season, a handful of voices: the unities are the condition of the book, since its subject is what reaches a woman who cannot leave and is never listened to. Every telephone call carries a fact of the plot that the reader must catch in passing; drop one and a thread breaks. Two things hold the axis where it stands. Repetition is the method: Paul’s harangues about money, lawyers and the ministry return with small variations, and some returns make the reader feel the weight rather than add knowledge. And McCandless’s long late speech against the fundamentalists and the people who run them says at length what the action has already shown.

Score: 8.4 / 10

The disclosure can be stated and it holds: in the American 1980s the evangelist’s pulpit, the publicist’s pitch, the plaintiff’s lawsuit, the mining company’s concession and the intelligence service’s covert operation are one economy, each trading on the others’ falsifications, and language itself has been reduced to the pitch. A drowned child becomes a fund-raising problem; an air crash becomes a claim; a war in Africa becomes a story to manage. The second disclosure is quieter: Elizabeth, the one person who tries to speak plainly and to write, is the one no one hears, and the telephone is the instrument of her silencing. Held at the bar because much of the meaning is satire, which shows a condition from outside, and because McCandless states the thesis aloud.

Score: 8.5 / 10

A cold book, and it means to be. Its elevation has two sources. The descriptive passages between the calls, the light on the river, the bare trees, the wind in the house’s ornament, the seasons turning outside the windows Elizabeth looks through, reach a bleak and exact beauty, set against the noise inside. And the ending reaches dread: a woman dead alone in a house full of other people’s papers, while the world outside moves toward a war her family’s money helped to make. Between these the register is comic, abrasive or flat by design, and the heights are few and spaced. The descriptive passages are weighed on their manner and placing, not quoted.

Score: 7.8 / 10

The title names the myth and the book builds it. The Gothic novel is the frame: the heroine in an isolated house, the older and secretive master, the locked room she is told not to enter, here full of a failed writer’s manuscripts and of what the intelligence men want, the inheritance, the threat that comes in from outside. The plot runs on the locked room, the inheritance and the menace. The second myth is the Apocalypse the ministry preaches, which the plot brings toward fact in Africa, so that the believers’ prophecy is fulfilled by the people who sell it. Held below the bar because the Gothic is built as parody, its archetype acknowledged more than inhabited, and Elizabeth does not quite become the figure the frame makes room for.

Score: 8.2 / 10

The inheritance is twofold: the Gothic novel, and Gaddis’s own invention in JR, the novel made almost wholly of unattributed talk. The departure from the first is real: the Gothic turned into a domestic satire of Reagan’s America, the supernatural replaced by the conspiracies of money and faith. The departure from the second is a compression: a method that in JR needed a very long book and a whole town is made to work in one house and a short book, with long descriptive passages admitted as a counterweight to the talk. Gaddis described the book as an attempt at a short, conventional novel that observes the unities. But a writer turning his own instrument on a smaller object makes a lesser wager than inventing it, and the turn is of degree more than of kind.

Score: 8.1 / 10

Change the form and most of what the book knows goes. The unattributed dialogue makes the reader do what Elizabeth must do: work out who is speaking, what they want and what has happened elsewhere, from voices that talk past each other and never wait for an answer. The one-sided telephone call is the book’s figure for its whole world, speech without a listener. The descriptive passages, unhurried and silent, are the only places where anyone looks at anything, and they are tied to the house and the view, so the form sets attention against noise. The title states the form: Gothic ornament nailed onto a carpenter’s frame, the house, the novel’s mode, the ministry and the company alike. Held off the top because the plot’s machinery is sometimes delivered as information to be decoded rather than discovered.

Score: 8.8 / 10

Evidence over forty years, real but modest. The book rewards return in a particular way: much of its plot is hidden in passing remarks on the telephone, so a second reading finds events, causes and connections the first missed, and readers do reconstruct it: who knew what about the concession, what McCandless did before, how Elizabeth died. Criticism exists: Steven Moore’s study of Gaddis (1989) and the scholarship since treat it, and it figures in work on the novel of the religious right and on the American novel of dialogue. Held where it is because the bulk of the attention to Gaddis goes to The Recognitions and JR, and because part of what return yields is reconstruction of plot, which is difficulty before depth.

Score: 8.1 / 10

The field is the American novel of the 1980s, and this is the lowest of the twelve. The intrinsic force is real and bounded: the book showed that the large novel of systems could be compressed into a short domestic form without losing its social reach, and it turned the satire of money from JR onto the alliance of fundamentalism, media and covert foreign policy before that alliance was a common subject. What holds it here is reach: it moved little that its author’s larger books had not already moved, and Gaddis’s bearing on later American writers runs mainly through JR and The Recognitions. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: respectful and some enthusiastic reviews, no prize of note, and a standing as a way into Gaddis rather than as a model for the field.

Score: 7.6 / 10

Survival is weighed over forty-one years, on form, then presence, then fabric. Form and fabric take no charge: the text survives whole, as published, and has stayed in print. Presence is where the charge falls. The book is read by Gaddis’s readership and in the academy, and is often the book through which readers come to him, but it is not widely taught outside courses on postwar American fiction, and it is the least discussed of his three central novels. Its surface is partly fixed to its moment, Reagan’s America, the televangelist, a proxy war of the Cold War, the rotary telephone, though the alliance it satirises has outlived its occasion and reads as forecast rather than period.

Score: 8.5 / 10

Judged on Gaddis’s English, with no translation between. The command is exceptional and load-bearing. The dialogue catches American speech in its evasions, interruptions and self-pity, and lets each voice identify itself without a tag: Paul’s grievance and jargon, the callers’ sales talk, McCandless’s learned contempt, Elizabeth’s unfinished sentences. The descriptive passages are a different instrument, long, periodic, precise and patient, and the passing of days and the turn of the season are given only through what the windows show, without a single conventional transition. To hold so many threads in a short book of talk, with nothing explained, is a feat of construction. Charged a little: the deliberate monotony of Paul’s speech is sometimes monotony in fact, and the clues to the Africa plot are at times set too obscurely to be fair.

Score: 9.0 / 10

Take the two most distant elements: the still description of the river valley through a window, and a call about the ministry’s fund-raising after the drowned boy. They obey one law: in this world everything that speaks is selling, and the only things that do not sell, the landscape, the house’s bones, Elizabeth’s attempt at her own sentences, are the things no one attends to. The law holds from the marriage to the war in Africa: the same falsification, the same appetite, the same deafness. Charged a little: the satirical apparatus, the evangelist’s name and ministry and the comic litigation, runs to broader exaggeration than the domestic realism of the scenes with Elizabeth, and the Africa plot’s arrival at war is partly asserted from offstage.

Score: 8.8 / 10

For a short novel set in one house it holds many orders, and the house joins them. Consciousness, in Elizabeth, largely unspoken. Marriage, in the Booths, a union of debt and contempt. The family and inherited wealth, in the dead father, the company and Billy. Religion, as the ministry and its prophecy. The media, as Paul’s trade. The law, as litigation. Science against belief, in the evolution trial and McCandless’s geology. Capital and the earth, in the concession. The state and its covert power, in the intelligence men and the war. The natural order, in the river valley. History, through Vietnam and the Cold War. Each reaches the house as a voice wanting something from the woman in it. Held where it is because almost all of it is reached by report, at one remove, and labour and community are thin.

Score: 8.0 / 10