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[...] It employs none of the fictive habits, the prompts and crutches and connective tissue of narrative. Time slips around like an eel. Place is bulldozed. Characters have no identity save for the words they speak and they speak the speakable with tireless abandon. There is no communion, no closure. There are rants. Mad soliloquies. Offended ripostes, offensive parries. Almost everyone accounted for is indignant, baffled, enraged, duplicitous, misunderstood, or misunderstanding. [...]
[...] They are both so miserable and distracted in their marriage that they harbor a flatulent drifter in their home, both thinking he is the other's father. [...]
i didnt even notice this lmao but it's so funny (dicephalis couple)
We are ... swept along. Mr. Gaddis confessed that he wanted us to be, in this flow of unremitting talk -- "might miss a lot but that's what life is, after all? Missing something that's right before you?" His characters can't or won't communicate in any meaningful way. [...]
During all the years he worked on J R, he was dutifully laboring for a paycheck from the corporate machine -- Kodak, Ford, IBM, Pfizer ("an operation of international piracy") -- writing ad copy and position papers [...] He knew the cant of marketing well and was ever alert to systems of speech, of persuasion, of obfuscation, seeing and portraying the American way of waste -- the waste of nature, talent, energy, the waste that markets, systems, management demand for gtowth.