J R

J R is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1975 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., J R was Gaddis's second novel and received the National Book Award in 1976. J R tells the story of the eponymous 11-year-old boy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes American financial markets. The novel is told almost entirely in dialogue, an... more

J R is a novel by William Gaddis. Published in 1975 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., J R was Gaddis's second novel and received the National Book Award in 1976. J R tells the story of the eponymous 11-year-old boy who obscures his identity through payphone calls and postal money orders in order to parlay penny stock holdings into a fortune on paper. The novel broadly satirizes American financial markets. The novel is told almost entirely in dialogue, and there is sometimes little indication (other than conversational context) of which character is speaking. There are also no chapters, with transitions between scenes occurring by way of shifts in focalization: for example, a character who is in a meeting may leave the meeting, get in his car, and drive off, passing, as he does so, another character, who becomes the subject of the next scene without any break in the continuity of the narration (though the novel is written in a discontinuous or fragmentary tone). The novel is thus broken only... less