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    Carpenter's Gothic
    Carpenter's Gothic
    Carpenter's Gothic
    Audiobook9 hours

    Carpenter's Gothic

    Written by William Gaddis

    Narrated by Nick Sullivan

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    This story of raging comedy and despair centers on the tempestuous marriage of an heiress and a Vietnam veteran. From their "carpenter gothic" rented house, Paul sets himself up as a media consultant for Reverend Ude, an evangelist mounting a grand crusade that conveniently suits a mining combine bidding to take over an ore strike on the site of Ude's African mission.

    At the still center of the breakneck action is Paul's wife, Liz, and over it all looms the shadowy figure of McCandless, a geologist from whom Paul and Liz rent their house. As Paul mishandles the situation, his wife takes the geologist to her bed and a fire and aborted assassination occur; Ude issues a call to arms as harrowing as any Jeremiad-and Armageddon comes rapidly closer.

    Displaying Gaddis's inimitable virtuoso dialogue, and his startling treatments of violence and sexuality, Carpenter's Gothic "shows again that Gaddis is among the first rank of contemporary American writers" (Malcolm Bradbury, The Washington Post Book World).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateMay 1, 2018
    ISBN9781541484344
    Carpenter's Gothic
    Author

    William Gaddis

    William Thomas Gaddis, Jr. was a novelist and author of War Without Bloodshed, a Simon & Schuster book.

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    Reviews for Carpenter's Gothic

    4/5

    139 ratings9 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Four stars only because it falls a notch below the others novels I've read by William Gaddis. For someone new to his work, this may be the best first read as it's short and relatively easy to follow.
    • 5/5
      I must warn you, I have no qualms calling Gaddis the greatest novelist of the later twentieth century, and perhaps ever. I am an unrepentant fanboy. So my star rating is completely untrustworthy. Anyway, on to my thoughts.

      This is the shortest and best titled of Gaddis' real books (I don't count Agape Agape). Carpenter's Gothic, one of the characters tells us, is a style of American architecture. The builders tried to imitate European neo-gothic, but did so from the outside in: the houses have turrets and towers, they're pointlessly tall but rarely spread out into all that land that American houses have to spread out into. The inside is a hodgepodge, because what the architects cared about was how it looked from the outside. So the rooms are divided in irrational, silly and unhelpful ways; there are false walls and weird shapes. Examples of neo-gothic include Westminster in London and the Cologne Cathedral. It's often considered to be an adjunct of political or theological conservatism, vs the liberalism of neo-classical architecture. You can't actually squash such buildings down into a house shape, and nor should you.

      Gothic is a literary mode that Austen mocked wonderfully well in Northanger Abbey, and that lives on in various forms today (i.e., all that vampire and werewolf fiction). The original gothic novels often take place in a neo-gothic country manor, and involve (doomed) romance and fantastic or inexplicable events, with improbable, convoluted plots and twists.

      You see where this is headed: CG takes place in a 'carptenter's gothic' (modern American analogue of the) country manor. It involves romance, an improbable, convoluted plot, and a mysterious concluding twist. But whereas gothic authors will either leave the actual cause of the mysteries unclear (think: James' 'Turn of the Screw'), or explained them as simple natural phenomena, Gaddis explains the mysteries by way of American overseas neo-colonialism and general masculine stupidity. Using old literary forms in new ways to criticize real world things gets me very hot under the collar (compare also: McCarthy's use of epic tropes in 'Blood Meridian' and Robinson's use of spiritual autobiography in 'Gilead').

      But I get positively *steamy* when a novel includes very little descriptive prose, a lot of dialogue, rants about the state (i.e., bad) of the world, and a high degree of irony about its own heart-felt rants. Check, check, check.

      Liz sits in the middle of an awkward love quadrangle, between her husband Paul, drunken self-righteous mansplainer and general symbol for American litigiousness, fiscal religiosity, rapaciousness, and (borderline) rape; her landlord McCandless, a hopeless self-righteous liberal who owns the carptenter's gothic and knows everything but does nothing because everything's f*cked anyway, and whose rants about other people's guilt make very clear that he's as guilty as the rest of us if not more so; and her brother Billy, a grasping self-righteous post-hippy who is *totally* not to blame for his own failures. They all insist on being very, very different from each other but the differences are minimal to non-existent: they hector Liz at every opportunity, about different things, sure, but that makes no difference to her as she lies around more or less incapable of leaving her house except to see a doctor.

      Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the United States of America, designed to look like a grand, albeit conservative Olde Europe, but from the inside nothing but a mess, inhabited by the sick/dying, and three kinds of self-righteous horror.

      McCandless screams with rage that "the greatest source of anger is fear, the greatest source of hatred is anger and the greatest source of all of it is this mindless revealed religion anywhere you look", and, from within his locked room in the carpenter's gothic mansion, mocks "their deep religious convictions and that's what they are, they're convicts locked up in some shabby fiction doing life without parole". He's right that religious violence is revolting, right that the endemic conflicts of Africa are down to "money from the West and guns from the East," but won't do anything about it. As Liz finally tells him, "you're the one who wants Apocalypse... you're the one who can't wait! The brimstone and fire and your Rift like the day it really happened because they, because you despise their, not their stupidity, no, their hopes because you haven't any, because you haven't any left." Liberal America.

      Paul is more or less incoherent and concerned only with greed and the conspiratorial liberal god-damned media who have all the power... with the powerless, useless McCandless as their representative. American Conservatives.

      Billy hates his father, tries to solve the problems in African and (spoiler) dies in a plane crash. American Radicals.

      So in short, Gaddis is smarter than us, writes better than almost anyone alive (if you even kind of like DFW, read Gaddis, who got in earlier, did it better, and knows much more about the world), and is funnier than almost everyone. Of his three first books, this is the worst. Just imagine that: this is just okay by Gaddis's standards.
    • 5/5
      an absolute box of matches! couldn't put it down. there are blocks and blocks of text that have voices carrying the so called plot or expository bit that baits the reader along uncovering the parts of each character as if engaged in the childhood sort of game turning over one card in a plot arranged 4x4—matching the pairs trying to remember which row the one that matches was when you had unsuccessfully failed to figure out what relevance it had (you get the picture)... and how gaddis has the mysterious mister mccandless spout something about striking gold thirty years before. that he didn't receive the recognition for his first effort and then how it was all he put into it and I've not read all bit as in his big book though it sits on my nightstand. but as for this book which is a later work, gaddis has been around the world by this point so many times and seen it all so many times that he puts this out like just to show he's still got it. comparisons: it should be worth it if you like Faulkner Vonnegut bernhard etc. it just made me think instantly of as I Iay dying, sound/fury. I love gaddis. such a demanding writer but I'd take any of him over Pynchon. or barth. maybe only nabokov who's as playful as a cat can really match him here. basically: soo much dialogue. but beautiful bits of prose and something of a plot. but nothing is for everyone. and the book ends without proper punctuation (as there is no final period) what's up with that
    • 4/5
      One of Gaddis' shorter books, but one that still requires a Herculean effort to read. A gigantic sprawl of dialogue.
    • 4/5
      High satire from this American master. Its briefer length makes it a better introduction that the longish JR. The Recognitions remains the jewel of Gaddis' oeuvre.
    • 4/5
      The whole novel takes place inside the house, which ends up being as much a character as any of the others. Does the house represent existence? Having it intricately Gothic on the outside, a shoddily constructed, falling apart piece of crap on the inside, does that show reality itself to be only a facade, an illusion? The falling apart on the inside representing the 2nd law of thermodynamics? Or has reading this book made me just as crazy as some of the characters?The only actions outside of the house are related by the characters (the book is almost all confusing, chaotic dialogue—and even when it isn't, it's difficult to decipher where the dialogue ends, and the narration begins). You can't count on the characters to tell the truth. So you don't know what to believe. As for the characters, I found I didn't really like any of them. But that's okay, because I get the feeling neither did Gaddis.I don't recall a book that has left me more ambivalent about how I felt about it. Obviously, from the rating I gave it, you can tell that I finally decided that I enjoyed it. But that wasn't my initial response. Right after finishing it, I was glad it was over, and didn't have any desire to read Gaddis' other four books. It took me the better part of a day to climb out of that mess of disjointed dialogue, and get to a place of understanding. Now that I've had time to reflect and absorb everything, I have a profound appreciation for what Gaddis was doing. Now I am excited about reading his other novels. I just wish there were more of them!
    • 4/5
      This is a book which moves forward almost entirely in a fugue-like conversation. It's so short, you almost don't get used to the style. A woman, who we learn has somewhat diminished capacity, has rented a carpenter's gothic house overlooking the Hudson some distance north of New York City. She has a hard time remembering things, doesn't express herself well, and has a constant series of doctors' appointments. Also, she wears the evidence of the abuse her husband has inflicted on her.The story poses more questions than it intends to answer, it would appear. What's really wrong with our renter, Mrs. Booth? Does her husband, whose visit threatens more violence, intend to pull the same sort of trick with Mrs. Booth's friend, Edie? Is McCandless, the owner of the house, an espionage worker and mineral-rights tycoon, or a pathological liar?We end in terrible menace. Mrs. Booth is dead, and Mr. Booth, now heir to a tidy fortune, climbs into a limousine with Edie. Mrs. Booth's brother dies, too, in a plane crash with a Senator. It was probably just me, but I remain confused about a lot of it to this day.Confusing, fascinating, effective, eerie, unpredictable. Spend some time with this book and cut yourself adrift from certainty. In this case, it's fun!
    • 5/5
      From this hilariously vicious satire you get the overwhelming impression that there is simply nobody that William Gaddis didn't hate. I try not to assume that an author uses their characters as nothing but mouthpieces for their own views, but this sort of fevered and incredibly tense bile-spitting half-conversation had to come from somewhere, didn't it? Or is it simply that good a satire? A truly, savagely seething novel and one of the best things I've yet read. If this is Gaddis' weakest work - as the general consensus seems to be - how great are his other novels? Call me excited.
    • 5/5
      Brilliant but exasperating book-- Gaddis decided to write a whole book of dialog, but it's dialog on the phone, and the reader only gets one side of the conversation. Assimilating the plot in this book is oddly similar to the way we assimilate our everyday lives. A chore to read, but worth the trouble.