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A Frolic of His Own

by William Gaddis

Frolic has been serving as my subway reading for nearly two weeks now. It is fun and funny, but also a bit of work -- since almost everything is dialog you have to really keep on top of who's speaking to whom, and what context they are in.

The dialog is just delightfully musical. I find myself almost nodding along to the rhythm of it -- Gaddis has captured the cadences of his characters' lives perfectly. The humor is stylistically a bit like that of Frazier (the TV sitcom I mean) but way funnier.

September 22, 2000

On the subway this morning, I figured out what attracts me about the rhythm of Gaddis' dialog, what makes it seem so natural. I have often noticed, when reading dialog, an artificial quality to the way that the different characters' lines are separated from each other -- when in real life, everyone is just as often talking at once. In Frolic, characters' lines are woven together in much the same way that I hear people talking to each other every day; it is a very clever naturalistic technique.

September 26, 2000

Frolic is a hard book to put down, which strangely makes it an excellent subway book. I think if I had not decided to read it on the subway, I would have plowed through it in two or three sittings, and not gotten much from it.

I had originally focussed on Christina and Harry as being perhaps a little more together than the other characters, like I could look to them to uphold sanity in the text. But now I see that was foolish -- they are as cynical and inattentive as anyone else in the book.

October 3, 2000

I finished the book tonight -- I find it pretty amazing that Gaddis was able to maintain the frenetic pace of the book over such a long read. It is a beautifully crafted book; however I don't think a great one. I was not able to identify with the characters for any sustained period, though I had moments of understanding each major character, by and large they seemed like chickens running around with their heads cut off. That worked well for a darkly comic effect -- this was a very funny book -- but I think the book could have been something more. There were moments where it seemed to be yearning to transcend, but it never quite came together.

I think I will read JR sometime before too long, though; maybe it will have what I'm looking for.