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  • Life at Work
  • Marie Fahd (bio)
Nothing Grew But the Business: On the Life and Work of William Gaddis
Joseph Tabbi
Northwestern University Press
www.nupress.northwestern.edu/content/nobody-grew-business
304 Pages; Print, $35.00

"Perhaps in my 70th year the time has come to set forth some attempt at a cohesive 'philosophy' that this accumulation had tried to express." These words from the author of A Frolic of His Own (1994) reached the ears of a well-known scholar, Joseph Tabbi, who embodies what any serious Gaddis reader ought to be: an apt and thorough listener.

In this long-awaited biography entitled Nothing Grew but the Business, Tabbi provides a magnificent source book on the life and work of a major, innovative American writer of the twentieth century. Tabbi's book is all the more welcome as Gaddis was secretive and self-effacing, eluding any biographical questions in interviews.

In twelve chapters, Tabbi retraces the personal and professional career of the distinguished writer. He takes the reader on a complex and uncharted journey that sheds new light on Gaddis's intellectual and artistic makeup as well as his rise within the evolving American corporate system.

Tabbi's approach is groundbreaking insofar as he brings to the fore the intertwining of Gaddis's life and work, giving deep insight into both while drawing on eloquent examples of the author at his wittiest and most incisive. He demonstrates how Gaddis's observations on the corporate world set the tone for an astute reflection on the emerging culture of business and technology, paving the way for the elimination of failure—though the latter was for Gaddis a precondition for artistic success. Tabbi shows how the novelist's job as a corporate ghostwriter led to a change in Gaddis's aesthetic, beginning with his second novel, JR (1975), which records the collapse of the very notion of recognition that Gaddis had witnessed. As Tabbi explains, in JR the prescient novelist put in plain view what the American corporate system had come to espouse, namely "a life lived without recognition." The eponymous JR is "post-ideological" as he epitomizes the total absence of belief and illustrates the drive to profitability.

Most importantly, Tabbi draws attention to the unique place this author occupies in literature. First of all, there is Gaddis's unconventionality. Throughout his literary output, Gaddis goes from being a "traditionalist" writer in the vein of T. S. Eliot (The Recognitions [1955]) to becoming a forerunner of postmodernism (JR, Carpenter's Gothic [1985], A Frolic of His Own [1994], Agapē Agape [2002]). Yet, Tabbi deftly takes this outlook to another level and proffers a perspective that I wholeheartedly share. He stresses the deep sway that European literature exerted on the author. As a young student, the eight-year-old William was already reading Don Quixote (1615) with his fellow boarding school classmates. Throughout his entire writing career, he was deeply engrossed in European, as well as American, literature. From The Recognitions to Agapē Agape, his work reveals the influence of European authors, ranging from Rilke, Flaubert, Goethe, Tolstoy, and Du Maurier to Thomas Bernhard, to name a few. In addition, The Letters of William Gaddis (2013), edited by Steven Moore, bear witness to his lasting European literary influences. Secondly, Tabbi debunks the idea that Gaddis is "Mr. Difficult." He explains that the author's prose is accessible if the reader is willing to be a close listener. Gaddis's quest, he emphasizes, is to appeal to a small and demanding readership. It is a quest undoubtedly rooted in Gaddis's devoted correspondence with his mother and businesswoman Edith, whose trust in his talents was unswerving.

On virtually every page of this literary biography, Joseph Tabbi shows how Gaddis constantly drew upon his own family life throughout his novels. Tabbi gives, for instance, the illuminating example of the novel JR in which the aunts Anne and Julia Bast allude to their brother James who pursued a musical career as a composer. While this might seem to be no more than an entertaining anecdote, the very fact that it is grounded in reality reminds...

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