William Gaddis's final work, Agape Agape, is an effective distillation of his philosophy and a powerful personal statement regarding the state of modern culture. The book is written in the form of a disjointed, stream-of-consciousness monologue delivered by a dying elderly man, himself attempting to complete his final work, a social history of the player piano in America. Desperate to complete his work before the onset of madness or death and fighting the effects of medication, the frantic narrator offers a meandering discussion of his work, which explores technology's artistically stifling influence. The narrator has isolated a particularly profound example of this in the player piano, an artistic invention that alternately replaced the artist. Technology, the narrator argues, has heightened the value of passivity, entertainment, and mediocrity, leading to the impending "collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look." The narrator fervently claims that only through artistic courage can we achieve understanding, transcendence, and discover the uniting spirit of creativity, a brotherly "agape" love.

As Joseph Tabbi explains in his informative afterword, Agape Agape is the result of years of research and consideration by Gaddis, and the novella explores technological advancement and the response to this advancement, both actual and hypothetical, by such figures as Nietzsche, Walter Benjamin, and Tolstoy. While an impressive work of scholarship, Agape Agape is foremost an emotional decree, Gaddis's final statement of outrage and sadness at our cultural direction and a plea for change. At less than 100 sparsely punctuated pages, the book is an efficient combustion of energy and an affecting depiction of personal and cultural disintegration. At once a condemnation, warning, and affirmation, it reflects Gaddis's apprehensions but also his enduring faith in the power of creation. A worthwhile starting point for newcomers to Gaddis's work, Agape Agape is a memorable end to the career of a gifted thinker. --Ross Doll

From Publishers Weekly
Published after his death in 1998, this final novel by Gaddis is a brief but noteworthy commentary on the state of creativity and the arts at the close of the 20th century. Gaddis has compressed 50 years of research on the social history of the player piano into a novel narrated by a dying elderly man who is as concerned with his own physical collapse as he is with his piano-based literary project. Gaddis's cultural jumping-off point is the late 19th and early 20th century, as he explores the coincidence between the advent of techniques of reproduction that made mass-produced art possible and the drop-off in artistic participation by hobbyists and ordinary people that soon followed. The title captures much of the essential concept, referring to the unique sense of wonder that arises during the creative process and that is now missing from our daily lives. As usual, Gaddis's avant-garde style requires patience and staying power from readers, who must parse long, elliptical sentences that wander from idea to idea while barely advancing the narrative. But his thoughts and ruminations remain fascinating and challenging, particularly when he manages to briefly focus his ramblings on such subjects as the publishing process, the nature of performing, the rise of such iconoclasts as Glenn Gould and the fractures that are beginning to appear in the fabric of cultural civilization as we currently know it. The brevity of this volume makes it relatively accessible for those new to this author (a cogent afterword by Joseph Tabbi helps too), and literary mavens who have followed Gaddis's career will mark this book as a brilliant closing effort from a groundbreaking novelist.Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Gaddis was one of America's most influential, albeit not widely known, 20th-century novelists. He wrote complex, large-scale works (JR being perhaps the most recognizable) that explored the inherent struggle between the artist and modern, corporate society. Written as he lay dying, this last fiction continues the same theme but in a much more succinct form-in 96 pages, to be exact. Its succinctness, however, does not make it any less complex. Like Gaddis himself, the narrator is dying as he addresses the reader directly in one long, stream-of-consciousness monolog. And again, like Gaddis, he is sorting through a lifetime's accumulation of notes and jottings, trying to bring together the thread of his story. It is basically a rant against the negative effects of modern technological society on the artist, the invention of the player piano being a major influence, as it allowed imitation to be mistaken for creation. The fertility of Gaddis's own mind is evident as his narrator wanders through his notes, seeking to make the connections that prove his point and to make sense of it all before he dies. This work will not attract a popular audience, but it is a very important one, as it has much to say about the author as man and artist. It also contains a very useful afterword by Joseph Tabbi. As such, it belongs in all academic and most larger public libraries.David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Peterburg, FLCopyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Over the course of four decades and four mazy and profound novels, Gaddis (1922-98) pondered the individual's place, especially that of the artist, in an increasingly mechanized, profit-driven world. Curiously, his elaborate inquiry into music, philosophy, literature, and the history of technology engendered an obsession with the player piano and its social implications. By eliminating any need for artistry, it robotized music making and helped pave the way for the "all or nothing" binary system and the now ubiquitous computer. Having collected a towering amount of material, Gaddis realized late in life that what was most compelling to him was not writing a nonfiction analysis, but rather fictionalizing, and satirizing, his quest to understand the consequences of the mechanization of the arts. And so in his incisive, caustically elegiac final novel, he conjures up an erudite, drug-addled old gent with a terminal illness, a true monomaniac, who delivers a torrential and trenchant monologue on art versus entertainment, authenticity versus imitation, and death and the dream of art's immortality. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

The New York Times Book Review
"An exalted, paranoid outcry, a last wounded proclamation of the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art."

Los Angeles Times
"Gaddis's final novel is perhaps his most poignant."

Book Description
William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas. For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career-long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts, Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

About the Author
William Gaddis (1922-1998) was a master of the American novel who was frequently compared with Joyce, Nabokov, and Pynchon. Two of his novels, J R and A Frolic of His Own, won the National Book Award. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the recipient of a MacArthur Prize. Joseph Tabbi was the first scholar to be given access to the Gaddis archives. He conducts research in American literature and new media writing at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a whole new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas." "For more than fifty years Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told via a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. This "man in the bed" lies dying, thinking anxiously about the book he still plans to write, grumbling about the deterioration of civilization and trying to explain his obsession to the world before he passes away or goes mad." Agape Agape continues Gaddis's career-long reflection via the form of the novel on those aspects of the corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts. It is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Published after his death in 1998, this final novel by Gaddis is a brief but noteworthy commentary on the state of creativity and the arts at the close of the 20th century. Gaddis has compressed 50 years of research on the social history of the player piano into a novel narrated by a dying elderly man who is as concerned with his own physical collapse as he is with his piano-based literary project. Gaddis's cultural jumping-off point is the late 19th and early 20th century, as he explores the coincidence between the advent of techniques of reproduction that made mass-produced art possible and the drop-off in artistic participation by hobbyists and ordinary people that soon followed. The title captures much of the essential concept, referring to the unique sense of wonder that arises during the creative process and that is now missing from our daily lives. As usual, Gaddis's avant-garde style requires patience and staying power from readers, who must parse long, elliptical sentences that wander from idea to idea while barely advancing the narrative. But his thoughts and ruminations remain fascinating and challenging, particularly when he manages to briefly focus his ramblings on such subjects as the publishing process, the nature of performing, the rise of such iconoclasts as Glenn Gould and the fractures that are beginning to appear in the fabric of cultural civilization as we currently know it. The brevity of this volume makes it relatively accessible for those new to this author (a cogent afterword by Joseph Tabbi helps too), and literary mavens who have followed Gaddis's career will mark this book as a brilliant closing effort from a groundbreaking novelist. (Oct. 14) Forecast: The publication of Agape Agape and the simultaneous release of The Rush for Second Place (Penguin), a collection of Gaddis's nonfiction, may spur reviewers to offer fresh overviews of Gaddis's career. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal