William Gaddis' tour de force, JR, attacks many … perversions of the American Dream, above all the materialism of Franklinian man. Adapting a stream of consciousness technique borrowed from Joyce and contemporary telephone conversation, Gaddis mercilessly lays bare the greed and essential mindlessness of those for whom wealth has become and end in itself—an obsessive end. His satire is particularly effective since he uses as his primary vehicle a twelve-year-old school boy who has mastered all of the jargon and methods of a Wall Street wizard constructing immense paper empires inevitably and fatally vulnerable to strangulation by the very tape which once held it together. But missing from Gaddis' overlong satirical saga, and its radical defect, is any sense or hint of a redeeming virtue. There is no music in his America, no poetry, despite the fact (or rather revealed by it) that one of his major characters...