SOURCE: "No Justice, Only the Law," in The New York Times Book Review, January 9, 1994, pp. 1, 22.

[Towers is an American novelist and educator. In the following highly favorable review of A Frolic of His Own, he praises the novel's humor, satire, and focus on language and the law, suggesting that the reader not be discouraged by the difficulties of Gaddis's style.]

William Gaddis is the formidably talented writer whose work—until A Frolic of His Own—has been, I suspect, more likely to intimidate or repel his readers than to lure them into his fictional world. His first novel, The Recognitions (1955), is one of late modernism's sacred monsters, a 900-page display of polymathic erudition, which, though crowded with incident and allusion, shows minimal concern for narrative movement or the in-depth portrayal of any of its myriad characters. With JR (1975) Mr. Gaddis developed and ruthlessly exploited a technique of almost...