SOURCE: "A Legal Lampoon Loses on Appeal," in Newsweek, Vol. CXXIII, No. 3, January 17, 1994, p. 52.

[In the following review, Jones offers a negative appraisal of A Frolic of His Own, arguing that in this book Gaddis "hasn't met his own high standards" established with The Recognitions, JR, and Carpenter's Gothic.]

Time has never been kind to the novelist William Gaddis. In the '50s his first novel, The Recognitions, helped inaugurate an era where so-called difficult writers were lionized. But while the Pynchons and Gasses and Coovers—writers with similarly dark visions who forsook traditional ways of telling a story—reaped the benefits of his labors, Gaddis toiled on in relative obscurity. Two decades later he published JR, and again he was ahead of the curve. That vicious satire of American business was the perfect '80s novel. Unfortunately, it appeared in 1975. Reviews were good, but sales were meager...