Literary Fiction · LightAn eleven-year-old schoolboy builds a vast paper fortune out of penny stocks, using only payphones and money orders
J R
An eleven-year-old schoolboy builds a business empire from a payphone
J R Vansant is an eleven-year-old schoolboy in a bleak, exaggerated version of Massapequa, New York. He hides his identity by using payphone calls and postal money orders, and he turns penny stocks into a large fortune on paper. He fills a run-down tenement apartment with the cheap goods he buys. A young composer named Bast, who has lost his teaching job for thinking independently, gets pulled into the business and drifts away from his music.
More about this book
Who
J R Vansant, an eleven-year-old schoolboy, and Bast, a young composer who works as his music teacher, plus Bast's artist friends Eigen and Gibbs.
World
An exaggerated Massapequa, New York, and a tenement on East 96th Street in Manhattan.
What makes it different
It is told almost entirely in dialogue, often without saying who is speaking, and has no chapters. Gaddis said he wanted readers to take part in creating the characters.
Feel
A comic satire of American money. It won the 1976 National Book Award for Fiction.
Page count and cover shown for: Selected edition
Behind the book
Gaddis lived in a tenement on East 96th Street and spent years in Massapequa, where the school board took much of his property through eminent domain. He half-jokingly said he wrote J R in revenge against Massapequa.
Source: Wikipedia
Further reading
- J RWikipedia