Perhaps William Gaddis' most accessible novel--though a dense and imposing book--A Frolic of His Own is a masterful work that mocks the folly of a litigious society. The story centers around Oscar Crease, the grandson of a Confederate soldier who avoided a deadly battle by invoking a legal clause that allowed him to hire a substitute and who later became a Supreme Court judge. Oscar writes a play about his grandfather that goes unproduced yet appears as the story behind a big-budget Hollywood film. Oscar sues and is tossed into the vortex of litigation. Meanwhile, almost 20 other lawsuits of varying frivolity swirl about, adding to this satirical and philosophical treat, which won the National Book Award for 1994.

From Publishers Weekly
The author of Carpenter's Gothic (and winner of a 1993 Lannan Award) takes a brash, entertaining swipe at the legal profession in his fourth novel. Oscar Crease is a quiet, middle-aged history professor whose father and grandfather were both high-ranking judges. The story begins as Oscar contemplates two lawsuits: one against the Japanese manufacturer of the car that ran over him; the other against a filmmaker Oscar claims stole his play, Once at Antietam , and turned it into a gory, lavish movie. Before long, the legal wranglings, strategic maneuvering and--of course--the whopping bills dominate Oscar's life and wreak havoc on his relationships. There is no description or third-person narrative. Like Carpenter's Gothic , which is rendered wholly in dialogue, this narrative is a cacophony of heard and found voices: Oscar's conversations with his myriad lawyers, his flighty girlfriend, his patient sister and her lawyer husband are all spliced with phone calls, readings from Oscar's play and various legal documents. Rather than slow the action down, these documents add to the grim melee. This is a wonderful novel, aswirl with the everyday inanity of life; it may also be the most scathing attack ever published on our society's litigious ways. Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
When Oscar Crease, an obscure history teacher, discovers that a new Hollywood film borrows heavily from his own unpublished Civil War play, he immediately sues for plagiarism. Meanwhile, Crease's brother-in-law, a corporate attorney, is struggling with a trade name dispute brought by the Episcopal Church against the anagrammatic Pepsi-Cola Company, and Oscar's father, irascible federal judge ThomasCrease, is deep in a "media circus" trial involving a dog trapped in a piece of junk sculpture. Gaddis's fourth novel is written in the cacophonous style that he perfected in his National Book Award winner, JR ( LJ 9/15/75). Conversation, recorded verbatim, is full of jargon, non sequiturs, and misunderstanding. No effort is made to identify the speakers, and blaring televisions and offstage noise drown out the words. The end result is a mordant analysis of a society overrun with lawyers, presented in a format that mirrors the chaos of modern life. An essential purchase for all literature collections.- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Gaddis--for all the brevity of his oeuvre--sits atop the Mount Olympus of U.S. experimental writers. His fourth novel in nearly 40 years will only help to secure his position there; it rests expansively on a theme representing one of the most flabbergasting aspects of contemporary American life, our litigiousness. Oscar Crease is a college teacher, author of a play derived from his grandfather's Civil War experiences. He's livid because a Hollywood producer has lifted his idea for use as a movie. Oscar's suing, and over the duration of the legal life of his case, he and all the people around him engage in conversation about the issue at hand as well as side issues and life in more general terms. Thus the novel is primarily a stream of dialogue often wandering far away from--but always returning to--its main premise. As Henry James wrote novels and short stories about the artist at the mercy of the mundane world, so Gaddis has woven a complex tapestry about the same situation. Readers familiar with Gaddis and/or appreciative of experimentation in narrative will be served a banquet of ideas and language; those whose tastes tend toward the traditional will leave the table early and go back to the likes of Willa Cather. Brad Hooper

From Kirkus Reviews
Greed and its destruction of independent authenticity is Gaddis's best subject, and with it here he has essentially rewritten his masterpiece, JR (1975)--not so much with business as the focus (as in that earlier book) but with lawyers. A ne'er-do-well college instructor, Oscar Crease, has written a long, sludgy philosophical Civil War play that he once sent off desperately to a TV producer; years later, a Hollywood blockbuster movie seems to duplicate (though only in Crease's mind) some of the stuff in the play. Crease sues--plagiarism--and is promptly sucked down into wholesale legal disaster: depositions, bills, opinions, more bills, appeals, more bills, bills and bills. His half-sister Christina and her establishment law-firm partner husband try to steer him through--but everyone gets drowned in the tidal wave of litigiousness. Meanwhile, Crease's own elderly father, a federal judge, is, as a sidebar, a stereoscopic whack at the legal system, simultaneously ruling on a case involving a dog killed while stuck in a piece of public sculpture (the book's most mordantly funny set-piece). Here, like JR, the novel is one of voices that are remarkably faithful to the real patterns of speech--interrupted, trivial, saying most when no one else seems to be listening. Paragraphs of speeded-up narrative link the voices, which are also interspersed now and then with depositions and judicial opinions. Gaddis's paranoid comedy of skepticism (some of it fairly cheap: a director named Jonathan Livingston Siegel, a car company called Sosumi Motors) pushes relentlessly forward... ...but if you've read a quarter of the book, you've read the whole thing: clever and brilliant though it is, it feels like a massive imposition on your time. Gaddis seems to want to prove the novel capable of film's open mike and panning shots, music's structure, and opera's recitatives (everyone only screeches and beseeches)--but once he has, all that finally seems left is a rather tinny note of pissed-off energy and formal subordination. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

With the publication of the Recognitions in 1955, William Gaddis was hailed as the American heir to James Joyce. His two subsequent novels, J R (winner of the National Book Award) and Carpenter's Gothic, have secured his position among America's foremost contemporary writers. Now A Frolic of His Own, his long-anticipated fourth novel, adds more luster to his reputation, as he takes on life in our litigious times. "Justice? - You get justice in the next world, in this world you have the law." So begins this mercilessly funny, devastatingly accurate tale of lives caught up in the toils of the law. Oscar Crease, middle-aged college instructor, savant, and playwright, is suing a Hollywood producer for pirating his play Once at Antietam, based on his grandfather's experiences in the Civil War, and turning it into a gory blockbuster called The Blood in the Red White and Blue. Oscar's suit, and a host of others - which involve a dog trapped in an outdoor sculpture, wrongful death during a river baptism, a church versus a soft drink company, and even Oscar himself after he is run over by his own car - engulf all who surround him, from his freewheeling girlfriend to his well-to-do stepsister and her ill-fated husband (a partner in the white-shoe firm of Swyne & Dour), to his draconian, nonagenarian father, Federal Judge Thomas Crease, who has just wielded the long arm of the law to expel God (and Satan) from his courtroom. And down the tortuous path of depositions and decrees, suits and countersuits, the most lofty ideas of our culture - questions about the value of art, literature, and originality - will be wrung dry in the meticulous, often surreal logic and language of the law, leaving no party unscathed. Gaddis has created a whirlwind of a novel, which brilliantly reproduces the Tower of Babel in which we conduct our lives. In A Frolic of His Own we hear voices as they speak at and around one another: lawyers, family members, judges, rogues, hucksters, and desperate

FROM THE CRITICS

Michiko Kakutani

There is almost no conventional narrative in A Frolic of His Own ; most of the book consists of nothing but voices characters creating themselves out of words, out of conversations, asides and ruminations. Heated conversations about death and money and sex are interrupted with murmurings about lunch and tea. Petty arguments about legal proceedings are sprinkled with allusions to Shakespeare and Plato.... Despite Mr. Gaddis's antic humor, this can make for laborious reading.... As a result of this highly oblique approach, Mr. Gaddis's provocative vision of modern society is purchased at a price, the price of hard work and frequent weariness on the part of the reader. -- New York Times

New York Times Books of the Century

...[An] exceptionally rich novel....[R]eaders who laugh their way through to the end may find it impossible to get the rhythms and sounds of [the] voices out of their imaginations.

Publishers Weekly

The author of Carpenter's Gothic (and winner of a 1993 Lannan Award) takes a brash, entertaining swipe at the legal profession in his fourth novel. Oscar Crease is a quiet, middle-aged history professor whose father and grandfather were both high-ranking judges. The story begins as Oscar contemplates two lawsuits: one against the Japanese manufacturer of the car that ran over him; the other against a filmmaker Oscar claims stole his play, Once at Antietam, and turned it into a gory, lavish movie. Before long, the legal wrangling, strategic maneuvering and--of course--the whopping bills dominate Oscar's life and wreak havoc on his relationships. There is no description or third-person narrative. Like Carpenter's Gothic, which is rendered wholly in dialogue, this narrative is a cacophony of heard and found voices: Oscar's conversations with his myriad lawyers, his flighty girlfriend, his patient sister and her lawyer husband are all spliced with phone calls, readings from Oscar's play and various legal documents. Rather than slow the action down, these documents add to the grim melee. This is a wonderful novel, aswirl with the everyday inanity of life; it may also be the most scathing attack ever published on our society's litigious ways. (Jan.)

Library Journal

When Oscar Crease, an obscure history teacher, discovers that a new Hollywood film borrows heavily from his own unpublished Civil War play, he immediately sues for plagiarism. Meanwhile, Crease's brother-in-law, a corporate attorney, is struggling with a trade name dispute brought by the Episcopal Church against the anagrammatic Pepsi-Cola Company, and Oscar's father, irascible federal judge Thomas Crease, is deep in a ``media circus'' trial involving a dog trapped in a piece of junk sculpture. Gaddis's fourth novel is written in the cacophonous style that he perfected in his National Book Award winner, JR ( LJ 9/15/75). Conversation, recorded verbatim, is full of jargon, non-sequiturs, and misunderstanding. No effort is made to identify the speakers, and blaring televisions and offstage noise drown out the words. The end result is a mordant analysis of a society overrun with lawyers, presented in a format that mirrors the chaos of modern life. An essential purchase for all literature collections. -- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law School. Lib., Los Angeles

Library Journal