JR - a novel, by William Gaddis

Something that I think I will end up saying a lot: consuming it is like living life.

That is one of the things I liked most about JR. From the beginning I thought it was amazing, but also tiresome, strangely paced with almost all dialogue, scenes that seem to go on way too long, transitions across varying degrees of space and time that were easy to miss, things that could be called gimmicks that were entertaining at first but then kept going (such as frantic yet stagnant pages with all the words from one side of confusing phone conversations). It wasn't until half way through its 726 or so pages (and probably about a month of very occasional reading) that I finally actually got into it. It was at this point I began to realise how like life the novel is, like a microcosm of life, like living all of life compressed into 700 pages. The occasional bits of non dialogue seemed complete in a way even though they actually weren't, were more like poetry or something that only contained necessary fragments that you had to piece together yourself to figure out what was going on. This is what the whole thing was like, sometimes in individual sentences or scenes in themselves or scenes combined with a few other scenes or scenes combined with all the other scenes (I use the words scene because it is written very much like a film or something, just without the visual aid most of the time, which means to have to work hard all the time to create -- and, ending the brackets but also keeping in them because this is the follow on point to both before and now, the whole book, whether you try or not, forces some degree of active creation so that you become a better person, a smarter person, by the very act of reading it.