William Gaddis’s Disorderly Inferno

I was (unreasonably) shocked to see from his photo how thin he was. Somehow, reading J R, I developed a mental image of the Gaddis as overweight, probably due to the heaviness (in the sense of heavy cream) of his prose.

What I've observed with novelists is that there are two kinds. There are those who write with frequency but stop at "good enough", the satificers who are usually quite good at keeping their word count within genre bounds, understand market trends, and if they're working full time can put out two or three books per year.

Then there are the ones who spend years studying rhetoric and linguistics, have worlds and characters they've been building for years, and want to write "Big" novels that often hit 200,000 words or more and can't really be compressed. They're as hard working as the prolific crowd, but from the outside it looks like they're dilly-dallying. When they finally publish, they're putting forward the best 200K words out of 2M... which makes a distinction that a few people care about although, to be honest, most readers don't. It's not an economical way to write. You do it because you're chasing some kind of deified Relevance that you'll never fully know if you've achieved because the real test is whether you're remembered 100 years after you die.

I'm immensely curious to see if He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named gets his book out, just to watch the YCs squirm. Rumor through mutual acquaintances is late 2021, but having never met this person, what do I know.