Speaking in Tongues

By Richard Lacayo

Built as they are almost entirely from dialogue, the novels of William Gaddis are like those scenes in a Robert Altman movie where everyone talks over everyone else while each tongue is tripping on itself. For A Frolic of His Own (Poseidon Press; 586 pages; $25), Gaddis practically rebuilds the Tower of Babel from the sounds and furies of the late 20th century. Drunken soliloquies, air-brained chatter and large, heavy blocks of legal gibberish are piled atop one another. One character is haunted by the thought that "reality may not exist at all except in the words in which it presents itself" -- which would mean that there's lots of it, and it doesn't always fit together.

The same could be said of this light novel about such weighty notions as justice and law. Gaddis' chief litigant is Oscar Crease, a self-described "last civilized man" who brings suit to prove that his high-minded (and unproduced) stage play was stolen by the producers of a big-screen Civil War blood spurter that features "the most widely discussed mass rape scene in screen history." Crease is also suing his insurance company, which isn't paying him for injuries suffered when his stalled car suddenly ran over him. His father, a cagey federal judge, is hearing the case of an artist who wants | to save his public sculpture from being dismantled to free a dog trapped underneath. Additional court time is provided by Trish, a nattering friend of Oscar's long-suffering stepsister and a walking lawsuit.

Piecing all those together is quite a chore for a novel that also wants to be a religious allegory, a comedy of bad manners and a portrait of the interior life at a time when TV ads clog the stream of consciousness like shimmering dead fish. Long stretches where the laughs come hard are followed by sudden bloomings of comic rhapsody. This wayward frolic is a bit like Oscar's car. Sometimes you could swear it was stone dead -- until it starts up and runs right over you.