Agapē Agape: William Gaddis's Strange Novel About Player Pianos

William Gaddis let his novels gestate slowly, spending a decade or more on each work in his oeuvre. Yet his shortest book took the longest to finish. He first considered writing about player pianos while working as a fact-checker at The New Yorker in the mid-1940s. But more than a half-century elapsed before this obsession resulted in a published book—h…