William Gaddis’s Eight Rules of Unruly Dialogue

William Gaddis's JR has a reputation as a difficult book. Yet most of its 700 pages are filled with conversations on mundane issues—money, politics, household matters, etc. How hard, you ask, can dialogue get? Well, with Mr. Gaddis, the sky's the limit. In this novel, he pushed the rules of dialogue beyond conventional boundaries, and in the process cre…