William Gaddis published four novels during his lifetime, immense and complex books that helped inaugurate a new movement in American letters. Now comes his final work of fiction, a subtle, concentrated culmination of his art and ideas.
For more than 50 years, Gaddis collected notes for a book about the mechanization of the arts, told by way of a social history of the player piano in America. In the years before his death in 1998, he distilled the whole mass into a fiction, a dramatic monologue by an elderly man with a terminal illness. Continuing Gaddis's career — long reflection on those aspects of corporate technological culture that are uniquely destructive of the arts — Agape Agape is a stunning achievement from one of the indisputable masters of postwar American fiction.
