I’m giving this one up. I hate to give up on a book, but this novel is going nowhere that I wish to tag along with. Besides, if I’m dreading picking up a book to read then that’s a good indicator that I should just stop.

I give up.

What I’m having a difficult time with is that Gaddis keeps writing the conversations as these fragments where everyone is half hearing what the other person says or they all talk over each other making it hard to get into any regular flow, such as a stream of consciousness allows for.

I’m also wary of Gaddis being too adolescent with the material, but we’ll see.

I wasn’t expecting this book to be so funny.

So far it reads like a cross between a Robert Altman film based on a screenplay by Paddy Chayefsky. Breathless scenes of chaos fade into an equally chaotic scene of ‘very important people’ discussing things they don’t understand. Meanwhile a music teacher is trying to get 6th graders to perform Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Replace TV with the internet and it’s set today.