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Title: Occasionally hits the mark but pretentious and too long.
Review: This much heralded "spoof" of litigation-mad America is, in fact, a rather self-indulgent and way too long display of avant garde literary technique. A National Book Award winner should be less of a chore to get through. The book is almost all dialogue, none of it attributed, and so it is always up to the reader to retrace his steps to figure out who is talking. Gaddis can't make up his mind whether he is writing a satiric comment on modern America or a surreal pseudo-Joycean trip. A lawyer reading the book will note many technical errors (state law pre-empting federal?), but I did love the Episcopal Church/PepsiCola lawsuit about the latter being an anagram of the former. As a lawyer and Episcopalian myself, I'm mulling it over
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