Agape with wonder from beyond the grave

Fiction: Appearing as a surprise New Year's gift, or time bomb, or possibly both, the welcome publication of a belated final work from the great US post-modernist William Gaddis (1922-1998) is cause for excitement as well as celebration.

It is also an artistic manifesto of genius and, as only to be expected from Gaddis, a characteristically virtuoso performance. He understood voice, the one-sided telephone call, chaos, the sheer frenzy of the intellect at work and, above all, the duplicitous tyranny of progress and its threat to art and civilisation.

It was Gaddis who, more than any other major US writer - Pynchon, Bellow and DeLillo included - grasped the sounds and subtexts of a society on the run. His work is full of the noises and images of today. Money, and the jargon of bond trading, public relations and litigation are among his devices. His fiction is dialogue-driven, he ruthlessly exorcised the authorial voice.

Yet for all the topicality, exasperated comedy, the energy of fragmented spoken speech and high-speed satire, Gaddis was, above all, a seer with a profound concern for the plight of the artist and art confronted by the disposable and increasingly self-destructive ethos of 20th-century life and expression. The fear of failure became, for him, a personal lament, albeit one devoid of self pity.

Caught somehow, and somewhere, between the modernism of Joyce and the post-modernism of Pynchon, Gaddis - more magnificent than either - never fully emerged from the awesome and claustrophobic achievement of his first novel, The Recognitions. Published in 1955, fittingly at mid century, it defies ambition and left him with a label, that of "high literary", a euphemism for élitist and unreadable. The fact that it is 956 pages long did not help much, either.

But its theme, that of art as fake or reality, preoccupied him for more than 50 years. This new book, completed shortly before his death and intended for posthumous publication, is a novella, a death-bed soliloquy of an old man aware he is dying. It is very funny. For all the profundity of the content, the narrative is conversational in tone, intense and a bit distracted, addressed initially to the reader, though ultimately to a particular listener - a close personal friend of Gaddis's who, at the time of writing, had been dead for two years.

Remarks shift from the fate of great artists, mainly musicians and writers, through the centuries, to the rusting staples in his legs and the effects his medication is having on his now tissue-thin skin. His thoughts soar between the abstract and the practical business of rescuing his mail from a spilt glass of water.

As was true of Gaddis himself, the narrator here is surrounded by a lifetime's accumulation of notes and bits of paper. "I never throw anything out," he said in an interview in 1994. It is true, his interests and obsessions remain constant. The man in the bed, the father of three daughters, is a writer fearful for the future of civilisation. He wants to alert his listener to the impending tragedy. He is also committed to tracing the story of the player piano in America, those automatic instruments that played away, thanks to a roller mechanisation, independent of a pianist.

For him, this invention, through which anyone could appear to make music, represents for him the final dismissal of the artist, "having art without the artist because he's a threat". As used here, it is more than a literary device. Gaddis spent a lifetime researching the subject and the material, charting the rise and fall of the player piano. The old man's monologue of references and cross references is erudite without being pompous, and evokes writers Gaddis admired, such as Hawthorne, Melville, Tolstoy and John Kennedy Toole, the author of the posthumously published masterpiece, A Confederacy of Dunces (1980). In relation to each, he considers the notion of failure, and the fear of it.

Gaddis, a quick-witted New Yorker, also managed to convey the languid ease of a Southern gentleman, just as The Recognitions is an American masterpiece in the form of a European novel of ideas. He never concealed the fact that he expected the story of Wyatt Gwyon, a troubled young painter who announces, "What's any artist, but the dregs of his work? The human shambles that follows it about?" to both change the world and make him famous. It did neither. It is fascinating to observe the way in which that majestic and angry début stalks this brilliant, mellow little leave-taking.

Gaddis is more ironic than rueful, but the point is made as early as the marathon opening sentence of Agape Agape ". . . I've got the papers land surveys deeds and all of it right in this heap somewhere, get it cleared up and settled before everything collapses and it's all swallowed up by lawyers and taxes like everything else because that's what it's about, that's what my work is about, the collapse of everything, of meaning, of language, of values, of art, disorder and dislocation wherever you look, entropy drowning everything in sight, entertainment and technology and every four year old with a computer . . ." Later, he says, "Loss, loss all just loss wherever you look . . . wrong about everything all so long ago . . . everybody out there giving prizes to each other." While some critics tentatively saw Gaddis as the new Joyce following the arrival of The Recognitions, he and the novel slid from view. Twenty years would pass before Gaddis struck again. This time with J.R.

Shorter in length, a mere 725 pages, it won the 1976 National Book Award. The novel's eponymous hero is an 11-year-old financial whiz kid in torn runners who builds an empire inspired by junk mail and sustained by frantic phone calls. He is Huck Finn flash-forwarded into the age of greed. It is an outrageously funny book, and far superior to Tom Wolfe's inflated bestseller The Bonfire of the Vanities published 10 years later.

Almost a decade separated J.R. from the next Gaddis novel, Carpenter's Gothic (1985). A short, snappy 262 pages, it shared its UK publication with Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days and was overshadowed by Keillor's media skills. Carpenter's Gothic chronicles the scheming Paul, a traumatised Vietnam veteran intent on launching a hick preacher as a television star. When two people drown during a staged river baptism, Paul begins negotiating the movie rights. His antics are watched by his timid, despairing wife, an asthmatic heiress who just wants love. If you have yet to experience the Gaddis genius, this is a good place to begin.

In 1994, four years before his death, his fourth novel, A Frolic of His Own appeared. Just under 600 pages, it is a manic exposé of the legal profession, and won Gaddis his second National Book Award. It opens with the dilemma of one Oscar Crease, a lowly history professor, living - as do many Gaddis characters - in a decaying upstate New York country house.

Hospitalised, having been run over, Oscar has a case. Except - it was his own car that hit him while he was hot-wiring it. He is advised: "You might almost say that this is a suit between who you are and who you think you are". Among some 18 largely ridiculous legal actions dominating the narrative is the plight of a little dog trapped inside a modern sculpture. Lightening intervenes. The dog is immortalised.

Agape Agape is more than a interesting footnote for Gaddis readers. It is a considerable work in its own right, manifesto and epitaph. Funny, perceptive and sharp as arrows, it is also further confirmation of his status as a rightful heir of Swift.

William Gaddis remains the concerned custodian of that savage indignation.

Agape Agape. By William Gaddis. Atlantic Books, 113 pp. £9.99

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times