How America went money mad William Gaddis invented our blank and empty world

There’s a kind of nausea or vertigo I get when confronted by an extremely large number. Kant called it the mathematical sublime, the terror before something that is “large beyond all comparison”. At a certain point numbers start expanding out beyond any ordinary experience of the world. I can eat three apples; three million apples is just an abstract enormity. It makes no sense. Kant’s example was the “kind of perplexity that is said to seize the spectator who for the first time enters St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome”. It’s just too big to fit inside the puny human skull; you can’t comprehend the size of the thing without running up against some kind of unthinking awe.

With modern science, we can do better. The Sun is about 1.3 million times bigger than the Earth. Impossible. Think about it too long and your brain starts leaking out of your ears. But we have images of other stars, far away, a billion times the volume of the Sun, in distant galaxies a million light years across and a billion light years away, each containing 500 billion stars. But as big as reality is, our numbers can go larger. According to Biblical tradition, the universe is around 7,000 years old. We now know that this is a hilarious underestimate; the real number is just under 14 billion years.

But ancient Indian civilization, which had the number zero and the decimal system much earlier than Europe, could conjure arbitrarily large numbers whenever they wanted. According to the Bhagavata Purana, one of Hinduism’s central texts, we are currently in Kali Yuga, the lowest era in the universal cycle of world-aeons. Kali Yuga has been going since 3,102 BC, and we’ll have to suffer under it for another 427,000 years. After that there’ll be a cataclysmic war and the world will be restored to the righteousness of Satya Yuga for 1,728,000 years. A full cycle of the four Yugas lasts more than four million years. A thousand Yuga cycles, or four billion years, is equivalent to a single day for the creator god Brahma, which is followed by the Naimittika Pralaya, or the Night of Brahma, in which all of creation dissolves into chaos for another four billion years while he sleeps. Then, in the morning, it starts again.

A year for Brahma is around three trillion human years, and he will live for 100 of those years. After that, he dies. It’s currently the day after Brahma’s 50th birthday, so our universe has been going for 155 trillion solar years, a number so large that it means the actual 14-billion-year figure is closer to the Old Testament estimate by several orders of magnitude. But our Brahma is just one of innumerable creator-gods, and on the scale of Absolute Reality even his 300 trillion year lifespan is incredibly brief. Brahmas are constantly popping into being like bubbles in the ocean, and constantly bursting again into the void.

Anyway, that sense of terror before extremely large numbers is how I’ve started to feel when I hear Americans talking about money.

Buc-ee’s is a chain of gas stations based in Texas. If you get a job as a car wash manager at Buc-ee’s — a role requiring no previous experience — your starting salary is $125,000 a year. This is twice what you make as a senior journalist at the BBC, considerably more than a senior civil servant, software engineer, or mid-level investment banker, and about even with what you get as an MP. Buc-ee’s are known for paying well, but not exceptionally well. In fact, according to some Americans, this is a poverty wage.

Every so often, the financial press there produces an article about how you need to make $300,000 a year to be middle class, or $350,000 to be middle class in New York; the latest dustup is over the asset manager Mike Green’s claim that thanks to rising asset prices, the real poverty line is around $140,000. Six figures is not impressive any more, not when the first of those figures is a one or a two. Get the right job and maximize your overtime, and you can make six figures rolling burritos at Chipotle. A janitor on the Bay Area Rapid Transit system managed to pull in $270,000. These are baby figures. According to one survey, the average annual income that Gen-Z Americans think they’ll need to be financially successful is $587,797. More than 70% of respondents thought they might achieve financial success in their lifetimes.

Americans have gone insane about money, and young Americans are more insane than anyone else. Like a lot of millennials, I came of age just in time for the 2008 financial crash. It colored an entire generation’s way of thinking about the economy: we decided that having an economy seemed like a generally bad thing that caused more trouble than it was worth. We wanted to change the world through collective action, build something fairer and gentler, that wouldn’t be able to suddenly immolate all our hopes and dreams because a few asset traders had invented a new and unstable kind of derivative. Our slogan was that “another world is possible”.

We made banners with that slogan and hung them from occupied university buildings during student protests that all imploded in various undignified ways. We came out in our millions to support socialist electoral movements that imploded with even less dignity than before. Another world might have been possible, but it didn’t seem to want to be anything more than a possibility. The new crop of young people are different. Their formative crisis was the pandemic, and it seems to have taught them the opposite lesson to us. Absolutely nobody is coming to save you. Collective action is a scam. Politics is for losers. If you want to survive, the only way is to make as much money as you possibly can.

Maybe making as much money as you possibly can has always been the secret content of American life, but at least it used to be secret. Once, mad covetousness could dress itself up as a set of civic values, all freedom and democracy, patriotism and the nuclear family, hot dogs and Jesus and the Fourth of July. Not any more. I used to find American patriotism vaguely baffling: all those grinning apple-cheeked aliens proudly hoisting a flagpole over their enormous lawns, as if they needed to remind anyone what country they were in, as if anyone could have mistaken this endless tract of treeless suburb for Belgium or Bhutan.

But I might miss it when it’s gone, and it’s going. According to a 1998 Wall Street Journal poll, 70% of Americans said patriotism was extremely important to them; by 2019 that had slipped to just over 60%. But since the pandemic it’s accelerated: in 2023, only 38% of people were driven by a fanatical adherence to the national cult. They don’t care about getting involved with their local community either: 61% of people said that was very important in 2019, and 27% in 2023. Religion is down nine points over the same period; having children is down 13. The only thing that’s more important than it used to be is money.

Making money doesn’t work the way it used to. For one thing, it doesn’t seem to involve getting a job. Selling your labor is a kind of impediment that cynical powers have put in the way of your getting rich. What you really want to do is move to Miami and start day trading. Sign up to some kind of convoluted crypto scam. Buy an apartment that will be underwater by the end of the next decade, then fill it with the most aggressively hideous art ever created. Coordinate a short squeeze. Defraud the government. Everything that exists is just money in potential. For everything in the world, there’s also someone who got incredibly rich selling it. Your purpose in life is to puncture through the veil of mere things and commune with the surging spirit-world of pure money that lies beneath.

This attitude isn’t entirely new, because that last insight isn’t mine. It belongs to JR Vansant, the 11-year-old monster at the heart of William Gaddis’s prophetic 1975 novel J R, which I’m legally required to describe as a “sprawling postmodern epic”. Gaddis first conceived of the novel in 1957, the age of mass union membership and the 91% marginal tax rate, long before Reaganism or Bitcoin. Yet already he saw something in embryo. This is the spiel JR delivers to his baffled teacher in a school corridor. “Did you ever think Mrs Joubert everything you see someplace there’s this millionaire for it? Like right now there’s this water fountain millionaire and this locker millionaire and this here lightbulb one I mean like even the lightbulb there’s this glass millionaire.” Mrs Joubert doesn’t much like this. She tries to make him look up at the Moon. “Yes look up at the sky look at it! Is there a millionaire for that? Does there have to be a millionaire for everything?” But JR doesn’t get it. He is the perfect and original instance of a type that’s taken over the 21st- century: a bright-eyed and innocent American child, totally obsessed with money.

In a way, JR is Joubert’s fault. The story begins, more or less, with her taking his class on a field trip to the Stock Exchange in New York to buy a single share in Diamond Cable, which is also a share in America. “The boys and girls will follow its ups and downs and learn how our system works, that’s why we call it our share. Teaching our boys and girls what America is all about.” But after their little lesson about shareholder democracy and the free market, JR and one of his friends sneak into the executive bathroom, where they overhear the titans of capital discussing some less upstanding aspects of the world of high finance. Crooked tax schemes, insider trading. There’s a plot to start a civil war in Africa over a government cobalt contract. Inevitably, JR and his friend are caught snooping:

—Well by, what the devil are they doing here, get an earful did you boys?
—No we didn’t even…
—Why not… he tore off a paper towel and blew his nose, —hear more straight talk in the washroom than you will at twenty board meetings, anything else we can tell you?
—Well I just wondered what you said about…
—Are you a millionaire?
—Millionaire? What would you do with a million dollars, you tell me that.
—Me? First I’d get this great big place with like these electric fences and…
—Be a damn fool too wouldn’t you. You in this class of Mrs Joubert’s are you? Mean she’s never told you the only damn time you spend money’s to make money?
—She did too hey I mean that’s what we’re having where she said your money should work for you or it’s like this here lazy partner which you…
—Think she’s pretty smart do you?
—Sure she’s real smart, like…
—Real smart is she? She ever teach you what money is?
—Like anybody knows that I mean, wait, like this here quarter is…
—What most damn fools think, next time you just tell her money is credit, you get that?

After that, JR’s rise begins. This snotty, gobby, grubby 11-year-old kid starts buying up penny stocks, practically worthless scraps of equity in failing companies. He ends up buying a dying textile company called Eagle Mills outright, which isn’t worth much except for its pension fund, which he leverages to buy a decrepit brewery. It turns out that the beer they brew contains trace amounts of cobalt, which allows JR to claim tax relief under a mineral depletion allowance. From there he hops from one firm to the next, buying up forestries and shipping firms and publishers, guided by tax loopholes and weird synergies.

JR is not an ethical businessman. When he buys a publisher, he has the brilliant idea of putting adverts in everything it publishes, including school textbooks. It doesn’t matter. Everything ends up dissolving into the J R Family of Companies, and before long, practically everyone in the novel is, without their knowledge, working for an 11-year-old boy. They start reverentially referring to the hidden genius behind the J R Family of Companies as the “Boss”. Meanwhile, the Boss is running his business from a pay phone in his middle-school hallway, buying up the adult world one piece at a time.

But despite the name, J R barely spends any time with JR Vansant himself. The bulk of the novel takes place in the adult world, among a cast of deranged businessmen, hapless administrators, frustrated artists, tormented writers, and despairing composers, whose paths only glance against the boy wonder. The most entertaining of these is Jack Gibbs, a kind of splenetic hyper-version of Gaddis himself, a failed writer, disheveled and rambling. Gibbs is not a happy person. When someone suggests the autumn leaves are beautiful, he belches: “See life draining out of everything in sight call that beautiful? End of the day alone on that train, lights coming on those little Connecticut towns stop and stare out at an empty street corner dry cheese sandwich charge you a dollar wouldn’t even put butter on it…” His friend Eigen is just as miserable, another artist reduced to writing corporate copy. Their friend Schramm sensibly kills himself. The novel follows this bewildering multitude as they fuck and scheme and manipulate each other, but before long it becomes very clear that absolutely all their interactions are mediated through money. At every stage, there’s some old stock certificate, or an ex-husband’s residual 10% stake in the family company, or a suicide’s inheritance: nothing happens in emotional life without money seeping in.

This has not made the book unanimously popular. Probably the most famous exegesis on Gaddis and J R has been “Mr Difficult”, Jonathan Franzen’s 2002 New Yorker essay, in which he publicly renounced the complex, ambitious, sprawling postmodern epic and made the case for his turn towards writing the kind of novels that get recommended in Barack Obama’s summer reading lists. The problem with J R, according to Franzen, is its haughtiness. “The first ten pages and the last ten pages and every ten pages in between bring the “news” that American life is shallow, fraudulent, venal, and hostile to artists.” J R, in this telling, tries to uphold art against the degrading, populist tide of money and entertainment, and it does this by being obnoxiously, pointlessly difficult. “Difficulty in fiction is the tool of socially privileged readers and writers who turn up their noses at the natural pleasure of a ‘good read’ in favor of the invidious, artificial pleasure of feeling superior to other people.”

And Franzen is right that J R does not read like an ordinary book. My edition is 770 pages long, and almost all of that text consists entirely of unattributed dialog. No he saids, no she saids, nothing to explain how many people are even in the room, just a constant rising hubbub of voices, all aggressively miscomprehending each other and refusing to let anyone else even finish a sentence. When there are a few scraps of ordinary narration, it’s written in a kind of inscrutable Joycean warbling. Here, for instance, is Gaddis describing the sound of a distant train: “And clear the mile away the wind might bring its sound from the tracks when the wind lay right, blowing off the day and finally letting the darkness settle, and damp, for day to return like a rumor of day and lurk in the sky unable to break.” Personally, I find this very nice to read. But it is not, I’ll admit, entirely easy.

I think Franzen’s problem, though, is that he was writing in 2002, which was too early; J R is absolutely a novel for the present, our present. That protean slop of unattributed voices doesn’t read so much like an obnoxious literary technique any more. Rather, it’s essentially the same as a form we’re now all deeply familiar with: social media. Thousands of nameless people, all chattering inanities, all of it pouring out of nowhere into your awareness through some algorithmic process we can barely manage to conceive of. If you only know how to read self-satisfied middlebrow novels, J R is difficult. If you know how to listlessly scroll on your phone, it’s a breeze.

More fundamentally, though, I think Franzen has managed to totally miss the point. The message of J R isn’t that all our human relations have been poisoned by money; it’s precisely the other way round. For almost all our characters, money means something important: love, power, sex, artistic fulfillment, revenge. The straightforward pursuit of wealth has been polluted with these messy libidinal drives. But not for JR Vansant. Unlike almost everyone else in the book, JR is a blank. We don’t ever see his home life. We learn nothing about his wants or desires. He doesn’t really seem to want anything at all; he takes over the world for essentially no reason. At one point the J R Family of Companies (well, technically the J R Foundation) ends up buying the middle school where its head has lessons every day. But the only thing he wants to do with his newfound power is organize more school trips to New York, so he can surreptitiously hold business meetings there. JR is a monster, totally indifferent to everything good and beautiful in the world, but in the end it’s very hard to dislike him. Unlike all the messy cynics around him, he is pure. An innocent of the world.

What does it mean to simply want money? The young people who think their life is a failure unless they make half a million dollars a year, who’ve abandoned every pompous old value for just making the number go as high as possible — what do they actually want? Usually the desire for money is conflated with the desire for lots of stuff, the luxuries of life. Money can, notoriously, be exchanged for goods and services. But in his 1844 Manuscripts, Marx makes an interesting point. Because money is a universal equivalent, it can be exchanged for anything — but this means that to take its specific form as money, it has to negate everything else it could be. “The less you eat, drink, and buy books; the less you go to the theater, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorize, sing, paint, fence, etc, the more you save — the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour — your capital.” This is the capitalist principle of thrift; what money wants, more than anything, is to expand itself. You don’t fritter it away on stupid pleasures. You annihilate your own life to let it swell. As JR learned in the executive bathroom, “the only damn time you spend money’s to make money.” When young people say that the only thing they care about is making as much money as possible, what they really mean is that they want nothing, nothing at all, a blank and empty world.

---