William Gaddis's Posthumous Novel 'Agonie d'agapè' Published

The posthumous novel 'Agonie d'agapè' by major American writer William Gaddis has been published. Written as a monologue by an aging, dying man—Gaddis himself—the book attempts to impose order on a project he worked on for over forty years: the history of the player piano in the United States and Europe. Drawing on extensive research from Plato to Norbert Wiener, the narrator argues that 'agapè' (love feast) dies when music is no longer performed by humans but mechanized for profit. Gaddis sees the perforation of player piano rolls—music reduced to binary logic—as the true epistemological break of modernity. This leads to a cultural disintegration in America, where everything becomes perforated, democratic leisure industries take over, and entropy erodes language and bodies. The novel is a sumptuous verbal and musical improvisation, deliberately perforated and flawed by physical suffering, legal troubles, and domestic disasters. It recalls the devastating outbursts of Thomas Bernhard more than Beckett's monologues.