He mapped and delved. His reach was enormous . . . Agapē Agape is the deathbed summa, the parting shot—complete and fully realized . . . its every strange sentence carries full disciplined intention, hurtling towards synthesis even as it writhes and falls. . . . The book is an exalted, paranoid outcry, a last wounded proclamation of the idea of the sacred rootedness of true art . . . we bring to these pages our sense of his great authority and attainment.” —Sven Birkerts, The New York Times Book Review “An excellent prelude to the themes that so obsessed Gaddis . . . Gaddis’s strengths were in creating dazzling architectures for his fictions, and in capturing the ironies and rhythms of human speech.” —John Freeman, The Boston Globe “Gaddis’s final novel is perhaps his most poignant . . . the themes that obsess the novel’s hero go round and round his head in a kind of discordant symphony: Plato’s plot to banish poets as dangerous to the state. Freud’s elevation of the pleasure principle.
