Carpenter's Gothic
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This article is about the William Gaddis novel. For the architectural style, see Carpenter Gothic.
Carpenter's Gothic is the title of the third novel by William Gaddis, published in 1985 by Viking. The title connotes a "Gothic" tale of haunted isolation, in a milieu stripped of all pretensions.
Gaddis's second shortest novel, Carpenter's Gothic relates the words and occasional actions, in one house, of an ex-soldier, confederate apologist, and pathological liar; his neglected and ineffectual wife; and a compassionate, understanding but haunted visitor who appears to stand in for the author. The book is notable mainly for its unrestrained contempt for its characters, and for its strict fugue-like nature, as each character pursues his own themes in conversation and in action, without reference to anything said or done by the others.
