AGAPE AGAPE (2002)

The final novel from the experimentalist author of The Recognitions and JR is a plotless, posthumous 96-page spew of what we're obliged to call ''postmodern thought.'' The narrator, speaking from his bloodstained deathbed, associatively rants about his work in progress, a magnum opus on the player piano. Gaddis drags in all the usual theory-headed suspects: Benjamin, Barthes, Lacan, Henry Adams. The commentary on the age of mechanical reproduction has been made -- with actual entertainment value, no less -- by everyone from Andy Warhol and Tom Wolfe in the mid-'60s to David Foster Wallace and Colson Whitehead in the last few years to Gaddis himself in a nice new essay collection called The Rush for Second Place.