The Recognitions
William Gaddis
NYRB Classics 2020
Reviewed by Bob Wake
I’m not ashamed to say I leaned heavily on Steven Moore’s indispensable online reader’s guide to William Gaddis’s The Recognitions. I consulted it often for navigational assistance and, frankly, comprehension. This will never not be a difficult novel. A daunting 956 pages, it was initially published to bafflement and poor sales in 1955, when Gaddis was thirty years old. The book is experimental in structure, scale, and execution. Its themes of greed, fraud, and spiritual exhaustion are set amidst a rapacious postwar consumer culture. The narrative encompasses madness, drug addiction, and sexual violence, as well as recurring parodies of cheerful radio commercials pushing pharmaceutical uppers (“Zap”), downers (“Necrostyle”), and contraception (“Cuff”). Gaddis briefly hung with the Beats in Greenwich Village. While The Recognitions isn’t a Beat novel, it shares the nascent counterculture’s mockery of authority and institutions. It’s also exhaustively allusive, like T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, piled high with references to classical art and literature, arcane myths, and religious rituals. There’s layer upon layer of erudition.
There’s slapstick. A buffoonish grifter disguising himself beneath an uncooperative toupee is pure Three Stooges. Or pure Thomas Pynchon, whom Gaddis would influence. The antihero of The Recognitions, a hapless art forger named Wyatt Gwyon, vanishes periodically from the kaleidoscopic narrative like Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity’s Rainbow, subsumed by historical forces greater than himself. (“A novel without a hero would be distracting in the extreme,” is a playfully metafictional remark from another character in The Recognitions.) Jonathan Franzen famously dubbed Gaddis “Mr. Difficult” in a 2002 New Yorker essay. Franzen courageously tackled The Recognitions on his own. (“The most difficult book I ever voluntarily read in its entirety.”) And while he ended up loving Gaddis’s novel—and even echoing it in The Corrections—he clearly struggled with it. “I read The Recognitions as a kind of penance, back in the early nineties,” he confesses. Given that Steven Moore’s Reader’s Guide first appeared in a print edition in 1982, it’s surprising that Franzen wasn’t familiar with it, or chose not to seek it out. Moore’s scholarly annotations are a masterful achievement in their own right.
At 720 pages, Antkind succeeds as a large-scale comic novel. This is an impressive feat for a first-time novelist (albeit a first-time novelist who happens to be an Oscar-winning screenwriter). Line for line, page for page, Antkind is frequently deliriously funny. Kaufman’s 1990s TV scripts for comics like Chris Elliot are a clear influence. Antkind’s narrator and protagonist, B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, a self-important film critic, has the snotty arrogance that Elliot mastered so perfectly. Chris Elliot’s willingness to risk unlikeability is both his genius as a comic performer and probably his undoing with audiences (e.g. Cabin Boy). Charlie Kaufman seems to intuitively understand that an insufferable character is only as bearable as the jokes exposing the character’s pretensions and selfishness. Antkind has the jokes like Arby’s has the meats. As Kaufman has shown in his wildly inventive film scripts (Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), he’s never met a meta gag that he can’t spin into comedy gold. Not unlike Martin Amis’s insertion of “Martin Amis” as a character in his novel Money, Antkind’s film critic is deeply hostile to the very real films of Charlie Kaufman (while extolling the more comfortably mainstream films, both real and imaginary, of Judd Apatow). Although the novel’s sci-fi trappings—time-travel and multiverses—seem at times like a lesser work by Philip K. Dick (name-checked in Antkind as an “American primitivist”), Antkind’s slapstick exuberance is like a live-action Tex Avery cartoon.
An author’s note chillingly informs us that U.S. coastal regions “harbor millions of pounds of dumped munitions” from military training exercises. The family in the poem visits the local police station to dispose of the shell. The mother is left discomforted. A chain-reaction of metaphors follows. She is haunted by her son’s autism and wonders “what it would look like / the bin for safe disposal of genes / that can ruin children.” These lines pack the kind of gut-punch that Rebecca Foust’s work never shies away from. She has addressed her son’s autism in poems over the years, at times with grace and understanding, and at other times with cosmic fury.
Frank’s well-received 2017 novel, 
Impersonal travel essays are nowhere to be found in Frank’s deeply personal collection of travel essays, Try to Get Lost. She is blessedly blunt about this turbulent era “of perhaps the most frightening protofascist ever to assume office in American history.” Her essay “Red State, Blue State” is a Baedeker for bad times. Survival strategies include everything from exercise to charity work to “you drink.” Pulling up stakes is an option, not a panacea. “Travel beats us up,” she admits in “Shake Me Up, Judy.” “Sleep’s elusive. Stress is amped.” Her sketches of European cities benefit enormously from shoe leather reporting (and the accompanying shin splints). The verisimilitude is breathtaking. Shop windows in Italy (“In Case of Firenze”) inspire a cinematic cascade of history and culture:
An instant classic. Adrienne Miller was the fiction editor at Esquire magazine in the late-90s when she was still in her twenties. Crossed paths with Mailer, Updike, Bret Easton Ellis, Dave Eggers, and, the real subject of 
There are deadpan sections of Flights outlining in utterly plausible detail an academic pursuit referred to as travel psychology, whose practitioners meet in airports for their conferences and workshops. “Practical travel psychology investigates the metaphorical meaning of places,” we’re told. Another recurring element of Flights investigates the human body itself as a landscape of infinite inward exploration. The history of phantom pain and the embalming of bodies for medical study are discussed at length. The encyclopedic flurry of anatomical and geographical info must have presented a challenge for Jennifer Croft, who translated the novel with evident eloquence from Olga Tokarczuk’s Polish. No surprise that Croft shared with Tokarczuk the 2018 Man Booker International Prize for Flights. A masterful literary work that feels like a contemporary classic in the making.
