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.
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