William Gaddis (1922–1998)

I didn't read this book i experienced it. It got into my dreams. It is the funniest classic book i have ever read, laugh out loud funny. The settings were indelible. At times it annoyed the hell out of me. There are pages and pages of people talking on and on while someone tries but can't get a word in edgewise. In some ways it is a 700+ page Bob Newhart on the telephone skit.
I don't think it was as hard to read as i have heard. It's like a lot of more modern books if it was a film no one would complain about it being difficult. The difficulty of most modern fiction would even be commented on if it were in a film. People are a lot more sophisticated when it comes to decoding film.
It shines out in the wasteland that is american fiction. One has many more fingers than necessary to count the number of books written in america since this was published that deserve to be read more.… (mer)

i have yet to find an exception to sontag's offhand claim that the best novelists are failed poets. toward the end of a career, many such authors are tempted to try at failing at philosophy as well - think nabokov. here gaddis has succeeded (at failing).



the author of Agapē Agape - a provactive title - has forgotten something critical: he is not walter benjamin however much he might pay obeisance. Gaddis isn't thomas bernhard either. whether, in his imitation of bernhard's inimitable rant, gaddis has "given musical form to the work itself" as joseph tabbi puts it, is the subject of a finer analysis. however, i am certain this is not The Goldberg Variations.… (mer)

The Recognitions charts the life of a capital-A Artist, though thankfully it spends more time on the people who encounter him than on the artist himself, before forgetting about him completely and transitioning into a sort of novelization of Durkheim's Suicide.

Much of the action of the book takes place off-screen, as it were, with events having to be inferred from the dialog between characters. This is not as horrible as it sounds: Gaddis is astonishingly good with dialog, and even more astonishingly bad with description.

This is probably one of those novels, like Catcher in the Rye, that is improved significantly by the reader having lived in New York City - in that quite a lot of the novel is how the city of New York, embodied by its denizens, reacts to the characters, and how the characters thrive or crumble under the indifference of such a concentrated population. One amusing aspect of The Recognitions is how little New York has changed since 1955: the people are the same, the problems are the same, and every party/bar/restaurant scene could have taken place yesterday.

Ultimately, though, it doesn't really say much, and the overwritten descriptive passages weigh down what would otherwise be a quite enjoyable book. I found JR to be a much better novel, and the lasting effect of this novel may be to make me re-read the other.… (mer)