A Shame (or, A Particularly Acute Case of the Stephen Kings)
A revenge review of The Recognitions
Introduction
It is clear from page one of The Recognitions, William Gaddis’ massive 1955 novel, that Gaddis both A) believes himself to be extremely smart, and B) considers himself a very good writer. The problem, unfortunately, is that he’s neither, and by the time you turn the last of the book’s 956 tiresome, awful, overwrought pages, you are so fed up that you set immediately to writing a revenge review like this one. This review, which has been brewing in my head since I started the book, won’t be a thousand pages, but I do wish I could make Gaddis read it and thereby suffer the same draw upon his attention as he demanded of mine.
Where to even begin? This is a book with so many flaws that it transcends “good book with some problems,” “bad book with some good moments,” and even “bad book that’s at least funny in its badness.” No, this book is just no-holds-barred, not-comically, to-the-core awful. This book, in fact, was a useful test in how I judge the merits of works of fiction, as it failed at pretty much everything and therefore helped me to clarify my own evaluatory metrics, cardinal rules of writing, and many aspects of the beliefs I hold about fiction in general. It stands as a perfect example of everything I have come to regard as poor writing, and this review will incorporate many of the specifics of this book into discussions about those theories and mantras I’ve formulated over the years that are applicable to all books. In other words, I’m going to use The Recognitions as a vehicle to examine where, in my eyes, some books succeed and others fail.
Perhaps the first piece of evidence I should offer that The Recognitions is not just colossal but a colossal failure is that despite my long anticipation of reading it—the various underground online literary communities I occasionally visit (and usually can trust) had mentioned this as a great and underappreciated novel—it took me six weeks to finish each and every one of those brutally pointless 956 pages. That may not seem like very long, but in my entire life I’ve only had three books take me longer than 2 weeks: Infinite Jest (20 days), Moby Dick (about the same), and this one. Infinite Jest is even longer than The Recognitions, by some distance, and Moby Dick is written in an intellectual register that requires ultimate patience, and I still finished them both in half the time. Why? Because, among other things, I had zero enthusiasm to read The Recognitions. It is an absolute chore to plod through this aimless, yawning book. It is not fun to read. I haven’t felt that in years, since I read a book so bad I won’t even name it.*
Speaking of Infinite Jest, throughout this review I’m going to refer to it, and Gravity’s Rainbow, with some frequency. Now, I don’t believe one book’s merit should be judged solely in relation to another’s, but since IJ, GR, and The Recognitions are all ultra-massive postmodern encyclopedic novels, IJ and GR will serve as useful examples of how to write ultra-massive postmodern encyclopedic novels correctly. (An aside: when you finish Infinite Jest and Gravity’s Rainbow, three things happen to you. 1, you are now allowed to refer to them as IJ and GR, and their authors as DFW and TP. 2, your IQ jumps 10 points, no questions asked. And 3, you receive the password to top-secret online discussion forums. No, I will not give you the password).
Alrite. Let’s go.
Analysis, Part I: The Roots of the Problem
The Recognitions is a novel that begins crushingly slowly, bogs down enormously in the middle, and limps to an uninspired whimper of a finish. It is bad on every page, and it took me about a third of the book to realize why exactly I was disliking it so much: it is a book without a center. There is no thing around which the novel coheres or relates to itself. This, I believe, in terms of all novel-writing ever, is an utterly unforgivable sin.
In both GR and IJ, the center is an object: a mysterious V2 rocket in GR, and a film so addictive you can’t stop watching in IJ. Other novels have a single character at the center, like American Pastoral and Sabbath’s Theater by Philip Roth or American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis. And still other novels have the prose itself as the central unifier, like Underworld by Don DeLillo, or Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Whatever form it takes, every great novel I’ve read contains something to which all else relates either directly or indirectly, a binding force, a sun at the center of the book’s solar system. The Recognitions has precisely nothing to fill that role, and in a book of a thousand pages, that hole feels like a galactic void.
The Recognitions reads like a series of overly long short stories with only the vaguest connections between them, and doesn’t really function as a novel in any real sense. Novels have internal integrity, delineated arcs, characters with motivations, events that serve a purpose, scenes that differ from each other, and words and sentences that have a reason to be there. Not for me, says Gaddis.
We’ll get back to those shortcomings in a minute, but first let’s explore the root of the book’s failure. The cause of all those flaws is manifold, but there’s one at the heart of all the trouble: this is a published first novel. That sounds commonplace—every writer has to have a “first novel” by definition, right? Well, there’s a saying in the writing community that goes something like this: to be a good writer, you have to write your first novel, then rip it up into shreds. Only then can you begin the work of creating your actual first novel. Why? Because you have to toss your “first-first” novel in the trash, because it is guaranteed to be bad. But along the way you learn so much that once you’ve finished it, you’re ready to actually give novel-writing a proper go and thus, your first published novel should always be at least the second novel you’ve completed. With The Recognitions, Gaddis clearly had his “first-first” novel published, with disastrous results.
The reason I know this is because I, like all other writers, have written a “first-first” novel, submitted it to agents and publishers across the country, and then only a year or so later realized it was awful, completely unworthy of public viewing. It was dastardly at the craft of novel-writing, disgraceful in its structure, weak in its characterization, sophomoric in its coherency, immature in its integrity, sorely lacking in its balance, progress, setting, dialogue—all of it. And The Recognitions fails at each of those too. Fails pretty spectacularly, in fact, at every single one of those things—it makes every possible new-writer mistake. As first-first novels should! But Gaddis, in his unshakeable belief in his own genius, completely missed the lessons his own book should have been teaching him about what not to do. Let’s break it down, piece by piece, to see where he, like so many other first-first-time novelists, went wrong.
Analysis, Part II: Piece by Piece
1. Plot.
Books with multiple storylines are nothing new, but here is how it goes in a well-written novel with that approach (like IJ, or GR, or Mona Lisa Overdrive by William Gibson, or countless others): as you reach the end of one section, you get pissed because you’re leaving what you consider in that moment to be the good half (or third, etc.) of the story, and you don’t want to be taken back to the other side. Then, after a few pages back in the other half, you wonder how you could ever have wanted to stay with the first half, as this section is so captivating, and you get pissed when that section ends. Rinse and repeat. I still think IJ would’ve worked as two stand-alone books, which is a testament to how strongly this phenomenon is at play in it.
The Recognitions is the opposite. There’s about three (?) storylines, and each one is so horribly uninteresting that soon after beginning each section you start begging for the book to switch over to another section that now, from the vantage of this pathetically unengaging storyline, seems more entertaining than GoodFellas. Then, when it finally does switch, you breathe a huge sigh of relief and tackle the other section, because there’s no way it could be worse than the one you just read. Surprise! Four pages in you’re begging for the original storyline to come back, as this other one is as engrossing as dirt. Rinse, lather, repeat, for a thousand pages.
Here is an attempt to summarize the plot(s). A thirty-something painter from New England, who’s totally nuts, completely incapable of holding a conversation, and otherwise deeply screwed up thanks to his stringent upbringing by his esoteric-text aficionado preacher father (who is also totally nuts and completely incapable of holding a conversation) and his domineering ultra-religious aunt, is contracted by a vaguely threatening criminal to produce forgeries of 16th Century Flemish paintings. They then sell these paintings on the black market, attracting the attention of other shadowy New York underworld figures. At the same time, an extremely large group of more-or-less indistinguishable characters attend endless weird parties in ‘50s New York, talking about absolutely nothing for absolutely no reason for pages on end. The book moves to Europe (and, sort of, South America) for its close, where the weird painter does more weird stuff (while still unable to hold a conversation), the large group of party-goers kind of have more weird parties, and everybody ends up in some weird and inexplicable situation.
That may sound pretty spotty and nebulous already, but that summary actually gives the book more coherency than it deserves, more clarity than it ever provides, and more delineation and direction than the entire thing is ever able to attain. There’s just no sense of consistency, no sense of payoff. If you stopped a third of the way through, you’d have no real burning questions left lingering. And even if you did, the remainder of the book wouldn’t answer them. Same for the middle third—it doesn’t generate any pressing urgency, or have any real tangible connection to what’s before and after. And since the final third doesn’t have anything to resolve, nothing you’re really curious about, no plotline with major gaps to fill or conflicts to bring to a head, and no previous set-ups needing a payoff, it doesn’t contribute to an overall effect either. There is no real narrative here worth following. This all is part of the book’s lack of center; for contrast, IJ and GR keep you tense with wonder up to and through the final paragraph. That The Recognitions possesses neither the skill to awaken your curiosity nor the ability to satisfy it is poor work indeed.
It should also be mentioned that things occur in the course of the “story” that in a good book would actually be useful, meaningful, intriguing plot points, bricks that build the story into a structure worth following. Well, it’s too bad The Recognitions is a bad book, because things like a murdered monkey in the first chapter, a counterfeit mummy near the end, and a case of mistaken identity about halfway through, among others, neither buttress anything prior nor lay a foundation for anything that follows. Things in this book just happen, for no rhyme, reason, point, or purpose, then are never mentioned again. But hey! At least there’s a lot of things happening! (This is a major flaw—cramming in as much shit as possible—as well. More on that later.)
There is a theory about good novels that I’d like to claim I formulated on my own but which I probably read somewhere years ago that goes like this: every word should inform every other. Regardless of whether Gaddis was too lazy to revise what he’d already written once he’d thought of a new event to add or whether he didn’t have the skill to weave the innumerable disparate and inexplicable events of his work together, this book really needed to follow that theory more closely. My final words on the plot of The Recognitions: aimless, pointless, scattered, uninspired, repetitive, insipid, and, if we’re being honest, pretty boring.
2. Setting/scene building.
All the chapters follow a similar pattern. First, we get a long ramble about the physical environment of a place, usually including the weather, that eventually makes what place it is explicit a few pages in. Often this place is either somewhere we have been 100 times before or somewhere totally new and without prior indication that the book should ever need to go there. Next, we find that a character (or two) we barely know from a hundred pages ago is currently in this setting we’ve drawn the curtain open to find. The character or two is/are wrapped in his/her thoughts, only dimly aware of where they are, until, very suddenly, another character we only barely know literally or figuratively runs into the first character. Bang! It’s Long Meaningless Conversation time, adding more and more characters as we go along, until they all end up at some kind of party. This takes up the rest of the chapter, and then we do it all over again, sometimes in the same place, sometimes with the same characters, and sometimes not.
This, if it is not obvious, is poor scene construction. It is astonishing how many times characters in The Recognitions bump into each other on the streets of New York, a city of eight million people, as though this is a common-enough occurrence to warrant building dozens of scenes off of its happening. Gaddis is not a good enough writer to make his characters actually have a reason to be anywhere, so he just throws them all together through pure coincidences, either on the sidewalk, or a party that they all just happened to stumble into. This, and I don’t say this lightly, is sophomoric writing of the worst kind. You know what inexperienced writers do when they want a bunch of their characters to have a conversation? Stick ‘em in a party. People have parties, right? Sure, but with people they’re friends with, and not every single day. The characters in this book barely know each other on any real level, but they always just happen to run into each other at these gatherings in various indistinguishable places in New York.
The settings themselves are: someone’s house, someone else’s house, then someone else’s house. Real inventive, Billy. One time we even get to go to an apartment! Everyone is always at a party they weren’t invited to at the house of someone they don’t know. Awful, awful—Gaddis just desperately needs vehicles for his precious long-ass pointless conversations between 20 people, so he jams his characters into apartments and houses that even the most one-dimensional of them has no reason to be. In one chapter he bizarrely takes us to the zoo, where two characters have a conversation that could have taken place on Mars for all the relevance it has to where they are.
What I’m getting at is: each setting has no bearing on the events that occur within it. This book could take place anywhere because it knows nothing of actual human interaction with other humans or their environment. The places in this book are bad because Gaddis does not know how to write sufficiently plausible human interactions in either solo, double, or group settings. I have a hot take that not knowing how to write sufficiently plausible human interactions should disqualify a writer from publication, but maybe that’s just me!
The zoo chapter, which occurs about halfway through, clarified a hypothesis that had been building in the back of my brain since page one: all the settings in this book are places Gaddis went to in the years he spent writing it. It seemed obvious, suddenly, that if he’d gone to a roller-skating rink instead of the zoo before he wrote that chapter, the characters would have been taken to a roller-skating rink. This theory was further strengthened when one of his characters fucks off to Latin America with absolutely zero warning. Gaddis must have gone there, I thought. There is just no reason for this character to be anywhere but back in New York. Sure enough, here’s what the Wikipedia page for the book has to say:
“During the period in which Gaddis was writing the novel, he traveled to Mexico, Central America, and Europe.”
Ding ding ding! And, unsurprisingly, the ending of the book takes place in Europe for—you guessed it—no reason at all. (I seem to be using that phrase a lot.) I don’t make this point to boast about my astuteness, because it really wasn’t that hard to guess. You don’t jump a New York-based novel to a banana republic with zero warning or previously-revealed character motivation unless you, the author, have been there and want to brag about it. This is the literary equivalent of posting a thirst trap from spring break six months later with the caption “Take me back” to make your followers jealous.
All jokes aside, I’m convinced that the underlying reason is this: new/bad writers don’t know where to set their books, so they set them in places they’ve been. There’s no reason for the character to be in Central America. He just is, because Gaddis has no idea where else to put him. You get a strong sense that if Gaddis had visited California a few weeks before writing that section, the character would have gone to California. This phenomenon is always a very clear sign that you are in the hands of an incompetent writer.
3. Characters.
Here is how fiction works. First, there is a character. That character has a desire. The character attempts to achieve the goal they desire. The character faces challenges on the way to achieving the goal and has to overcome them. Finally, the character either achieves or doesn’t achieve the goal, and regardless of outcome, has somehow been changed by the experiences they have undergone. This is standard practice for all good books ever.
Here is what The Recognitions does instead. We start with about a zillion poorly-defined characters. None of them have any goals, motivations, or true reason to be in the novel at all. This naturally leads us to no conflicts or narrative tension. At the end they have neither succeeded nor failed at the non-goal they never had. None of them have changed, if they were clearly-drawn enough to begin with to discern who they were at all. This is how most stories in Fiction 101 are written.
For Exhibit A of The Recognitions’ shocking failure at perhaps the most crucial part of storytelling, let’s look at the weirdo painter I mentioned in my plot summary. This guy, who starts the novel named Wyatt Gwyon, should have been the main character, should have filled the role of “center” I discussed earlier. But he doesn’t. In fact, though the novel spends the first hundred pages sort of examining his childhood and adolescence, he still ends up getting less screen time than several other characters.
His portrayal is flawed on many, many different levels. First, he is a totally passive character. Everything he does is done to him or for him or is something he’s been compelled to do by someone else. He has zero motivations or desires, so as we follow him around it’s unclear why, exactly, we are shown glimpses into some moments of his life and not others. Since he doesn’t want anything, why should we care what he’s doing? We don’t. (An old writer’s rule: you must ensure there is a reason you are telling your story about this particular time in someone’s life. Usually the reason is the character is undergoing some sort of upheaval and therefore is changing. Bad fiction is concerned with telling the status quo. Good fiction examines when that normal routine is disrupted.) But he keeps coming back, doing more and more stupid/bizarre/inexplicable things that have no bearing on anything.
Second, he is totally unable to speak in anything but ellipsis-filled half-thoughts that convey absolutely nothing. Gaddis does this to suggest that he is a brilliant writer communicating complex topics by tiptoeing around their edges, but it really just comes off like his “protagonist” is always chewing on a mouthful of sand. This guy is so bad at speaking that the reader only gets frustrated, as we have no idea what he’s even trying to say. And third, I mentioned that he starts the novel named Wyatt Gwyon—and then, in a move which utterly baffled me, after about page 200 he is never referred to as Wyatt Gwyon again, but only as “he” (by both other characters and the author) and some other names when people mistake him for someone else. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out why the hell Gaddis would do this—seven hundred pages of never referring to a major character by name—and came up with absolutely nothing to justify it. Without exaggeration, this is probably the weirdest and worst decision I’ve encountered in a novel in several years.
Oh, and by the end, Gwyon is the exact same as he was at the beginning. Great work, Billy, you hack.
How ‘bout the other zillion characters? Are they any better? Take a guess. All I can really say about everyone else in the book is that Gaddis must have read chapter 1 of some fiction writer’s handbook, until he saw the old adage “give every character a hat,” then stopped reading and shat out The Recognitions. It’s honestly pretty good advice—in essence it means give the reader something to associate with a character so they’ll be distinguishable—except Gaddis evidently thought that all you need for a successful characterization is a single “hat.” For different characters in The Recognitions this means different things—one always wears a certain watch, one always has the same dress on, one is always referred to as “the tall woman,” one is always dressed in all black, one is always drunk, one is always holding a Bible, one is a black guy, one always wears a sling, etc. The problem is twofold: 1) that is basically all we know about each of the characters just listed, and 2) there are dozens more characters who don’t get a hat at all but still keep coming up over and over.
We get zero sense of anything that usually makes a plausible character: backstories, motivations, fears, likes, dislikes, family life, and even age and physical appearance are difficult to discern most of the time. What we get instead is endless conversations between great numbers of them—of which any line could be spoken by any character, so poorly are they distinguished in their personalities. This, if my italics didn’t make it plain, is a symptom of truly poor writing. Every word that comes out of a character’s mouth should only make sense coming from them, which requires strong characterization in advance. Gaddis fails at both halves of that coin, yet he keeps stuffing in more and more characters willy-nilly, all one-dimensional and weird just like everyone else in these bloated pages.
GR, a novel of over 400 characters, is probably the best-ever example of how to juggle that many people. Every single one of those 400 has a unique set of goals, a unique personality that dictates their efforts to overcome challenges on the way to those goals, and conflicts that arise organically from the clashing personalities. The Recognitions has about the same number, but absolutely nothing save their “hats” to tell them apart.
4. Miscellaneous bullshit.
The Pulitzer Advisory Board infamously described GR, when rejecting the jury’s recommendation of the novel for the 1974 award for fiction, as “turgid,” “unreadable,” “overwritten,” and “obscene.” Funny enough, while they totally missed the point of GR, the Pulitzer editors basically hit the nail on the head if they were trying to describe The Recognitions—particularly with turgid, which Google defines as “tediously pompous or bombastic.” Bombastic’s definition sums it up quite perfectly: “high-sounding but with little meaning.” Bingo. There’s sure a lot of shit in here that’s supposed to sound very smart and very accomplished and very impressive, but actually achieves absolutely zilch.
Let’s walk through some of the numberless examples of The Recognitions’ miscellaneous bullshit via one of the most depressing lists I’ve ever had to make: the things in this book that, as Peter Bradshaw said about Oceans 13’s baffling use of split-screens and jump cuts, “are all quite meaningless.”
1. The use throughout of a long flat mark, longer than an en-dash yet shorter than an em-dash, to indicate dialogue. Every speech by every speaker begins with this symbol (like a hyphen and a half, basically), but does not conclude with the same symbol, so you’re not always sure when someone’s finished talking. Non-standard dialogue indicators, I want to state very clearly for the record, piss me off to no end whenever I see them. To all authors: you are not too cool for quotation marks. TP and Philip Roth and DFW use them just like everyone else, no problem. You do not need to try to be different or strange or quirky.
2. The constant use of other languages. This is something else that irks me whenever I see it, and Gaddis decides to show off his high school French on pretty much every damn page. It really does nothing for a book to always be stuffing in untranslated French, Spanish, German, Latin, whatever. Instead of buttressing the book’s justification for its existence (or stroking the author’s ego, as in this case), using other languages instantly diminishes a book’s weight as it necessarily negates the reader’s understanding of some portion of it. And in The Recognitions, there’s a boatload of foreign sentences that might as well not be there, for all I gleaned from them. Hope you wasted many hours of your time with your ‘50s translation dictionary, Billy. Real mature of you, sticking in eight Romance languages per page because you fancy yourself an intellectual.
3. The epigraphs at the beginning of every chapter. Gaddis, in yet another self-serving and self-congratulatory move that actually comes across as a series of literary train derailments, puts esoteric, completely irrelevant, totally-without-connection-to-the-content-of-the-chapter quotes as chapter-starters. A lot of them are in other languages, too, so see number 2 above for how I feel about that. They serve no purpose whatsoever except to try to cow you into thinking Gaddis is tremendously well-read and therefore much smarter than you.
4a. The occasional and completely inexplicable tense shifts. The book is told 99% in the past tense, except for like three completely random pages that occur in the present. Why? I’ll talk more about this below, but this to me is just evidence that no one—Gaddis, his editors, his agent—ever really looked at the content of this book as closely as they should’ve. They add nothing to the book’s effect, and distract from an already-scatterbrained “story.”
4b. The occasional and completely inexplicable point-of-view shifts. The book is told 99% in omnipotent third person, which would be totally okay if it was consistent. For utterly no reason, there’s a few random “we”s and “our”s tossed in, which throws doubt over the whole thing about who or what, exactly, is telling us this stultifying story. New writers very often make tense and POV mistakes (and yes, I have decided that they are indeed mistakes, serving no practical purpose and therefore needing to have been edited out), and Gaddis is no different.
5. The awful and excessive allusions and references to other works, most of them esoteric religious/spiritual texts in other languages. When I say “excessive” I mean that Gaddis literally spends paragraphs listing off books that no one has ever heard of or read (usually about baloney like sun-worship or St. Francis of Assisi) for no reason at all other than to prove that he’s heard of these books and wants you to think he understands them. This one also ties into number 2 above, because most of them have foreign titles, but is especially annoying because he can’t even pretend they advance the plot or develop character; they’re literally just lists. Painfully pointless and just brutal for the reader to slog through.
6. The constant use of what are supposed to be symbols, but really aren’t anything. Here’s how it goes, on quite a few occasions: “This is a symbol!” Gaddis shouts at you, the reader. “Great,” you say. “A symbol of what?” “This is a symbol!” he shouts again, looking nervous. “Awesome,” you answer. “A symbol of what?” “THIS IS A SYMBOL!” he yells, red in the face. And so on. You get the idea. There are no less than a dozen objects interspersed at random into the narrative because someone must have once told Gaddis that symbols are important; these include, among others, a green scarf, a golden bull statue, a suit of armor, birds (lots of fucking birds), a monkey, a Mickey Mouse watch, a fake mummy, and more. They’re all like cotton candy: bright and colorful in appearance, yet totally devoid of any real substance. If I had to give the whole book a simile, I’d say it’s like shoe leather: dull, and unfit for human consumption.
Analysis, Part III: The Prose Itself
I’ve talked a lot of shit on Gaddis and his awful novel, so it’s only fair that I give it a chance to speak for itself. To that end I’ve collected some paragraphs from the book representative of the kind of thing you get on every page. (Note: under no circumstances are you to try to understand the quotes that follow, as it will only induce headaches and possible nausea. And no, there is no context that would give these passages any more meaning.)
Passage 1, from about page 250:
“The moment of evening loss is suggested in restricted portions of the sky which only suggest infinity, and that such an intimacy is possible when something rises from inside, to be skewered on the peaks or continue to rise untrammeled: a desperate moment for those with nowhere to go, the ones who lose their balance when they look up, passing on all sides here, invited nowhere, enjoying neither drink nor those they drank with but suddenly desolated, glancing up, stepping down from the curb alone, to seek anywhere (having forgot to make a date for “cocktails,” asylum of glass, brittle words, olives from across the sea, and chromium) a place to escape this transition from day to night: a grotesque time of loneliness, for what has been sought is almost visible, and requires, perhaps, no more than a priest to bring it forth. Restricted above the seven lilies, the sky lay in just such a portion as the Etruscan priest might have traced with his wand when, building the temple, he outlined on the sky the foundation at his feet, delivering the residence of deity to earth.”
Okay. Deep breath. You made it. Let’s try another one, a good example of the kind of thing that opens a lot of the chapters. Passage 2 begins chapter IX of Part II near page 700:
“The sun rose at seven, and its light caught the weathercock atop the church steeple, epiphanized it there above the town like a cock of fire risen from its own ashes. In the false dawn, the sun had prepared the sky for its appearance: but even now the horned moon hung unsuspecting at the earth’s rim, before the blaze which rose behind it to extinguish the cold quiet of its reign.
In the daylight’s embrace, objects reared to assert their separate identities, as the rising sun rescued villagers from the throbbing harmony of night, and laid the world out where they could get their hands on it to assail it once more on reasonable terms. Shapes recovered proper distance from one another, becoming distinct in color and extension, withdrawn and self-sufficient, each an entity because it was not, and with daylight could not be confused with, or be a part of, anything else. Eyes were opened, things looked at, and, in short, propriety was restored.”
Yikes. I’ve chosen these two passages because they contain many of the mistakes that the prose itself of The Recognitions makes consistently. Let’s walk through them and use them to analyze the prose overall. (To be clear, by “prose itself” I mean the actual syntactical choices Gaddis made, the words and sentences he has placed on the pages of his book.)
Passage 1 is a masterclass in indecipherable long-winded gibberish, so I’m going to defer to my favorite analysis of indecipherable long-winded gibberish, from a really interesting article I once read about famed psychologist and total bizarro Jordan B. Peterson:
“What’s important about this kind of writing is that it can easily appear to contain useful insight, because it says many things that either are true or “feel kind of true,” and does so in a way that makes the reader feel stupid for not really understanding. (Many of the book’s reviews…contain sentiments like: I am not sure I understood it, but it’s absolutely brilliant.) It’s not that it’s empty of content; in fact, it’s precisely because some of it does ring true that it is able to convince readers of its importance….[M]uch of the language [is] so abstract that it cannot be proved or disproved. (The old expression ‘what’s new in it isn’t true, and what’s true isn’t new’ applies here.)”
The author of that article was referencing a passage in Peterson’s Maps of Meaning, but to me it also applies dead-on to the paragraph from The Recognitions. Yes, it’s true that the sky gets darker as night approaches, and that some people who haven’t made plans are lonely. But those sentiments are so obvious and not-original that Gaddis couches them in nearly 200 words of unprovable yet unfalsifiable nonsense, so heavily qualified that if I went on a discussion board arguing this very point his fans would almost certainly insist I have misunderstood what he was really trying to say. This is all without even examining his putting of the word cocktails in quotations for no reason at all and then the comically irrelevant (but smart-sounding) reference to “the Etruscan priest.” No, I don’t know who the Etruscan priest is either, and he’s never mentioned before or after this. (This phenomenon—throwing in references to possibly-real or possibly-fictional religious-y things—is a common occurrence throughout the book.)
The goal of Gaddis’ writing like this, as I pointed out in some different contexts above, is to make you believe he is smart and a good writer. I don’t want to go so far as to say that anyone who likes The Recognitions (and there are certainly quite a few people who do) has been totally fooled by its Jordan B. Peterson-esque author, but I am going to say that my bullshit meter went absolutely through the roof on pretty much every page. It was painful to read this book because at no point did Gaddis convince me of the thing he desperately needs the reader to accept: that he knows what he’s doing when it comes to the craft of novel-writing and sentence-building. Since I never had faith in that, the book’s bullshit remained just that—bullshit from a charlatan—rather than what Gaddis thought it was, cutting-edge new-age insight into the nature of human existence. That’s a pretty lofty goal for any writer to tackle. Gaddis should’ve set his sights a lot lower if he wanted to have any hope of succeeding.
Okay. Let’s move on to Passage 2. Something that inexperienced/bad writers do that good writers don’t is mention a few specific concepts way too often. This is not an exhaustive list of those concepts, but it’s close: the sun, the moon, the sky, clouds, light (often in reference to the sun or the sky), shadows, darkness, the weather, the sunrise, the sunset, and the stars. Notice what these all have in common: they are utterly everyday things. The sun is there in the same sky with the same moon every single minute of our lives. So why do bad writers toss these in constantly? Because they don’t know how to write fictional characters and scenes well enough to not rely on mentions/descriptions of these most-ordinary of real things. Trust me: there is no way you could describe the sunrise or sunset that someone else hasn’t already done more succinctly and beautifully in a novel from a hundred years ago.
Gaddis mentions pretty much all of those things with such frequency that it’s honestly impressive he never tired of hearing himself come up with one overused sun/moon analogy after another. Passage 2 could be distilled to: “The sun rose.” Except you can’t say that, as the article on Peterson makes clear, “[i]f you want to appear very profound and convince people to take you seriously, but have nothing of value to say.” To achieve that, the article explains,
“there is a tried and tested method. First, take some extremely obvious platitude or truism. Make sure it actually does contain some insight, though it can be rather vague. Something like “if you’re too conciliatory, you will sometimes get taken advantage of,” [or, “The sun rose”]. Then, try to restate your platitude using as many words as possible, as unintelligibly as possible, while never repeating yourself exactly. Use highly technical language…so that no one person will ever have adequate training to fully evaluate your work….Never say anything too specific, and if you do, qualify it heavily so that you can always insist you meant the opposite. Then evangelize: speak as confidently as possible, as if you are sharing God’s own truth. Accept no criticisms: insist that any skeptic has either misinterpreted you or has actually already admitted that you are correct. Talk as much as possible and listen as little as possible. Follow these steps, and your success will be assured. ”
So, Gaddis can’t just say “The sun rose.” That’s too obvious, and would defeat his goal of convincing people he is very profound and should be taken seriously. Instead he tries to dress it up in some fancy linguistic footwork that eventually just tangles him in until he falls flat on his face. Those paragraphs suck, man. Like, really bad. (Notice how many times he says “rise” in its different forms/tenses in rather close proximity.) Gaddis is describing the most commonplace and universal event using some of the most trope-reliant and unimaginative language possible. That mix of poor choice of subject and poor wording to describe it is basically the book in a nutshell. If that sounds like a pretty devastating critique of a novel, it is.
As the discussion of Passages 1 and 2 has hopefully shown by now, there are sentences, paragraphs, and often full pages in The Recognitions that are so loosey-goosey, so unjustifiable, so bad, it’s astonishing they weren’t chopped by an editor. But they weren’t. I honestly think I’m going to start recommending this book to people who ask me how not to write well. (Just kidding. I’m never going to recommend this book to anyone, because no one else should ever have to suffer through it.)
Analysis, Part IV: Illnesses
The Recognitions suffers from an especially acute case of two literary illnesses: I Am A Genius-itis and Stephen King’s Disease. Let’s do a little book-reviewer doctoring and diagnose them in depth.
1. I Am A Genius-itis
The first malady the examination shows is a rather nasty case of I Am A Genius-itis: Gaddis truly believes himself to be brilliant. This led him to the exact opposite approach of how to produce good writing: he was clearly concerned with, and believed himself to actually be, creating a masterpiece. (This is something a lot of first-first novels suffer from—since you’ve never written one, you assume that what you’re doing is beyond comparison to all other novels that have come before. It’s the literary equivalent of the guy on his couch eating Doritos watching the Olympics on TV saying, “Yeah, I could do that.”) This self-belief of Gaddis’, that he was making A Monumental Work of Deeply Significant Art, is evident in every word, every piece of miscellaneous bullshit mentioned above.
The problem is that actual masterpieces are never written this way. At no point does the writer of a masterpiece yell, as Gaddis does on each page, that the book you’re holding is brilliant. Instead, you just write excellently, and the reader’s appreciation of the work will deepen and grow organically. Roth infamously believed himself to be the best writer alive (and maybe he was right), but not for one single word of self-service would he sacrifice the story at hand. For all Roth’s supposed arrogance, for all the stories about his yearly anticipation of being awarded the Nobel, for all his hyper-intelligence and smug appreciation of that intelligence—for all that, the story, the book, the final published product was paramount every single time. In a career of 30+ books, Roth never once resorted, not even for a sentence, to literary showboating. Gaddis, much stupider and much worse a writer, decided to make every page of his creaking behemoth an ode to his own self-absorption.
Because the novel was written with this framework in mind—author above novel, writer above character, creator above created—the actual content on the page is much worse than it should be. The imposition of the author’s self onto his work never turns out well, even regardless of how smart the writer actually is. Pynchon, in his great introduction to his collected book of short stories Slow Learner, spoke disparagingly about his own most-famous short story “Entropy” for reasons very similar to this: “Entropy” is poor, he says, because he began with a concept (entropy, the gradual loss of energy within a system) that he thought sounded smart, then tried to impose that concept on characters. His later work learned from this, as all good writers must, and from then on he let his novels’ characters decide the direction and themes of the works they appear in. Gaddis, unfortunately, missed that memo, like he missed so many others.
Gaddis was so caught up in his own (supposed) genius that he forgot to write something worth reading, something that might actually impart a sense of appreciation, something that might actually cohere to itself and to a reader’s mind. He forgot, or didn’t know, a critical part of writing: respect for your reader. You can respect your reader while mocking him, while satirizing him, while insulting him, while boring him, while thrilling him, while teaching him, while learning from him, but you can never, ever respect your reader by forgetting about him completely. This book is Gaddis’ head on a dusty platter, with not a single thought given to the possibility that a casual examiner might not find Gaddis as fascinating as he finds himself.
The Recognitions is not about its characters, or its supposed themes of the real and the fake, or religious consternation, or anything else the dust jacket and the community of the book’s champions say. This book is about William Gaddis impressing himself. And that is probably the only way in which the book succeeds. Rather pathetically, Gaddis spent the twenty years after its publication sulking, bemoaning the lack of praise it received, claiming that no one understood it properly. Oh no, Billy, we got it just fine. It just isn’t worth getting.
It just isn’t particularly anything, save stupefyingly, unjustifiably, horribly long. It is not particularly clever. It is not particularly funny. It is not particularly beautiful at the sentence or syntactic level. It is not particularly insightful. It is not particularly dense. It is not particularly mysterious. It is not particularly well-plotted, well-paced, or well-planned. It is not particularly philosophical. It is not particularly great at capturing the rhythms of human speech. It is not particularly noteworthy for snappy dialogue. It is not particularly good at creating unusual or interesting settings. It is not particularly close to being the expose of an age. It is not particularly deft at transitions. It is not particularly intelligent. It just keeps fucking going, page after page after unremarkable page. And if it’s somehow not clear after everything I’ve lambasted in this review, it is bad at most of those things just listed.
2. Stephen King’s Disease
Stephen King’s Disease, the literary sickness where the author believes every idea he has to be a good one, infects every page of this book. (Named by me in honor of King, who’s done so much blow that his brain long ago lost the ability to distinguish between good and bad ideas. As you might imagine, this one can often be diagnosed commensurately with I Am A Genius-itis.) Gaddis’ agent and his editor are also included in this diagnosis, as they should know better than to entertain thousand-page vanity projects, but they were either too cowed by Gaddis’ bravura to challenge him or it was just the Fifties and straight white men could get thousand-page vanity projects published as first novels with no questions asked. Regardless, the Stephen Kings bit this one hard, and boy howdy did it make a whole lot of sense to me when, reading the Wikipedia article on the book after I’d finished it, I came across the following nugget:
“Gaddis worked on writing The Recognitions for seven years. He began it as a much shorter work…[then later] began to expand his work as a full novel. He completed it in 1949. Evidence from Gaddis’ collected letters indicates that he revised, expanded and worked to complete the draft almost continuously up to early 1954, when he submitted it to Harcourt Brace as a 480,000-word manuscript.”
The key words here are “expanded almost continuously” for five years after it was “completed.” Expansion, Billy, is not what you should’ve focused your time on. A novel is not something you just throw bits and pieces onto for adornment like a Christmas tree (see the list above of miscellaneous meaningless bullshit for examples of these pointless ornaments). A novel—like a symphony—is a self-contained whole, a perfect box free from decoration, filled to the brim but no further with the exact number of words needed. Gaddis’ box not only couldn’t close, the contents spilled so far over the sides that it became an entire house of unneeded shit—unnecessary references, pointless scenes, purposeless characters, meaningless conversations, and totally irrelevant material of all kinds. A box has a point: to hold contents befitting its size. All good novels, and good novelists, know this, and stay within the confines a novel creates for itself.
(Though I did mostly come to this conclusion on my own regarding fiction, I am hardly the first to make this point regarding art in general. A few weeks ago Kate sent me a great quote from Mark Speer, the lead songwriter for the minimalist Thai funk band Khruangbin, who made a similar point when talking about the group’s composition process:
“When we first started the band, we wanted to have a formula. It’s like, ‘This is what we do, and we’re not gonna try and go outside the box too much. We’re gonna explore the box we’re in.’ I’ve always been a big fan of that. I used to be in bands where it was like, ‘Man, we’ve gotta think outside the box!’ And all I’m thinking is: ‘You guys don’t even know.’ Music should never be experimental just for the sake of being experimental. Before you even start, you have to know what you’re experimenting with first.”
Gaddis clearly needed a good dose or two of minimalist Thai funk, as unlike Speer, he has no friggin’ clue what box he’s in.)
I once got chastised in a class discussion board for criticizing an awful short story—so awful I won’t name it**—with the following:
“In stories of [this] vein, the individual fragments should combine to form a composite picture greater than the sum of the parts…People say that about Mozart in the movie Amadeus: if you took one note out, or added one note more, the whole piece would be immeasurably worse. Everything is required, and nothing more can be added. I’m not saying we all have to write fiction like Mozart wrote symphonies, but [the story] felt disconnected in every way except chronological. [The author] could have removed [a specific lengthy paragraph], and the story’s overall effect would have changed very, very little.”
My professor gave me hell for that, which was probably justified considering this was in Intro to Fiction Writing and I’d written a grand total of one (bad) short story in my life at that point, but reading it back now I’m stunned at how accurately I was able to summarize my feelings about what makes some stories succeed and others fail. (Ironically, it was around this time that I was finishing my “first-first” novel, a masterclass in unnecessary crap. Clearly, I still had to learn to take my own damn advice.)
Which brings me back to The Recognitions. The book was a perfect litmus test of what I despise most in fiction: uncontrolled prose from an amateur writer. I have spent this review (and several other things I’ve written in the past few years) trying to put into words what exactly it is, the way my brain differentiates between good and poor writing. I’m still not sure if I’ve done it to my own satisfaction, but that sentiment from my discussion post above, which I will bold, italicize, and all-caps for maximum emphasis, as it’s the crux of this entire review and my general theory of all literature—NOT ONE WORD COULD BE ADDED OR DELETED WITHOUT MAKING THE WHOLE WORK WORSE—is, has been, and always will be my ultimate measuring stick for judging the merits of fiction.
That is a high standard, to put it mildly. Writing at that level, it should be obvious, is really, really, really fucking difficult—like impossible-to-put-into-words difficult—especially as the work gets longer and the writer is faced with an exponentially-increasing number of decisions. But the men whom I consider the greatest writers of all time—Pynchon and Roth—are artists on par with Mozart, and the novels they produced are as brilliantly and tightly constructed as any of the symphonies in Amadeus. GR is 760 pages, and Sabbath’s Theater is 450, but in both cases every single one of them is needed to tell the story the book is telling. The Recognitions is 959, and less than 200 justify their existence. That’s as clear as I can make it, I think.
Conclusion
Let me, at the close of this mammoth review, offer some extremely measured praise, but praise tempered with some very real frustration. Because here’s the kicker, my final analysis of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions: hidden in the corners of this book is the shadowy outline of a really interesting story involving art forgery and the underbelly of the 1950s, but that glowing gem of an idea is completely crushed, smothered, subsumed, and battered into nothingness by the horrible weight of the rest of the content. 250 pages of that story would have been a terrific first novel, a gold cube of a book with the razor insight and pinpoint satire of Less Than Zero or The Crying of Lot 49.
Remember the earlier discussion of “first-first” versus “first” novels? Well, they can be the same thing—if the actual “first” novel is a much-edited, stripped-down version of the first-first. That’s what happened in the case of Less Than Zero: Bret Easton Ellis wrote about 1000 pages of total rambling gibberish, then looked at it, realized where the good stuff was, took his lessons like a champ, and sliced and diced it down to 220 pages of the tightest, cleanest first novel anyone had written in years. The Recognitions, had it undergone a similar revision process, would almost certainly be getting a glowing rather than acerbic review from me and the many others who found so much to be disappointed with.
It is ironic that The Recognitions, a book ostensibly about the real vs. the fake and the genuine vs. the counterfeit, is itself a sham. It is a travesty of good writing, a fraudulent mimicry of excellent novels, the cheap copy of many real masterpieces. The Recognitions is the “before” of a good book. That it never became the “after,” the actual good book, is—at the deepest level—a shame.
Postscript: A micro-review of the introduction to The Recognitions by William H. Gass
The best part of the edition of The Recognitions I read was William H. Gass’s witty and erudite introduction, which was witty and erudite because every word of it drips with the fact that he was asked to write said introduction for no other reason than his similar-sounding name meant he was frequently mistaken as the author of The Recognitions in the years after its publication. I’m Gass, not Gaddis, the introducer makes plain—and, yes, Gaddis, not Pynchon or Salinger or even William Gibson (how many Bill G.s are there in the literary world?), is the author of the monstrous work ahead of you. It is a strange introduction: Gass praises the novel, yes, but in a very carefully measured way, and spends a good deal of time discussing its author’s other novels rather than the one at hand. Read the way I read it (after I’d finished the book), the introduction is a keenly disguised satire of exactly the same things I found so problematic.
Gass acknowledges, unnecessarily, the fact that The Recognitions, “the work which wrapped Gaddis in the cloud of its carefully adumbrated confusions, remains widely heard about, reverently spoken of, yet narrowly read.” Hmmm. Maybe that cloud of mystique is shrouding a colossal collective ignorance of what’s actually in the pages? And then Gass notes, very unnecessarily, the vocal critical response upon the book’s release, even offering this list of pleasant adjectives: “unreadable and wandering and tiresome and confused.” Sound familiar? He then delves into a lengthy treatment of the hero’s journey archetype as made famous by Joseph Campbell, ostensibly to illustrate the literary tradition The Recognitions moves in, but in my reading it was just because Gass had no other kind things to say about the novel he was being paid by the page to introduce. The ten-page introduction, then, is full of more cutting insight, more delicate insinuation, more elegant writing, and more humor than all 956 pages of The Recognitions put together.
* No, I won’t name the book here either. If you really want to know, ask me in person. I refuse to give it any more online footprint.
** No, I won’t name the story here.
