Joe Murphy on The Recognitions
Hi Everyone-
I'm enjoying a little "staycation" this week, but I wanted to take a moment to tell you about William Gaddis' masterwork The Recognitions. I mentioned it several months ago to say that I was considering taking it on. Well, I finally did, and have in fact devoted the better part of the summer to reading it. It's a huge commitment, but I'd like to strongly recommend it to you, because the rewards are tremendous.
I became interested in it when I saw it referenced in Jed Perl's book New Art City, about the Manhattan art scene in the 1950's, of which Gaddis was a keen, if jaundiced, observer. My curiosity was further piqued by William Gass' appreciation of Gaddis' work in his A Temple of Texts. So I ordered myself a copy and worked up my nerve. 
I had previously read Gaddis' scathing satire of civil law, A Frolic of His Own, which I loved, but I had no idea of the scope and power of this, his first novel.
I was captivated almost immediately by Gaddis' dense but demonically funny prose style. The sentence which drew me in occured on only the second page:
As for plot, there's plenty of that, too. The Recognitions centers on Wyatt Gwynon, who forges paintings in the style of the Flemish masters, but there is a huge tapestry of characters who meet and overlap in brilliant and unexpected ways, particularly a number of long, dialogue-driven scenes at parties and bars around New York. The major theme of the novel is falsehood, fakery, and deception in all its multiple forms (hundreds in the course of the text), along with an examination of religious belief. In all cases, the true is found in the most unexpected places: Wyatt's forgeries are impossible to expose as such, because of the passion he puts into them, and true religious belief is expressed in the form of mania.
To mention just a few unforgettable scenes:
Otto, the would-be playwright who goes to a bar to meet his father for the first time, instead mistakenly encounters Frank Sinisterra, a counterfeiter who believes Otto is the connection to whom he is to deliver $10,000 in fake bills. What follows is a hilariously confused and surreal conversation, followed by what Otto takes to be an unusually generous Christmas gift;
Wyatt's father, a humble small town parson, goes insane and performs a Mithraistic ceremony in the place of the Christmas Eve service, leading to chaos in the town;
Frank Sinisterra, in Spain towards the end of the novel, meets Wyatt and hatches a scam to steal the body of the local saint, doctor it up as a mummy, and try to sell it to a visiting Egyptologist. They find themselves in a train compartment with the corpse (covered in a shawl), trying to make conversation so no one will suspect the identity of their "travelling companion;"
...and there are too many other dazzling scenes to begin to mention, ranging from the darkly comic to the terrifying to the profound.
The book is densely allusive, and the plot is beyond complex; one of the key expressions of the theme of falsehood in the novel is that several of the characters change (or lose) their identities: Wyatt, for example, is not identfied by name for several hundred pages, until Sinisterra renames him "Stephan" while in Spain. I found an invaluable resource for keeping track of the identity changes, and particularly for following up on Gaddis' many allusions: if you go to williamgaddis.org and click on The Recognitions, you'll find a page by page set of annotations where you can chase down the references as you please.
I also just watched "Stone Reader" on DVD last night, a documentary about people's passionate relationships with ambitious, sometimes difficult novels. To my delight, The Recognitions was mentioned as one of the ten best first novels of the twentieth century, and as I enter the final stretch (only 50 pages left--I should be wrappiing it up today!), I'm strongly inclined to agree. I very highly recommend it, and I'd love to hear from others who have tackled it. If you've read it, or are starting it, feel free to contact me at jmurphy@olssons.com.
Hope your summer is going well. Read something great!
See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
I'm enjoying a little "staycation" this week, but I wanted to take a moment to tell you about William Gaddis' masterwork The Recognitions. I mentioned it several months ago to say that I was considering taking it on. Well, I finally did, and have in fact devoted the better part of the summer to reading it. It's a huge commitment, but I'd like to strongly recommend it to you, because the rewards are tremendous.I became interested in it when I saw it referenced in Jed Perl's book New Art City, about the Manhattan art scene in the 1950's, of which Gaddis was a keen, if jaundiced, observer. My curiosity was further piqued by William Gass' appreciation of Gaddis' work in his A Temple of Texts. So I ordered myself a copy and worked up my nerve. I had previously read Gaddis' scathing satire of civil law, A Frolic of His Own, which I loved, but I had no idea of the scope and power of this, his first novel.I was captivated almost immediately by Gaddis' dense but demonically funny prose style. The sentence which drew me in occured on only the second page:
Nevertheless, they boarded the 'Purdue Victory' and sailed out of Boston harbor, provided for against all inclemencies but these they were leaving behind, and those disasters of such scope and fortuitous originality which Christian courts of law and insurance companies, humbly arguing ad hominem, define as acts of God.Wow. That's a heck of a throwaway sentence, and this 956-page novel is stuffed to the gills with writing this brilliant, polished, and savagely funny.
As for plot, there's plenty of that, too. The Recognitions centers on Wyatt Gwynon, who forges paintings in the style of the Flemish masters, but there is a huge tapestry of characters who meet and overlap in brilliant and unexpected ways, particularly a number of long, dialogue-driven scenes at parties and bars around New York. The major theme of the novel is falsehood, fakery, and deception in all its multiple forms (hundreds in the course of the text), along with an examination of religious belief. In all cases, the true is found in the most unexpected places: Wyatt's forgeries are impossible to expose as such, because of the passion he puts into them, and true religious belief is expressed in the form of mania.
To mention just a few unforgettable scenes:
Otto, the would-be playwright who goes to a bar to meet his father for the first time, instead mistakenly encounters Frank Sinisterra, a counterfeiter who believes Otto is the connection to whom he is to deliver $10,000 in fake bills. What follows is a hilariously confused and surreal conversation, followed by what Otto takes to be an unusually generous Christmas gift;
Wyatt's father, a humble small town parson, goes insane and performs a Mithraistic ceremony in the place of the Christmas Eve service, leading to chaos in the town;
Frank Sinisterra, in Spain towards the end of the novel, meets Wyatt and hatches a scam to steal the body of the local saint, doctor it up as a mummy, and try to sell it to a visiting Egyptologist. They find themselves in a train compartment with the corpse (covered in a shawl), trying to make conversation so no one will suspect the identity of their "travelling companion;"
...and there are too many other dazzling scenes to begin to mention, ranging from the darkly comic to the terrifying to the profound.
The book is densely allusive, and the plot is beyond complex; one of the key expressions of the theme of falsehood in the novel is that several of the characters change (or lose) their identities: Wyatt, for example, is not identfied by name for several hundred pages, until Sinisterra renames him "Stephan" while in Spain. I found an invaluable resource for keeping track of the identity changes, and particularly for following up on Gaddis' many allusions: if you go to williamgaddis.org and click on The Recognitions, you'll find a page by page set of annotations where you can chase down the references as you please.
I also just watched "Stone Reader" on DVD last night, a documentary about people's passionate relationships with ambitious, sometimes difficult novels. To my delight, The Recognitions was mentioned as one of the ten best first novels of the twentieth century, and as I enter the final stretch (only 50 pages left--I should be wrappiing it up today!), I'm strongly inclined to agree. I very highly recommend it, and I'd love to hear from others who have tackled it. If you've read it, or are starting it, feel free to contact me at jmurphy@olssons.com.Hope your summer is going well. Read something great!
See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
Anyway, may I recommend a great fun, dark read for the summer? Scott Smith, who wrote the electrifying A Simple Plan about a decade ago, has a new novel, The Ruins, and it's a doozy. Four young American tourists, joined by a German and a Greek (language becomes an issue) leave their cozy, relaxing Mexican beachside vacation spot to look for an archeological dig. They find a mysterious hillside guarded by an impoverished Mayan tribe, who first warn them away from, then force them toward, the hill. Once trapped there, they find themselves in a desperate struggle for survival against a sinister, unexpected "other" among them. I don't want to give too much away, so let me say this: I haven't read anything that could be termed a horror novel since high school, and this thing creeped the bejeezus out of me. Seriously. It rockets along to what one can see from the beginning will be its unhappy conclusion with very taught prose, characters drawn with far more care than your typical suspense novel, and a wonderfully perverse sense of the degrees of human survival instinct and the extent to which it pays off (if at all). And, hopefully without revealing too much, I just have to add: Scott Smith must have had the worst gardening experience. Ever.
Finally: a big word of thanks to everyone who came in for the Random Summer buy-two-get-one-free promotion. It ends tonight (Thursday), and it's been a great run. Vintage, Anchor, and Broadway have such great lists, and I was delighted to see out customers taking advantage of the sale to stock up on their summer reading. These promotions have been so well-received that we have one more planned for late summer, with paperbacks from the prestigious independent publishers Harcourt Brace, Houghton Mifflin, and W. W. Norton. I'll let you know all about it when we get just a little closer.