The Recognitions
William Gaddis
1955
Around 980 pages
Praise Zeus, it's finally over. I felt like I just kept reading, and I wasn't getting any closer to the finish line. It's difficult to sustain your audience's interest for nearly a thousand pages, and William Gaddis failed to keep me engaged within the first few pages. So I knew this was going to be a slog.
Wyatt Gwyon is inspired to become a painter by The Seven Deadly Sins, a Bosch work that his father owned. He gets discouraged as all artists do, and moves to New York City. There, he meets Recktall Brown, who enlists him in a forgery scheme. There are many other stories interwoven into this one, and narratively, it is a very challenging novel.
Gaddis recognized (ho-ho) that this was not a reader friendly novel. So it's not a fun read. I get the sense Gaddis was trying to capture the essence of a painting in his work. The story is organized like a triptych, with many larger and smaller scenes happening at the same time. He also never identifies speakers. I do think good writing means that that readers can deduce who is speaking based on a strong sense of the characters, without dialogue tags. However, this was a very confusing story to begin with, so that choice just added to difficulty level. And why is making the experience of your book really grueling an admirable feat? I accomplished that in my debut novel with ease.
Pretty dull for a book with a character named Recktall.
RATING: **---
Interesting Facts:
In 2005, Time included The Recognitions in its list of "100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005".
In 2002 writer Jonathan Franzen said that this novel was, "by a comfortable margin, the most difficult book I ever voluntarily read."
UP NEXT: The Quiet American by Graham Greene
