Giving Up On Books: The Recognitions by William Gaddis

If you do decide to read the book, I highly recommend reading Jonathan Franzen's "Mr. Difficult" first:

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[bjwnashe]

Have you ever read The Recognitions by William Gaddis?

[syater]

I read The Recognitions in the Spring and Summer of 1989. Certainly there is a sort of mental girding needed to take up a book of this sort. I came to the novel with an interest in the theme of 'original versus copy' and an interest in Northern Renaissance painting. That was enough to get me started but of course I could not have known how much more there was to this world of a book. And that is the point. 33 years later I am left with a thick book with notes and underlined passages and am nearly inspired to dig in again. I'm thinking about it. I'm just glad Franzen's essay wasn't around to dissuade me from the adventure.

[OttoIncandenza]

My favorite novel of all time. Shame it didn’t do it for you. :(

[ashulman]

I found the erudition stimulating and thought the satire hit its mark. Also, it's brooding on authenticity, a hot topic in the 50s, may seem irrelevant only because authenticity was so thoroughly defeated in our time.

[mandys]

I read it in my early20s. I thought it had the most hilarious sense of humor. It fits for people with a familiarity with religious texts and who had studied Hermeticism and Alchemy. I had come from a Roman Catholic background so for me it made total sense and I loved every second of it!

[TedBurke]

Our host complains that author Gaddis displays contempt for all his characters and comes across as though he's blissfully unaware that The Recognitions is an epic satire. Satire by any definition by any research one can research or contrive a severe form of making brutal fun of people, ideas, situations, things. It exists not just to make us laugh but also to create in readers that humans are capable of being bad actors devising horrible schemes and finding ways to make their grotesque fantasies become real things. Gaddis was brilliant with this and the number of things he manages to decimate --the art industry, species notions of what constitutes authenticity, the torturously labyrinthian theology that props up The Catholic Church-- is breathtaking, actually, and written in some of the most elegant prose composed in the 20th century.

[bodhibrother]

I have this weird issue with people who organize their books by color.

[secretmeeting]

Have you read William Gass? He has a similar reputation but his prose is the most startling I've read ever. His preface to In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is better criticism than some critics manage in a career.

[bigfat]

I wish you would've finished it but I understand the sluggish feeling you get when a book is totally missing you.

My only real gripe with the review was the discussion on difficulty in books. It felt a bit reductive. I understand the impulse to question the idea of why a book is difficult and to maybe attribute the purpose to being to fuel some litbro ego. But difficulty is a literary technique like any other. It's there for many reasons but most of all just to increase engagement from the reader. Of course that can fail, like in your case, in which the difficulty fails at its job. But in other words we read difficult books because it's fun and exciting to do so.
Im sure im not saying anything you haven't heard or don't know already but I wish that angle would've had a larger effect on the timbre of the review.

[bryangarcia]

Jack Green’s _Fire the Bastards!_ should, in my opinion, be read immediately _before_ one takes the plunge into _The Recognitions, _ as a sort of preparatory measure.

[joaoluizsiqueiraclemente]

I was reading against the day in the original. I am brazilian, so a native portuguese speaker. I already read other novels in the original english, infinite jest included, but this was the first time that i decided to read a Thomas Pynchon novel in english, he is also my favorite writer. Unfortunately half way throug i had to give up once i realized the reading was being more of a work than fun to me. So, i bought the translated version (it was very expensive, the translation is sold out here in Brazil) and i am hoping to read the english version somewhere in the future, when i'm ready.

Loved the review, by the way, The Recognitions was in my wishlist since it was mentioned in The Marriage Plot

[scottlyons]

I know this is cliche, but this book will be more impactful if you read it when you're older.

[TheChannelofaDisappointedMan]

I almost gave up on Trollope's mammoth The Way We Live Now at about page 200, but I decided to soldier on. 700 pages later, I was done, and firmly convinced it was a damned masterpiece.

[valpergalit]

All respect for you, Book Chemist, but I really think you missed the mark on this one. Perhaps a few years down the line you will tackle it again — and finish it — and recognize Gaddis’s genius.

[k.e.]

That's why you should read Stoner by John Williams. No reader can hate that book, it is perfect.

[hazyhillsblue]

A book is not guaranteed to connect with every reader, no matter how critically acclaimed it is. Especially if you don't connect with the writer's ideology or view of the world.

I'm getting the same type of irritation with Vollmann's 'Royal Family'. I find all the characters deeply unpleasant for the sake of it, the plot glacial and the author's experimentation unneccesary. I also find that the book is easy to understand but hard to read as a text. It's a very bitter book that leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

At the same time, I'm almost finished with Barth's 'The Sot-Weed Factor', which despite being written in an older English style, is actually extremely fun and straight-forward to read, which I wasn't expecting from Barth. But Barth has always been weirdly entertaining.

[bingiamatta]

Oh man, I'm in the same situation : shelves full of unread books since the last decade and I keep buying more!

[PinkFLoYD]

Dissing people who read “difficult” books as hipsters who just read to brag or for some kind of validation is ridiculous and embarrassing. These kinds of remarks speak more of you than of the actual readers or the actual book.

There might be people out there who read difficult books just for the sake of difficulty - hipsters as you call them - but this is obviously not sustainable. Sooner rather than later they will give it up. This is why I think the vast majority of people are genuine in their appreciation of a book like The Recognitions. I cannot fathom reading thousand page books just to get through them, it would be such a waste of one’s life. There is something to be said about pushing your limit, but if there’s no enjoyment and you hate every page of it, there is no point. Come back to it in 5-10 years, maybe you will enjoy it then.

There are novels out there that I don’t understand the appeal of myself which are considered masterpieces but I will not tear them down. I never liked people’s arguments that describe a book as difficult and diss it mainly because of that. You don’t like it, fine, put it down and pick something else.

[matthewandel]

"The entire novel..." - from someone who opened this video stating that they did not resd the book lol unreal

[billcardigan]

Hi Bookchemist, I like your channel

This not-review is more pessimistic than the novel. I’ll try to break down why.

You said when you were younger you had more of an appetite for difficult literature which would have pushed you through the novel. Now, in retrospect, you seem to believe that type of passion is not entirely pure but rather symptoms of “obnoxious young man seeking confirmation, ” “Hipsterism 101, ” and “the most WASP thing ever.” I think you’re discrediting yourself.

Regardless of your motivations to read hard books (Infinite Jest, GR) you still read them and they undoubtedly kindled your passion for literature. The same thing happened with Jonathan Franzen (thanks for the essay link) who’s description is perfect:

“By the time I reached the last page of "The Recognitions, " I felt readier to face the divorce, deaths, and dislocations that were waiting for me out in the sunlit world. I felt virtuous, as if I'd run three miles, eaten my kale, been to the dentist, filed my tax return, or gone to church.”

In summary, not exactly fun, but well worth the effort.

You recommended to read his essay before The Recognitions but, after seeing your reaction to it, I completely disagree. Almost every negative point you found in the book was almost verbatim from Franzen’s opinion of JR (which he did not finish). I don’t think that’s a coincidence. In fact, I think it heavily clouded your reading and gave you an academic “excuse” to not finish the book.

The fun is the challenge. The fun is the reward. The fun is engaging deeply with something that actually has depth. If you quit climbing the mountain because it gets too cold you’ll never see the view. You’ll only know a cold mountain.

And of course there are a million good reasons to quit a book halfway and a million and one good reasons to quit The Recognitions, but I don’t think you tackled many. A lot of what you said was completely misinformed and disrespectful to the author. I’m referring to basic things like:
Wyatt’s name being dropped is “difficult for its own sake.”
That there is no significance to the difficult dialogue
“If you don’t have that kind of fascination with humans why... write novels”
It confronts old fashioned religiosity and yet is paradoxically not fun.

You’re better than this! You know it, I know it, everyone knows it. And to be fair this is probably one of the worst times to read an incredibly challenging and brutal novel. You gotta save those for when you’re young and passionate and have all the free time in the world and still romanticise books…

To summarize:

You found a book that requires work, did not put in the work, and then claimed it was not worth the work. The videos comes off more arrogant than the hipsters and WASPs you insult.

And to answer your question... I quit Paradise Lost for a very stupid reason: the iambic pentameter drove me nuts.