The Recognitions is a long, bloated mess of a book. Its underlying plot (and it does have one, and it's a good one) works in fits and starts. You follow about ten different characters concurrently, with the focus of the story being on a struggling artist who has abandoned his aspirations and become an expert forging. The characters are all very good and memorable, but they revolve around and orbit themes rather than a central story.

It's a book about fraud and forgery, about pretentious pseudo-intellectuals claiming to see the meaning of life in a used t-shirt, about drug addicts and alcoholics who think God is their Man, about crazed Christians turned cultists and about nihilistic capitalist pigs. It's about finding truth and meaning in a world of falsehoods and deception, not the truths espoused by ministers or Dale Carnegie or shitty artists, but real truth, real meaning, that Recognition.

The book was completely dismissed when it was published. 53 of the 55 reviews published about it were negative. It was doomed to obscurity because all anyone could say about it was that it was a piece of shit. What's funny is the book itself takes aim at critics and paints them as idiots who like only what's in trend. In The Recognitions, real art is neglected and ignored by critics who don't even bother to read what they review (likewise, most of the critics who reviewed this book wrote wildly inaccurate summaries of it, implying that they had not actually read it themselves).

Reading it now, it's hard to see why it was so dismissed. It's a perfect critique of pseudo-intellectualism and the capitalist art world. It's a hilarious roast of the modern era. Its language is beautiful and completely unusual, containing countless references to literature and history. He can describe an apartment room party as a hellish underworld, can find the bizarre in the ordinary, can make the deal between a capitalist and an artist as life-and-death important as a deal with the devil. And it's really, really funny, it's absurdly humorous. There's a grave robbery scene where they steal a corpse so they can make a forgery of it (long story) and they sit it up next to them on a train, Weekend at Bernie's style, and move it a little and talk to it try to make people think this decomposing corpse is their grandmother.

Anyway, before this gets too long (it already is), I'll leave you with two quotes. One of which is from Gaddis himself and disputes that arrogant prick Franzen's assertion (seriously, fuck Franzen), in explaining the necessary difficulty (which is really overhyped imo, I've read far more difficult works) of The Recognitions. The other is the first two sentences of the novel, which I think constitutes one of the most peculiar and intriguing openings to any book ever.

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>"I do ask something of the reader and many reviewers say I ask too much ... and as I say, it's not reader-friendly. Though I think it is, and I think the reader gets satisfaction out of participating in, collaborating, if you will, with the writer, so that it ends up being between the reader and the page. ... Why did we invent the printing press? Why do we, why are we literate? Because the pleasure of being all alone, with a book, is one of the greatest pleasures."

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>"Even Camilla had enjoyed masquerades, of the safe sort where the mask may be dropped at the critical moment it presumes itself as reality. But the procession up the foreign hill, bounded by cypress trees, impelled by the monotone chanting of the priest and retarded by hesitations at the fourteen stations of the Cross (not to speak of the funeral carriage in which she was riding, a white horse-drawn vehicle which resembled a baroque confectionery stand), might have ruffled the shy countenance of her soul, if it had been discernible."

By the way, thanks for the recommendation. I've been reading a lot of surrealism lately (I'm reading Maldoror now) and I'll check Solenoid out.