Despite the intricacies of structure and design that have gone into the making of The Recognitions, there is apparent in the work, as in the flamenco music so loved by Wyatt, "the tremendous tension of violence all enclosed in a framework," Much of what strikes the casual reader as "excessive" in the book—its length, the virulence of its satire, the wide and esoteric range of its allusiveness, the improbability of certain incidents—suggests the extreme lengths to wh...

[Few] outside of a coterie of devoted followers have read or even heard of The Recognitions…. We have now had, however, access to some of Gaddis' manuscripts, which may help The Recognitions find its rightful above-ground reputation. (p. 61) To understand Gaddis' relationship to his characters, and thus his philosophical motive in writing the novel, we are helped by knowing how Gaddis conceived of it originally. The Recognitions began as a much smaller and less complicated work, passing...

In a world in which people cling to their separateness, originality as a justification of their claim to individuality is of prime importance. But what if they lack originality, and are unable to accept it? They resort to fakery…. That there is something alarming about a world in which the compulsion to cling to one's separateness degenerates into … perverse and bizarre antics, not only enables Gaddis to provide the … rich texture [of The Recognitions] and much of its hilarity, b...

[In The Recognitions, the] canvas overflows with characters who are fatally infected with a malady that the author naturally attributes to decayed religious, professional and social institutions and their false values. Mr. Gaddis himself does not escape infection. And it is significant that a novel which treats counterfeiting on such a grand scale should itself be an ambitious and impressive imitation. The Recognitions is particularly indebted to Gide, Joyce and Eliot for its theme, form, tone and symbolic ...

[The Recognitions] is an immensely long first novel whose spiritual forebears are Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's The Waste Land, and Gide's The Counterfeiters. Its theme is familiar—the modern world is hell: a place where the counterfeit is preferred to the genuine and where the presiding spirits are Fakery and Delirium. Sizable sections of the novel are set in Spain, New England, and Rome, but the dominant milieu is New York's downtown Bohemia and its prosperous uptown affiliat...

In some quarters of the literary scene today William Gaddis's novel "The Recognitions" is bound to be praised to the skies, and this reviewer keeps wondering who is being taken in. Mr. Gaddis has immense erudition; he writes in at least four languages; his use of mythology is impressive—and he shows the decay of faith in the modern world in over 900 pages of bright chatter…. [Beneath] the elaborate religious superstructure of the story, and the series of parallel invocatio...