What is the main conflict in The Recognitions a Novel by William Gaddis?

In this sprawling and largely-forgotten novel of 1952, author William Gaddis takes as his theme the fake, the flaky, the fraudulent, and the phony in religion, the art world, academia and every nook and cranny he can put under his satirical microscope. In its scope, the novel is as broad as Balzac, as beat as Kerouac, and as rhapsodic as Thomas Wolfe. The characters, an always-changing stream of individual egos pitted against an absurd world, are by turns funny, desperate, deluded, and myopic.