T he Recognitions is primarily a satire of American society. "Much of our fiction," Gaddis declared in 1986, "has been increasingly fueled by outrage or, at the least, by indignation." Like most mainstream American radical writers from Henry David Thoreau to Allen Ginsberg, Gaddis seeks, in his words, to draw upon that indignation in order to call "attention to inequalities and abuses, hypocrisies and patent frauds, self-deceiving attitudes and self-defeating policies" in American society and (whether overtly, or by implication) to offer some means by which these social ills may be corrected.

Gaddis is not, however, naive enough to think that "through calling attention to inequalities and abuses these will be promptly corrected by a grateful public," for he knows that "the state is the public's fiction, and gratitude is not its most prominent attribute." Very few of the flaws of American society are left unscathed by...