Rating: 
Summary: I made it halfway ...
Review: .. before I gave up the book out of sheer boredom. I suppose the point of the book is a play on phonyness, 50s style; a lot (and I mean a LOT) of well-crafted pseudo-intellectual blather from major and minor characters is what moves the story forward, but wordiness does not make a masterpiece. I still think it's important that, first, a novel describe - the who what when where - and much of the time I was even confused about who was talking, and to whom. Other reviews mention Ulysses, and Pynchon; well even in the thickest tangles of those works I knew what was going on. I'll probably reread this from time and pick up where I left off; I don't expect much revelation in the second half.
Rating: 
Summary: A Beautiful Shy, Still Shy a Classic
Review: After having prepared myself for The Recognitions, reading the praise and knowing I must sooner or later approach this lengthy, always prefaced "difficult" work, I have to say I found it a beguiling and very near classic -- yet I feel it necessary to maintain the "very near" in my assessment.First, it cannot be denied there are passages in this novel that strike like lightning, particularly the descriptions of walking in New York City. I have never read a better description of that icy, speedy feeling than in this book. The thickness, the syrupy references lend a biblical feel to the book, and I think that is effective too. Still, having reached 900 pages, I began to realize the author disliked and possibly even hated not most, but all of his characters. There seemed nothing noble that did not become ridiculous in their desires. Realizing Gaddis is to some degree a satirist, I still believe he meant to reach further than satire alone. Surely a satire of supposed New York sophisticates, or the art world, would require less than almost a thousand pages. A Mad magazine treatment would do. I also found the last chapter anti-climactic. I feel the novel places Wyatt at its center, then pulls away at the last minute in the style of a movie ending in titles describing what happened to all the characters. Yes, it is a unique and brilliant book, but still it must be said there is something just missing.
Rating:
Summary: Now, that's a real novel!
Review: Geez, I loved this book. Here were characters who, while not entirely as sympathetic as I personally would have liked, satisfied the tremendous and, OK, somewhat neurotic need I have to find companionship amid the pages of a book. With 'The Recognitions,' I sat for a long time in my modishly furnished TriBeCa loft, looking as slovenly as I possibly could in my scary glasses and Salvation Army ensemble, and when the novel was over and done with and all that was left was the goobling of all the chubby pigeons bumbling in the airshaft and the still quiet one expects to find in the aftermath of an intensely artistic experience I realized that I'd done it! I'd finished this long, somewhat boring, but somehow essentially necessary experience. I shoved my gaudy World Wrestling Federation ticket sleeve into the little slot by my bedside marked "Colorful Bookmarks" and placed my skinny arms behind my head, staring up at the ceiling. Here's how my thinking went, albeit not in some stuffy stream-of-consciousness type rendering that might put off a potential reader: I could go out to cocktail parties all across town and say, "Howdy! I just read the Recognitions! You look like a Ann Tyler type yerself, not that I'm scoffing due to Tyler's holy Contract with her readers to provide sympathetically whimsical characters to identify with, take home, and hopefully bring to bed, but you certainly don't look like you're man enough to handle a massively endowed tome like The Recognitions." Strangely, I was only invited to one or two cocktail parties. Soon, I was only meeting girls at George Segal film festivals, slithering up to them after a screening of, say, "King Rat" and whispering suggestively: "Say! That King Rat is one long book. Ever tackle, by chance, 'The Recognitions'? And, if'n you're not so inclined to read an intransigently uncooperative 'text', you wanna tackle a skinny man in scary glasses?" This worked, briefly, but only during an Ecstasy epidemic that raged throughout the northeast for one glorious summer. OK, maybe the book is a little too erudite, a little too long, a little too difficult (for some!). I could handle, I was long ago provided with the oddly misshapen tools required to crack open unwieldy and difficult texts. Before I realized that the truest and deepest bond that could be formed between an author and an audience was of the type managed by Eric Segal, there's nothing I liked better than to curl up with "Of Grammatology." I'd raise my Army-surplus covered forearm up to my dripping nostril and wipe, sniffily. But now I'm better. It's character, plot, and weighty theme that moves me now (as long as that theme isn't banal and unexceptionable. It's controversy I court!). And I think Gaddis shows a lot of promise in this debut effort.
Rating: 
Summary: Strange beauty
Review: I admit there were places in this book that I had to force myself through. But in retrospect the whole thing just seems like a unified, ornate edifice, like a gothic cathedral of words.
Rating:
Summary: A Secret Missile
Review: I suppose that it is a "recognition," or cosmic correspondence or something of the sort that Malcolm Lowry, author of that other great Twentieth Century Novel, Under The Volcano, to which Gass compares The Recognitions in the Introduction to my copy of this book, was reading The Recognitions when he died. Lowry mentions it in one of his last letters as a "Secret Missile of the Soul." I think that's about as far as any reviewer is likely to get in trying to label or summarize this book... Aside from an interest in Flemish masterworks, esoteric sects and religions, forgery, alchemy, the fraudulence and general cheapness of what passes for the artistic endeavour and religious experience in modern society, what this book really requires for enjoyment is a sense of humour. -Lowry also noted how readers failed to grasp the humour of what Gass calls his "dark" masterpiece-and, of course, an appreciation of fine writing. What else can one say? Delineate one of the subtle drolleries that are interlaced throughout the book? Plunge into a dissertation upon Mithraism? Go on about aesthetics and the modern age?-No, you the reader must discover all this for yourself in the hand-grenade-hopscotch that constitutes the reading of this book. I think any vaster judgments are best left to other (possibly interstellar) forms of life. I will say, for the record, that the recognition that keeps recurring to me most often comes from the final lines of the cryptic letter to the dentist Dr. Weisgall:
"Everything grew too fast then, it was no use trying to keep it down. Everything grew too fast."
Rating:
Summary: Epiphanies on Every Page
Review: In a habit I sustained in college I make it a practice to underline the most quotable lines of novels I read: The Recognitions has underlines on every page. Gaddis is a major literary talent who hasn't yet even begun to receive the following of which he is worthy. This novel concerns the discoveries, both major and minor, of what is authentic in life: The Recognitions is enlightening, almost beatific, in the way in which it focuses upon the shortcomings and moral lapses of humans in pursuit of true art. From the starving painter whose unappreciated genius leads him to forge Flemish masters to a musician whose copied work played upon a great pipe organ brings down a chapel to counterfeitors of money and plagiarists of drama, this of work of Gaddis is the real thing. It is brilliant, witty, original and his command of the language is breathtakingly stunning in its execution. One can see the influence of James Joyce throughout the writing in an experimental style that is breakthrough. It is incredibly inventive and funny and astonishingly intelligent. It's no wonder that The Recognitions went unrecognized for so tragically long -- Gaddis is, without doubt, one of the top half-dozen of American literary novelists of the 20th century ranking with Bellow, Barth, Vonnegut, Hemingway and Faulkner. The writing is work by a fellow of verifiable genius: I strongly recommend that you to discover Gaddis -- he will enrich your life and help you better understand the nature of the personal epiphanies that give meaning to life.
Rating:
Summary: Chrast, how unnecessary!
Review: In my view, one sign of a postmodern classic is that it provokes in the real world the very things it thematizes in its own fictive world. The theme of indecision in Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow is a ready example (think of the character Thanatz's "Of course it happened, of course it didn't happen," then think of the Pulitzer Prize fiasco the novel created). Likewise with Gaddis' The Recognitions, which, among so many other things, demonstrates the invincible [...]uselessness of the kind of critical evaluation attempted in the majority of these Amazon.comreviews of the novel. At their most helpful, they are simply thumbnail descriptions of what the book is, a catalog of its literary "parts" or qualities. At their most useless, they are merely attempts--a number of them remarkably bad--at what Nietzsche called "interpretosis." In short, the very interpretive and evaluative methods the novel so viciously satirizes, even to the point of personifying them in characters like Basil Valentine, Recktall Brown and The Distinguished Novelist, are unwittingly perpetuated by real-world reviewers of the novel who don't have the sense to know the joke's on them. Thankfully, in their reviews of The Recognitions, Robert M. Aber and "a reader from Singapore" stand out as readers who seem to have made this connection in their own way (a work of fiction about artistic fraudulence that generates critical fraudulence in the real world). But I like to think that Ed Feasley, a character in The Recognitions, would sum it up better than any of us here in the real world could. For if you were to encounter Ed on the street and tell him you were writing a book review, he would no doubt reply with his famous catch-phrase: "Chrast, how unnecessary!"
Rating:
Summary: The Recognitions
Review: Not many people even attempt to write like Gaddis anymore. His work, while some would argue, seems to lack much in the way of editing, aspires to something grander than the perfectly edited mediocrity of today's novels. "The Recognitions" is Joycean in its thematic and narrative breadth, and it's aesthetic/philosophic questions go beyond the often trite and angsty work of the later beatnik writers. In spite of highminded digressions on authenticity and Flemish art, the book remains totally engaging through a series of hilarious social parodies and sometimes tragic human dramas.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful and Bitter
Review: The Recognitions is the extreme terminus of "The Catcher in the Rye." Both are concerned with exposing the phony, the counterfeit. Gaddis' work is far more mature, wide ranging and dispairing. His erudition is breathtaking. The work attacks the fake and counterfeit in society, art, Christianity, personal morality and business. My favorite bits are Gaddis' thrashing of Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People", and the weird flashes into the pagan underpinning of Christianity. Many questions are raised and left unresolved, indeed are unresolvable. The narrative is left in fragments that bleed in all directions, blurring the line between narrative and non-narrative, the conscious and the unconscious. It is a beautiful if bitter book. PS In my opinion The Recognitions and Gravity's Rainbow are very different and not derivative one from the other. The Recognitions is about fakes, its style jagged fragmentation, highly realistic. GR is paranoid, fragmented like an opium dream or acid trip, and it comes off like a big practical joke or comic book. Read both! Don't think if you've read one, you've got the other.
Rating:
Summary: The Recognitions
Review: This book is long, really long, clocking in at about 950 pages, not including a worthy introduction by William Gass. And dense. Oh my is it dense. The first hundred pages in particular, with references to thousand year old religions/gods/spirits/rituals just thrown about as descriptive terms, which is obviously nice and easy to understand. Gaddis writes amazing dialogue. His party scenes are the most memorable of all. Using the '-' to show new speakers could be confusing for some, I suppose, but for me it helped pull me further into the pages. For some reason, dialogue just seemed more natural. And it allowed him to have random comments from people in the periphery (Which he used a lot). I loved how a main character would mention something in passing, or discuss something with another character, and then, three hundred pages later, a random string of dialogue would mention/discuss it. Just brilliant. It'd be even more fun to go back through it and pick up the ones I undoubtedly missed. I didn't get a lot of closure on anyone except Stanley, which was unexpected because I considered him a very minor character. Towards the end, however, Gaddis must have decided that using names was a bad idea, so who knows, I might have found out what happened to Otto, Wyatt, Esther, Esme, etc (Though I think I know what happened to Esme). Definitely need another read, but I'll put that off for at least a year or two - This book sucks you in, and well, I feel sad for leaving the highly educated world of the characters, but it also feels like a weight has been taken from my shoulders.
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