That's Gaddis to Pynchon, pals

[Eric Alan Weinstein, Centre For English Studies, University Of London]

   To anyone interested in either Pynchon, or Gaddis, or  really in 
20th Century literature, The Recognitions should be a necessary 
book. It more than rewards the reader for time spent with it; like
Pynchon's best work, it re animates the imaginative impulse in a 
new and peculiar set of literary and historical conditions; it poses
needed, and sometimes impossible questions which consistently 
both demand and evade our attention. And of course, it is very
funny. 

   Of course, Gaddis is not always easy to read, and his work
 is what we might call "a difficult pleasure," if indeed it is any kind
of pleasure at all. What interested me at first in Gaddis was our man
Pynchon's intense reading of Gaddis and "The Recognitions" at a 
certain period of his writerly career. It's reading seems to have been
one of a series of pivotal moments for him.

      Yet the fate of The Recognitions is to be a very long, very dense
 book,  which most people who try to read it never get through. 
I wouldn't be surprised if the actual number of people who have ever 
read it end to end was less than three thousand. This is a great shame; 
another reason for me to encourage what  must be (nearly) the
 impossible: the reading (and perhaps the teaching) of Big Books. 
Am I wrong in thinking that Moby Dick, that great and huge novel, 
was little read for seventy-odd years after it was written? Gaddis 
may be the Melville of our time.

      Having said this, I am, in fact, presently reading Truman
Capote's diminutive and delicious late fragment, "La Cote Basque."

 
E.A.Weinstein
Centre For English Studies
University Of London
E.A.Weinstein at qmw.ac.uk