NP - Gaddis

[Arthur Fuller]

Jesse,

Yes, I have read JR more than once, and was dumbfounded by the skill and
language-accuracy. Chapters go on for sometimes 20 pages, without a single
"He said" or "She replied" or anything similar. It's 700+ pages of dialog
and there's never a moment when you wonder who is speaking. As I write
this, I'm giggling about the music teacher's soliloquy, and also JR's
slogan for his pills. "It's Green." I have got to press Send now and grab
it off the shelf and dive in again.

I know I'm a man of strange literary tastes, but in terms of fiction
written in English, the small group includes Pynchon, Gaddis, Le Carré,and
Jonathan Franzen. For decades, I have read everything Philip Kerr has
written. His "Bernie Gunther" series is as good as Le Carré's Smiley
sequence; widely dissimilar in style, but utterly compelling.

A.

That was actually the first Gaddis book I read, and then quickly devoured
all the others

On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 7:21 PM, Mark Kohut <mark.kohut at gmail.com> wrote:

> All our circles of info are different but I thought I was occasionally
> seeing Gaddis's genius being accepted and praised more, as Franzen's slowly
> recedes to one book, THE CORRECTIONS, and that so yesterday--as good and
> important as Booth Tarkington, I said to somebody--- but for contemporary
> events.
>
> On Sun, Jul 9, 2017 at 7:13 PM, jesse gooch <jlguuch at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> I finished The Recognitions about two years ago and after being blown
>> away by it, was soon at a loss to describe it. Where does one begin?
>> I’m surprised that you don’t hear his name more often. I think I only
>> came across it in a DFW essay.
>> Has anyone read JR? Trying to get the nerve up to start that one.
>>
>> On Jul 9, 2017, at 12:18 PM, rich <richard.romeo at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> The New Yorker just had a long piece on Texas and it's politics, some
>> harbinger of the future of America with its starved and obscene, religious
>> wing nuts, ad infinitum.
>> Gaddis was and remains for me  a refreshing cudgel upon the heads of such
>> rampant stupidity and malice but reading the article leads one to think
>> it's gotten even worse.
>> It's funny how often Gaddis gets trashed now beyond the idiot Franzen.
>> Yet no one has reached the heights WG landed in just 4 novels.
>>
>> rich
>>
>> On Sat, Jul 8, 2017 at 2:54 PM Charles Albert <cfalbert at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> I've spent the past couple of years feeling like one of those halfwit
>>> monks described in The Swerve. This is the first period of time I've had to
>>> read something big on the ever expanding list.
>>>
>>> Given how hard it was to find for so long, I'm certain not everyone has
>>> The Recognitions, so I wanted to share the moment when I believe I may have
>>> fallen in love....
>>>
>>>
>>> -Your father's father, she corrected him sharply, but her voice broke,
>>> almost bitter as she looked away, not for the death of her brother but to
>>> insinuate that he had abandoned her in this bondage of mortality. She
>>> talked to Wyatt familiarly of death, as though to take him with her would
>>> be the kindest expression of her love for him possible: still, she never
>>> spoke directly of death, never named it so, but continued to treat it with
>>> the euphemistic care reserved elsewhere for obscenity.
>>>
>>>
>>> It sets up like Bierce, and then the punchline is not another artfully
>>> engineered clause or sentence - it's ONE word.
>>>
>>> It gives me wood......
>>>
>>> love,
>>>
>>> cfa
>>>
>>
>>
>


-- 
Arthur
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