Over the past twenty years, New York Review Books has gained a well-deserved reputation for saving great novels from oblivion, having returned to print John Williams’s Stoner, Elaine Dundy’s The Dud Avocado, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and many other works overlooked at publication or forgotten after early success. More recently, it has brought such international classics as Uwe Johnson’s Anniversaries and Antonio di Benedetto’s Zama into English for the first time. Through the imprint’s curatorial interventions, dozens of books once unknown to American readers have found a devoted following.
William Gaddis’s first two novels, which NYRB Classics is reissuing this fall, present a slightly different case. The critical neglect that The Recognitions suffered upon its appearance in 1955 has become the stuff of legend. But by the time the book made its way into paperback seven years later, it had been acknowledged as a landmark of postwar American literature. Published in 1975, J R solidified Gaddis’s reputation and earned him the National Book Award. He would go on to publish two more novels in his lifetime, one (Carpenter’s Gothic) merely very good, the other (A Frolic of His Own, which won him his second National Book Award) a masterpiece nearly on the level of the first two. At his death in 1998, he was universally hailed as a giant of the age, and his books have not fallen out of print since.
Readers with more than passing interest in the twentieth-century novel will know his name. Yet they may know it mostly as part of the litany of unfashionable postmodernist titans that is still invoked—“Gaddis and Gass, Barthelme and Barth, Coover and Hawkes”—each time a young white man publishes a long novel with a hint of narrative playfulness. If they know more about Gaddis, it is perhaps that his books are long and difficult and unwelcoming, and that they are not much read. They may also have some sense that Gaddis wanted it this way, that he held common readers in contempt and meant to scare them off. Except for the part about not being much read, none of this is quite right. So Gaddis may be ripe, after all, for the kind of rediscovery in which his new publishers specialize.
Read Full Article »
