This past year was a year of big novels and long texts. It's taken a bit of time for me to come around to appreciating longer works. A short novel, even a dreadful one, is a small contract and quick work. Long novels, if you actually hope to finish them, require a greater willingness to indulge an author. As Kurt put it to me: "Long novels feel like you're always standing." I can't think of a better way to describe it.

Two of these long, always-standing novels were The Recognitions and The Tunnel. Both large in several senses. Both erudite. Both very public challenges to certain institutions, practices, and ideologies. Both intimidating.

What I find interesting though is the serious differences in my experience of reading of each, experiences that I'd have a hard time believing are exclusive to me as a reader. Namely, my enjoyment in reading The Tunnel was notably more rewarded than my enjoyment of reading The Recognitions. I wonder if there aren't certain attitudes and dispositions that can be decided about each in considering the two works side by side (ha! surely there are, or else why am I doing this?).

The Recognitions

 

The Recognitions certainly has a history of being an unreadable, unconquerable mountain of a book written by a sour and irascible young man pissed at everyone about everything. It's storied lore, bolstered by this text here, suggests that upon the novel's release, the overwhelming majority of--negative--reviews were written by reviewers who hadn't even read the book, much less finished it. Much is made of its difficulty--cross dialogue; a multitude of languages; a multitude of characters so much like one another that it's nearly impossible to distinguish one from the next; broad, sweeping chapters with plot developments echoing ancient texts; impenetrably dense references to flemish painting. Well, it is these things and it isn't. Gaddis certainly didn't expect much other than an active engagement and a willing participation on the part of the reader, which is really all it takes to read the book (any book). In fact, you'd often need little more than a good dictionary to find definitions and summaries of some of the more distant references (I, for one, was quite tickled to read about Mithraism once it's mentioned and incoporated in the text). Further, some of Gaddis's prose is some of the best I've encountered. The man can craft an amazing sentence.

Less compelling, however, are some of the structural weaknesses of the text, particulalrly concerning plot (something that is even more absent in, but poses no probloem to, The Tunnel). I'm just gonna say it: there are way too many pointless fucking parties in The Recognitions. Come on, Bill. Who gives a fuck? Clearly you don't, because you have nothing but scorn and hatred for these people (well, most of them anyway, save maybe Wyatt and Stanley).  So why? Why am I asked to read scene after scene of people talking shit at cross-angles over and over again? Does it work to grant a certain satirical realism to the tone of the text? Indeed. Does it, in fact, work to elucidate certain character qualities and traits regarding key players and their relationships? Certainly and without a doubt. But dial it back a notch. Please. After nine hundred pages of it I hate New York as much as Otto but probably more cuz I really hate Otto too (and--btw--the arm sling is funny like maybe the first or second time it's mentioned, Bill).By the time Stanley's banging away on the organ and that shit-hole church collapses on his head I'm just kinda like "Whew, it's done. Now, what else do I got on the shelf here? Ooooooo, Don DeLillo? Yes, please." I feel like this is a shortcoming. I shouldn't simply be happy that the book is finally finished. That thing should resonate with me. And, if I'm honest, it does. The Recognitions is impressive in many ways, and it boasts an ethics that I think is important to serious literature. But to say I enjoyed the experience of reading it might be a fib. Appreciate? Yes, mostly. Enjoy? ....might be a stretch. I'll even concede the possibility that I'm an impatient mornon and simply do not know how to read. This could be true. And I might have to read the book more than once to truly apprehend it and its acheivement. There's a reason we're still talking about it a half century after it was published, no doubt.

The Tunnel

 

Now this, this is a fucking book, you guys. Holy shit. The product of thirty years of writing and revision, The Tunnel--I'll try to refrain from hyperbole--is perhaps the most enchanting novel I've ever read. Which is a weird, weird thing to say considering what a bleak ontological project it is most of the time. But there's something else going with The Tunnel that The Recognitions seems to lack: Gass uses the text to embody a curious and shifting relationship between language and Truth. What does it mean to be a man? A bad man? A man is bad why? What evidence do we have stacked up behind us, or, in Kohler's case, buried in the drawers of your fat wife's chifforobes? What about all of this other stuff we did when we were trying to be Great Men? These books we wrote? The lives we've lived in small, mundane ways from moment to moment? Is that where we are? Hidden between the pages of our grander ambitions? In attempting to consider these kinds of things, and consider them he did, for many many years, Gass uses his typically alliterative and assonant style to shape long, beautiful sentences into polished pieces of glass. The most beautiful, beautiful glass. And they ring, they chime. They fragment light and cast pieces of it in bright splotches on the wall. They are marvels. And it seems to be this consistent and unquenchable curiosity about being that gives The Tunnel its life. There is virtually no plot to speak of. But unlike Gaddis, who posits The Recognitions at you as a rhetorical gesture, like something he's already figured out so here you go, Gass via Kohler seems to be asking questions until the final sentence, considering whether or not to rise or lay himself down by sorrow's side. God is that book good.

So, maybe, in the end it says more about my needs and expectations about my reading than anything. I don't need or want William Gaddis to stick his penis (a 900 + page penis, no less) in my face to tell me that he's figured it out. I need an author to approach these questions with greater consideration, and to make the considering itself the artistic gesture.

That's it for now.