I'm a Gaddis junkie but didn't anticipate hoovering this one up as I did. I had thought I might pick at it over a long period, maybe on the toilet or in dribs and drabs at bedtime. But I read every word of it over the course of about a week and enjoyed it a great deal. Plenty of it is routine, perhaps even outright boring, as a young Gaddis writes his mother dozens of letters to briefly report his location and ask for books or money, but there's plenty besides that, and even seeing the progression as Gaddis grows and struggles and publishes and struggles some more is fascinating.

Writers of great books have always seemed in a way untouchable to me, erudite, talented beyond the grasp of mere mortals, maybe even almost vatic. As a sometime-scribbler, I've read work by the likes of Gaddis and felt simultaneous despair ("I could never do what he's done") and inspiration ("I should try!"), but in the end I've always come around to feeling like it must be somehow easier for such among the elect as Gaddis than it has felt for me. Reading his frustrations and false starts shows me that he is human and that putting out work like his is a task of staggering difficulty (which I knew, of course, but that, in fits of laziness, it's easy to forget). Reading the letters makes me feel, well, yes, still as if Gaddis is light years beyond me in intelligence and talent and work ethic, and, no, I could not do what he did in writing his great books... but maybe it's not as far out of my reach as it's easy to roll over and feel. So then there is a kind of hope in these pages for the sometime-scribbler.

I especially enjoyed letters from the time during which he was writing J R (my favorite of his books by a mile), and a few letters to his children are tender and lovely.

Probably this would be a snooze for anybody not already pretty well wrapped up in Gaddis. ( )

I have to say a couple of things before getting serious here. First, although it might not be entirely accurate, I still say Gaddis when someone asks me who my favorite author is; and I still say The Recognitions when they ask about my favorite novel. Of course I need to re-read his stuff in order to check if this is true.

Second, if you're editing someone's letters, I would caution you not to say in your introduction, things like "it can be assumed all irregularities are in the originals", bold-facing "all... originals," and to clarify why you're bold facing these words "to catch the eye of readers and reviewers and preempt complaints that this book was poorly proofread." If you absolutely *insist* on such a hubristic statement, I would recommend that you proofread your book again because, duh, this book is filled with typos, both within the letters (even if Gaddis thanks Erika Goldman for "sening" him a book, it's hardly unreasonable to correct it to 'sending,' nor is it outrageous of the reader to expect 'hot' to be corrected to 'not' when necessary etc...) and in the notes to them(Mary McCarthy is many things, but a "crirtic" is not one of them; I haven't read Elkin's 'The Magic Kingdom', but I'm certain it does not feature an "eight-year old geriatric"; and most memorably of all, Mary mother of God is not a "goddess," and naming her such suggests either than Stephen Moore is i) an idiot or ii) an adolescent who can't really give up on religion, and so feels the need to guy Christianity by making it sound more ridiculous than its best thinkers admit that it already sounds--credo quia absurdam. Moore is surely neither of these, and the silliness of letting that claim slip by does him, and Gaddis, a disservice.)

Now, to important matters. In The Recognitions, Gaddis has his character ask what people want from the man that they can't get from the work; and his letters are certainly nowhere near as interesting as his novels. At worst they are replacement level writers' letters, all complaints about money, publishers, business etc., with little of Gaddis-the-novelist's brilliance.

But they do, at best, tell you something about the composition of the books--what Gaddis was reading, what he was trying to do at various points. He describes The Recognitions as an attempt to write a new myth, which I find interesting for literary-historical reasons (compare McCarthy's 'The Road'), and also notes his own desire to truly *believe* in a myth of some kind.

The most interesting thing about this book, though, is the way the letters let us see Gaddis's intellectual development: as a callow youth, he's viscerally disgusted by a socialist professor; as time passes he becomes highly critical of the U.S. and 'free enterprise,' without feeling that the latter is inherently flawed, but does start to mock anti-communism; ultimately he concludes that, on the evidence of his own work, perhaps capitalism just is inherently flawed.

More distressingly, for me at least, is a different 'development.' At 38, Gaddis wrote that, although forgery is inescapable in a finite world, "what is vital is the faith that the absolute... *does* exist," or that the attempt to grasp God/perfection is "all we have to justify this finite condition." At 51, he has become disgusted by Catholicism, but also feels that JR is "a secular version" of The Recognitions. At 59 (1981) he is writing letters about how his work is *not* purely negative, and the struggling artist is himself a kind of triumph. At 70 (1992) he responds to Gregory Comnes, a postmodern theorist, that although he sees himself "cited in a postmodern context" he "cower[s] in the notion of a traditional novelist"--but is starting to be apologetic about the fact. In an extraordinary letter to the Iowa Review (1993), he rejects the idea of himself as an experimental novelist, due to the mass of rubbish being produced under that moniker; insists that he has always "believed... that I knew exactly what I [was] doing."

But after all of this, a lifetime of fighting the good fight against philistinism and fashionable nonsense, the postmodernists finally got to him: in 1994 he writes to Comnes about how much he loves aporia/ indeterminacy/chaos etc..., and in a letter to Updike, of all people, he approves Comnes' claim that his (Gaddis's) work is a vision of "an essentially indeterminate landscape, a postmodern world with no absolutes."

I'll take Gaddis's early interpretation of his work--as a striving after some absolute, even if that absolute is out of reach--over his later interpretation, in which it's just pomo theory in novel form. If it turns out that it is just the latter, he'll cease to be my favorite novelist.

I think I'm safe. ( )