The Counterfeiters

THE RECOGNITIONS (956 pp.)--William Gaddis--Harcourf, Brace ($7.50).

It is almost impossible to ignore a novelist who produces 956 closely printed pages. William Gaddis, a 33-year-old New Yorker who has never published a book before, rates attention for other reasons as well. He has written this novel from that dark night of the soul where, as F. Scott Fitzgerald once said, "it is always three o'clock in the morning." To the small army of "beat generation" characters in The Recognitions, dawn never comes.

As Author Gaddis sees it, the 20th century U.S. is a soggy butt end of western civilization, an age of publicity and duplicity in which the phonies have inherited the earth. Pronouncing a scarcely original, but nevertheless grandiose, anathema, he finds everyone corroded through the decline of love and the absence of Christian faith. Rangy in setting (New England, Greenwich Village, Paris, Spain, Italy, Central America), aswim in erudition, semi-Joycean in language, glacial in pace, irritatingly opaque in plot and character, The Recognitions is one of those eruptions of personal vision that will be argued about without being argued away. U.S. novel writing has a strikingly fresh talent to watch, if not to cheer.

On the follow-the-hero level, the action of The Recognitions may seem simple. Wyatt Gwyon is the shy son of a New England preacher. His mother has died during a trip to Spain, and he is brought up under the gimlet eye and Puritan maxims of a crabby maiden aunt. In Paris, he holes up in a studio and paints, but he gets panned by the critics. Wyatt is soon back in a Greenwich Village flat with a draftsman's job and a possessive wife just out of analysis. He sheds his wife, and sells himself into esthetic and moral bondage forging "undiscovered" Flemish masterpieces for a millionaire dealer in expensive fakes. This work drives him to the fringes of sanity and murder. Fleeing the U.S., he makes an obscurely redemptive pilgrimage to his mother's grave in Spain.

Gallery of Despair. But on a deeper level, Wyatt is making another pilgrimage, a modern Pilgrim's Progress, and there is a kind of nimbus about him at the end. He is enveloped in a world of spiritual bankrupts who tide themselves over their despair with drink, drugs and periodic injections of selfdelusion. In this gallery, some are mad and many are damned:

P: Rev. Gwyon, Wyatt's father, finds gin more consoling than the Protestantism he preaches. When he is not hitting the bottle, he soaks up the rites of non-Christian faiths. One Christmas he comes unhinged, proclaims the gospel of Mithra from the pulpit after sacrificing a black bull. His horrified congregation packs him off to a sanitarium calted Happymount.

P: Esme is a slim, wistful artist's model, and a heroin addict. In her lost, grieving face, Wyatt finds inspiration for his forged Madonnas.

P: Otto, the would-be playwright, forever scribbles his friends' dialogue into notebooks, but rarely gets a chance to test-fly a line ("I'd say he was a latent heterosexual").

P: Agnes Deigh (her name a pun on Agnus Dei) plays godmother and literary agent to a lisping crew of homosexuals until she jumps out of a hotel window.

P: Mr. Pivner, the all-too-common man, is a try at redoing Joyce's Mr. Bloom. While some shreds of humanist culture clung to Bloom, Pivner's brain is a sheer pulp of newspaper headlines, self-help manuals and radio commercials ("Hi, gang! Your friend Lazarus the Laughing Leper brings you radio's newest kiddies' program, The Lives of the Saints, sponsored by Necrostyle ... Don't forget, kids, Necrostyle, the wafer-shaped sleeping pill").

The Welt of Satire. The flailing misanthropy of The Recognitions might be even more grotesque and pretentious than it is, were it not for the comic welt of wit and satire it often leaves behind. Author Gaddis is as faithful as a tape recorder to the babble of loose American tongues, and New York as an asphalt jungle has rarely been patrolled so intensely since Dos Passes' Manhattan Transfer.

But Author Gaddis also intends The Recognitions as a spiritual rebuke ("I wonder, when I step out of doors, how the past can tolerate us"). Unfortunately, the best he can do for a symbol of evil is to trade in Melville's white whale for Manhattan's Madison Avenue. Like other literary specialists in damnation, William Gaddis has held a seashell to his ear and convinced himself that just about all humanity is drowning.

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