The Recognitions

William Gaddis's The Recognitions consists of 956 pages of very small print-some half million words in total. But the author summed it up in a single word. "The book is a novel about forgery," Gaddis wrote to physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer in 1955. And then the novelist quotes Oppenheimer's own words, seeing them as a summation of the concerns of The Recognitions. "I tried my prolonged best to show 'the integrity of the intimate, the detailed...the evils of superficiality and the terrors of fatigue.'"