Though neglected for many years, this monumental, eclectic, and intertextually dense masterpiece is now regarded as one of the foundation stones upon which American literary postmodernism is built. If you equate 'difficult' books with pretentiousness he is definitely not the one for you, but if you enjoy a challenge that really gets those synapses firing, Gaddis is the man. I just hope that publishing these summaries on The Dennis Cooper blog will hip at least one or two more people to the genius that is Gaddis. from his acceptance speech for the National Book Award in Fiction for J R, April 1976Īside from a couple interjections all of this information was copied from and.
I think this is because there seems so often today to be a tendency to put the person in the place of his or her work, to turn the creative artist into a performing one, to find what a writer says about writing somehow more valid, or more real, than the writing itself.' 'I feel like part of the vanishing breed that thinks a writer should be read and not heard, let alone seen.