The Recognitions Author:William Gaddis New introduction by William H. Gass — Wyatt Gwyon's desire to forge is not driven by larceny but from love. Exactingly faithful to the spirit and letter of the Flemish masters, he produces uncannily accurate 'originals' -- pictures the painters themselves might have envied. In an age of counterfeit emotion and taste, the real and... more » fake have become indistinguishable; yet Gwyon's forgeries reflect a truth that others cannot touch -- cannot even recognize. Contemporary life collapses the distinction between the 'real' and the 'virtual' world, and Gaddis' novel pre-empts our common obsessions by almost half a century.
The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the ur-text of postwar fiction and the first great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadn't read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of both. The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.« less