The Review of Contemporary Fiction
A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis by Peter WolfeRobert L. McLaughlin
Peter Wolfe. A Vision of His Own: The Mind and Art of William Gaddis. Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press, 1997. 312 pp. $45.00.
Why, I wonder, has a great, innovative, and influential novelist like William Gaddis inspired comparatively few critical studies? A quick count in the MLA Bibliography shows only eighty-eight articles and books on Gaddis published over the last thirty years. Perhaps that explains the need for Peter Wolfe’s introduction to Gaddis’s career and work. Despite a few annoying mistakes about the novels’ characters and incidents and some sloppy psychologizing, Wolfe does a good job of addressing both the narrative techniques that make the novels work and their thematic concerns. He does an especially good job of showing the connections between Gaddis’s overwhelming cataloging of the minutiae of his characters’ lives and larger, less obvious social, economic, and political forces. An overview of the career is followed by chapters focusing on each of the novels, with most of the attention given, appropriately, to The Recognitions and JR. This study will be especially helpful for newcomers to Gaddis and graduate students, some of whom, I hope, will go on to make their own contributions to Gaddis studies. [Robert L. McLaughlin]