Reading order
Reading order
| # | Title | Published | Author | Buy on Amazon |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Recognitions | 1955 | William Gaddis | Buy |
| 2 | JR | 1975 | William Gaddis | Buy |
| 3 | Carpenter’s Gothic | 1985 | William Gaddis | Buy |
| 4 | A Frolic of His Own | 1994 | William Gaddis | Buy |
William Gaddis was one of the major American novelists of the postwar period, though recognition came slowly and his readership remained small relative to his critical standing. His first novel, The Recognitions, was published in 1955 and ran to nearly 1,000 pages, following a network of forgers, artists, and con men across the United States and Europe in a dense, allusive narrative that drew on years of research. It sold poorly on publication but grew in reputation over the following decades, eventually recognised as one of the key works of American postmodern fiction.
JR, published in 1975, is formally even more radical, consisting almost entirely of dialogue with minimal attribution, following an 11-year-old boy who builds a massive junk empire through telephone speculation while the adults around him pursue their own failures and illusions. JR won the National Book Award in 1976. Carpenter’s Gothic, published in 1985, is shorter and more accessible, a dark comedy set in a rented house where a collection of self-deluding characters talk past each other while the outside world deteriorates. A Frolic of His Own, published in 1994, returns to the long-form format, dealing with a lawsuit over ownership of a Civil War film in a satire of the American legal system, and won Gaddis a second National Book Award.
The four novels are standalone works with no shared characters or continuous narrative. Readers can approach them in any order, though publication order gives the clearest sense of Gaddis’s development as a writer.