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¶ Mr. Pivner, the all-too-common man, is a try at redoing Joyce's Mr. Bloom. While some shreds of humanist culture clung to Bloom, Pivner's brain is a sheer pulp of newspaper headlines, self-help manuals and radio commercials ("Hi, gang! Your friend Lazarus the Laughing Leper brings you radio's newest kiddies' program, The Lives of the Saints, sponsored by Necrostyle ... Don't forget, kids, Necrostyle, the wafer-shaped sleeping pill").
The Welt of Satire. The flailing misanthropy of The Recognitions might be even more grotesque and pretentious than it is, were it not for the comic welt of wit and satire it often leaves behind. Author Gaddis is as faithful as a tape recorder to the babble of loose American tongues, and New York as an asphalt jungle has rarely been patrolled so intensely since Dos Passes' Manhattan Transfer.
But Author Gaddis also intends The Recognitions as a spiritual rebuke ("I wonder, when I step out of doors, how the past can tolerate us"). Unfortunately, the best he can do for a symbol of evil is to trade in Melville's white whale for Manhattan's Madison Avenue. Like other literary specialists in damnation, William Gaddis has held a seashell to his ear and convinced himself that just about all humanity is drowning.