It was a good few years beforeI finished the thing. It was after reading Gaddis's first that I went back and completed his second. A good few years later, a book shop called Books, Etc. ran a special promotion; they imported lots of US paperbacks, including a Penguin uniform series of Gadis's novels, The Recognitions, J R and Carpenter's Gothic. These were not the Ppenguin Modern Classics, but the ones with the white covers with (from memory) thin bands of colour around the edges and a small illustration in the middle. That's when I got my copy of The Recognitions.
Pete Dempsey
UK

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When I got out of school in the mid-60s I moved to NYC, got a low-level typist job in advertising in order to support myself and my undergraduate husband, and read all the time, finally released from assigned books, on the way to and from work, all evening after work for myself. I read through all that had been published at that point of Bellow, Roth, Pynchon, and many others less often mentioned now, Bruce Jay Friedman, John Knowles, Vance Bourjaily. One evening I was in the process of selecting my next book, and from the bookshelf pulled out The Recognitions, bought by my husband in about 1961 or 1962, on the basis of the blurbs on the cover and a bit of reading around in it in the shop. I was looking it over, doing some reading around of my own and considering beginning this very large volume that I would be carrying back and forth to work for weeks at least, when from across the room behind me my husband said, "That's a really good book." I began it immediately, finished it in a couple of weeks, and had the strong impulse to turn back to page one and begin reading it again. But too many other titles awaited.. It wasn't until 1997 when I joined the Gaddis discussion group on the web that I ever met another person who'd heard of William Gaddis, let alone read him.
Victoria Harding
US

I remember it all too well, and I can picture it after all these days.
Mid-October 1975, the autumn leaves falling outside the kitchen window of my father’s house late one afternoon, I was idly paging through his copy of Time magazine when I came across a review of Gaddis's newly published J R. It didn’t sound too appealing -- a satire of big business? wasn’t that a worn-out theme? -- but the reviewer noted the recent Avon reprint of The Recognitions in a way that grabbed my attention. He (R. Z. Sheppard) made it sound like an American Ulysses, which was all I needed to hear, for at that time I was in the depths of a heavy Joyce addiction, and was compiling a glossary to Finnegans Wake. I called a few bookstores, found a copy and bought it the next day, read it shortly after, and was blown away (as we used to say).
At that time, age 24 with an M.A. under my belt, I was not only discovering current innovative novelists (Barth, Pynchon, Vonnegut, Brautigan), but was also devouring books on myth and religion like Frazer’s Golden Bough and Graves’s White Goddess, both of which are quoted in The Recognitions. It’s as if this book was made for me. And so then, as I wrote in the preface to my Reader's Guide,

"As is my custom when confronted with exhilarating literature, I began looking around to see what kind of critical work had been done on the novel, fully expecting to find mountains of material (and silently wondering all the time how I had missed hearing of such a novel). To my utter dismay, I found not mountains but molehills, and this in 1975, a full twenty years after publication. Apparently the novel had been sitting like an island in the stream of American literature, circumnavigated a few times, but as yet unexplored. Feeling let down by the academic scholarly community, I proceeded to write (for myself if no one else) the kind of book someone should have written long ago."

I had been feeling an itch to start writing literary criticism, and it struck me that writing the first book on Gaddis would be better than writing the 101st book on Joyce. A few months later, I read J R, and that sealed the deal. Anyone capable of writing one or the other of Gaddis’s first two novels was clearly special, but to write both elevated him to the genius level. So I put away my Joyce materials and got to work.

-- Steven Moore
US

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My friend gave me J R as a birthday present last year and I started to read it, but after only a few pages I lost courage; the book was too much for me, I wasn't ready I think. But this year, for my 25th birthday, she tried again and gave me Agape Agape. I looked into it and thought: "Ah, I can read this, and it's about music, this is perfect." And so I read it and it took me one day. The Annotations, which I got along with the book, helped me a lot, I used them all the way through and they also made me want to read some of the books and authors alluded to in Agape Agape, Tolstoy's "Kreutzer Sonata," and even Plato. I was very much touched by its truth and its pathos. I am a musician, a pianist, who always seeks for truth, for the true art, I can understand when Gaddis talks about the real artist. This book is one beautiful song, sad and so true. I'll try J R again.
Marija Stojanowa
Macedonia

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I picked up my first Gaddis -- Carpenter's Gothic -- in a second-hand bookstore in Kingston, Ontario, in 1991. I hadn't heard of Gaddis, but my friend pointed at the book: "I've read that he is very good." So we each bought a copy of Carpenter's Gothic, of which there were several, and he also found an edition of J R, which was Gaddis' best novel, he had also read somewhere. At home in Hamburg I put the Gaddis on the bookshelf and there they sat until 1994. That year Joseph Tabbi was visiting professor at the University of Hamburg and he gave two courses, which included Gaddis. One had J R on the reading list. So I read it. I started and re-started the first ten pages about three or four times until I had the feeling I was getting into it, but after that I never stopped until "Hey? You listening…?" It took me three or four days; I think I didn't leave the apartment during that time. Did I eat? I did drink. And I dreamt: of voices and never-ending quarrels, those dreams were very loud. Unfortunately Ann diCephalis's voice was a very prominent one, for whatever reason.

After around a hundred pages, reading turned into listening and the novel into a piece of music. At one point in particular I associated another piece of music, Shostakovich's sonata for piano and viola, which at one point literally quotes the beginning of Beethoven's so-called moonlight sonata. In J R it's the short passage right in the middle of the book, in which Norman Angel tells Coen about his childhood, the Winchester, the spring circus, the music, his father. Those 25 lines sounded so different after 360 pages of brilliantly arranged noise: it was like reading Sherwood Anderson all of a sudden. This particular musical association belonged to the first very intense reading only and never returned on rereading J R. I do love all of William Gaddis's novels, but J R will always remain my favorite.
Anja Zeidler
Germany