Fire the Bastards!

by Jack Green, Steven Moore (Introduction)

"Fire the Bastards! "is a scorching attack on the book-review media using the critical reception of William Gaddis's 1955 novel "The Recognitions "as a case study.

Genres: Nonfiction, Criticism, Books About Books

88 pages, Hardcover

First published November 5, 1992

Reviews

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Recently this dude has been floating around the goodreads.com ether-verse calling people names when they disagree with him about books. His exchanges look like this.

You don't like big important book (BIB) x. You say you were bored by it and didn't finish it. Everyone (aka grad students) knows BIB(x) is a masterpiece. You don't like BIB(X) thus you must be dumb and an ugly lesbian. Because dumb and ugly lesbian are a tautology, along with pretty much everything else said above.

He's quite amusing and not a very sharp reader himself since he mistook my obvious sarcasm in one exchange, but I'm not calling names. I'm just sharing a pretty entertaining new addition to the land of goodreads.*

Another person sort of like this guy is Jack Green, author of the articles that make up Fire the Bastards!.

Fire the Bastards is a collection of articles turned into a 79 page book detailing the lukewarm reception of The Recognitions in 1955 when the book was published. 55 reviews were written about the novel and most of them were found to be lacking in quality by Green. So, he decided in the issues of his underground publication newspaper to go on the attack, point out the flaws of the reviews and demanding most of the reviewers be fired for incompetence.

In some of the reviews he shows that the reviewer either says they didn't read the whole book, or it's obvious that the reviewer is cribbing from the jacket copy. Others have mistakes in the review that send Green into conniption fits. God forbid, none of the reviewers read the book more than once so none of them are in a position to review the the book with any intelligence. And some of the reviews were basically rewrites of other poor reviews, which makes those review second generation incompetence. It's interesting to see how flimsy the world of professional book reviews are and what a mill the industry is. Which it is. The reviewer is churning out reviews to be published for new books just released. More new books will also be released that the reviewer will then have to review. To spend too much time reading a new book, or to read a thousand page book multiple times to truly understand it would a) be detrimental to the reviewers livelihood (sad but true, but you've gotta eat) and b) detrimental to the book in question since giving a huge book multiple readings may result in a better review but it could also result in a review for a book that is no longer readily available and whose initial fate is sealed by the book buying public.

I don't feel like breaking open a serious database and doing the search, but I'm going to guess that Adam Levin's The Instructions a thousand plus page novel by a first time novelist isn't going to get 55 unique reviews in major publications and newspapers. I say this because the professional side of the industry is probably even less likely to show interest in a really ambitious work by an unknown author today than they were fifty-five years ago (what is up with all of these 55's? Does this mean something?). I'll be coming back to this idea shortly.

Anyway, Green is correct about the laziness of some reviewers (VirJohn though isn't correct, he is wrong to call out the people he has called out. None of them stated they finished the book, and as I will come to shortly the role of amateur online reviewer is different from the role of professional reviewer). But he doesn't stop there. Green thinks that The Recognitions is a masterpiece. The greatest book since Ulysses, possibly even greater than the book about June sixteenth. Over the course of the book what appears to anger him most is that none of the reviewers love the book as much as he does. Even the reviewers who think the book is great and give it a glowing review don't like the book for the right reasons. They are too dumb to get the book like he does. It is just not enough to like the book, one must love it. One must also love it in the way that Green does, and not deviate from the interpretations that he has for the book. To deviate from his way of thinking is to call scorn and infantile name-calling upon the reviewer.

For example, if Green were to read by review of The Recognitions he would call me dumb. He would hate my review. I really liked the book, but I found it flawed. To find a flaw in The Recognitions is to Green like pointing out to particular Christians a contradiction in the good book and watching them spittle froth at their mouth as they insist that there can be no flaws. Green may perfectly understand the book but many of the criticisms brought against it by reviewers are valid. Gaddis doesn't write novels for everyone. He doesn't write neat novels, and The Recognitions is something of a mess. Maybe a second and third reading will show it to be a tighter constructed novel that it appears on a first reading, but there are formal elements in the novel that critics at the time criticized The Recognitions for that are valid criticisms that Green took offense at but which are now relatively accepted to appear in works of 'difficult' or 'serious' literature. Thing like lack of true resolution, the discontinuity of time and space in the novel, and some characters not being clearly defined are a few of the examples. Twenty years later when Gaddis wrote JR he was still playing with these elements but he had perfected his craft and wielded them with more control. Green would cry heresy!**

Like a good Marxist of his time (which he may or may not have been) Green likes to think of himself as at the vanguard of progress but can't stand to see anyone think differently from him.

Which is what the guy at the beginning of the review suffers from too.

There is no excuse for a professional reviewer to not read the book they are reviewing. I remember the Entertainment Weekly review of Infinite Jest were the reviewer said she hadn't read the book and it was too big and couldn't be read in the bathtub (I think it was EW, once again my laziness at opening up a database is astounding). Snarky comments about a book being big are the easy way out of dealing with a big book and they aren't really that cute for a professional reader to be making (what you are saying if effect is I am unable to read three books, since the 'big books' are at most roughly three times the size of an average 100,000 word / 300 page novel-- I'm not saying I advocate doing this to books, but a reviewer could just cut the book up into three parts wrap the spine with tape and read it that way. I mean, since it's only an ARC they are reading and it's for work).

I take back my last paragraph. I think it can be ok for a PR (professional reviewer as opposed to what I will call AR (amateur reviewer), which is like all of us who write reviews but don't get paid nor have to write in any particular style (unless of course if one feels that certain goodreader's opinions should be taken as editorial, in which case we do write in a particular style (but who really cares to appease one or two people? Fuck that))) not finishing a book and saying so. If a R, be it P or A, is reading a really shitty book there is no reason to finish it, just say, this sucks because of (x). The same can be said for reading big weighty tomes of dead white men thought. If you're not liking it say you don't like it and stop reading it if that is what you like. It's called honesty. It's more important to be honest in a review being it P or A, than to just write the accepted opinion. Everybody knows the dice are loaded and everybody knows that Ulysses is supposedly the greatest book of the last hundred years. But that doesn't mean it is everyones cup of tea. Not everyone enjoys the games Joyce plays. Not everyone is going to appreciate the way he breaks traditional confines of the novel or find his particular brand of humour delightful. Not everyone will want to read a book that kind of demands the reader have either a pretty encyclopedic level of knowledge stuck in their head or access to some good secondary literature. That isn't fun for everyone. Now we all know we are supposed to think it's great and that it is a work of genius, and maybe we all believe it is (we don't all believe that but let's just fucking believe we all believe for the sake of this argument) genius but our actual enjoyment of it just isn't that great. So we judge the book accordingly. If we all just rated and reviewed based on what a book's reputation was we'd give it five stars and nod along. At this point our opinions and ratings would be voided out by our in unison 'uh-huhs'.

Instead I want to hear that someone is bored by Ulysses. That this reviewer likes this book that no one else really likes. That he loves this book most people are lukewarm about. That she hates this book everyone gushes over. I like to see that even if I don't agree with the reviewer. I like finding people that I disagree with to see why they like or don't like something. I also like finding people who I agree with on books and then I'm able to take their opinions on books I might be interested in reading and get an idea if I would like it. Actually I can do this with reviewers I disagree with too if I know what it is they like and don't like about books, and all of this is built upon the community of reviewers and their honesty about what they like and don't like about particular works.

Personally there are AR's on this site whose opinion I give a lot more weight to than any of the reviewers for The New York Times. Hearing that a book is getting rave reviews from the Times might do nothing for me, but to see that certain people on here are loving a book I wasn't interested in can definitely kindle some interest in me. This disappears though if everyone just bows down to canonical opinions or all trace of reviewer personality is erased from reviews.

That all said, everything stated in my reviews is obviously correct. You may hold a different opinion than me, but realize that you are wrong and you should come around to my way of thinking. I'll be nice about it though and give you a bit of time to contemplate the mistakes you've made before calling you a fat ugly lesbian. You have twenty minutes.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

* But, he is just calling people names. Yes but he is doing it in a belligerent manner that makes his attacks lack any real sting but cause giggles. Giggles are important to have sometimes.

**Green would also think I'm a moron for reading The Recogntions as having the actual Ernest Hemingway as a character in the book. Maybe Green knows from Gaddis that the Hemingway lookalike isn't supposed to be Hem, but I read the Hemingway character to be an effective attack on the cult of the writer as personality that can be personified in a Hemingway-type and in a sustained attack that Gaddis engages in against the style of writing Hemingway is known for. I point to the future that Green couldn't have known about when he wrote his articles, the scene in JR where a copy of A Moveable Feast appears on a characters desk.

Green in his articles ridicules reviewer who has my reading of Hem being in the book and can't see how anyone with a brain could read the book this way. Green is a myopic prig and bore with the pedant's attention to minutiae needed for such an interesting overview of every written review for a novel, but without any real vision to appreciate literature as a dynamic conversation between writer and reader.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A “challenging” and “difficult” work of “experimental” criticism that shows me up as the third-rate wannabe hack who can’t close-read for toffee that I am. Jack Green was (or is, or was) an underground crank who wrote first-rate criticism in lowercase and no punctuation in his newspaper (ah—how things have changed . . . oh um oh hmm) and this work torpedoing lazy reviewing was published without his consent in the early nineties. The pieces date from the 1950s, and take Gaddis’s The Recognitions as their springboard to call all reviewer clichés into question: all of which exist today, all of which I have committed at some point. (Things such as comparisons to other authors, calling the writer “erudite” and the prose “challenging” or “something that will mature over several reads.”) The overall product is a pedantic, passionate defence of an uncategorisable novel (am I falling into the trap?) and a reminder that criticism should aspire to meticulous text dissection and laser-eyed close reading. Nowadays, only published authors review books in national papers: a step forward or a sideways lunge into incompetence? Jack would know, the bastard. [P.S. I don't want to read The Recognitions. It sounds bloody difficult.]

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

There are some stupid things said, but it is The New Yorker. At least a notice: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs...


___________
In its important entirety:
http://www.nyx.net/~awestrop/ftb/ftb.htm


The opening sally:

"william gaddis's the recognitions was published in 1955 its a great
novel, as much the novel of our generation as ulysses was of its it
only sold a few thousand copies because the critics did a lousy job—

—2 critics boasted they didnt finish the book

—one critic made 7 boners others got wrong the number of
pages, year, price, publisher, author, & title

—& other incredible boners like mistaking a diabetic for a narcotics
addict

—one critic stole part of his review from the blurb, part from
another review

—one critic called the book "disgusting" "evil" "foul-mouthed,"
needs "to have its mouth washed out with lye soap" others
were contemptuous or condescending

—2 of 55 reviews were adequate the others were amateurish
& incompetent

failing to recognize the greatness of the book

failing to convey to the reader what the book is like, what its
essential qualities are

counterfeiting this with stereotyped preconceptions—the
standard cliches about a book that is "ambitious," "erudite,"
"long," "negative," etc

counterfeiting competence with inhuman jargon

—constructive suggestion: fire the bastards! "

[Michelle]

I'll never read this book because this guy's an asshole:

https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/1...

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this one as a necessary complement to The Recognitions (since it’s cruel to jump into another novel directly after that one, as few others can compare). Came for the Gaddis, stayed for the Green.

Jack Green (pseudonym) essentially wrote this spiel to crucify the literary critics who failed to recognize The Recognitions as a masterpiece when it was first published. He exhaustively details what he considers to be flaws in the original reviews, some of which are undeniable (factual character/plot/setting information, misquotes, etc.), and others which read more as the nitpickery of W.G.’s biggest fan (how dare a critic nor read the 950 pg novel at least twice before reviewing! how dare they attempt to name Gaddis’s likely influences!).

What’s most noteworthy about the volume is Green’s eccentric style, with its lack of punctuation/capitalization, and his extreme irritation/anger - it almost feels like a precursor to punk zines a few decades later, but with much more critical merit. He knows his stuff and is insufferable about it, in a way that I decided to admire (because otherwise it’s unbearable). I agree with the majority of his points and think he’s spot-on about the failures of literary criticism as a whole, a field which has only declined further since this was originally published (as Steven Moore sadly laments in his intro, which also confirms that Green did not even consent to this book being republished [should have copyrighted it!]).

Aside from my agreement with the premise/general interest in Gaddis, I also think this is worth reading as someone who values criticism and does not want to see it continue to dumb itself down. I’m already catching myself offering insights that Green would have torn me apart for, which is a good thing as it will keep me honest next time I don’t give a book the reflection it deserves.

[ReemK10 (Paper Pills)]

Write a review? Who would dare?

#Green25 #FIRETHEBASTARDS #JackGreen #TheRecognitions #WilliamGaddis #ReadingAnActOfSharedSolitude #paperpills🇵🇸❤️ #beedoubleokayess📚🐦 #ReemReel #AThingOfBeauty
https://www.instagram.com/reel/DNq69A...

[Jimmy Cline · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've read this on the Gaddis Annotations site several times, but it would be nice to sit down with a physical copy. The Gaddis forum just posted this Paris Review article; really interesting stuff, especially for anyone who's never heard of the Wanda Tinasky/Thomas Pynchon conspiracy.

http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...

[PK Lawton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I started reading Jack Green’s Fire the Bastards! the moment I hit the epigraph of The Recognitions—a book I’ve enjoyed immensely, even if I’ve been reading it at the pace of geological time. Green (aka CC Reid) took on the thankless, masochistic task of reading and dissecting over 50 reviews of The Recognitions, exposing a parade of critics who either didn’t read the book, plagiarized each other, or just parroted the dust jacket.

Serializing his takedown in three issues of his underground newspaper (which he typed out, mimeographed, and punctuated only when absolutely necessary), Green rants in long, unbroken stretches of prose that hiss with disdain. His intolerance for hackery is relentless—anyone who misreads Gaddis is either lazy or a moron—but beneath the invective is the first real piece of scholarship on The Recognitions.

More than just a defense of Gaddis, Fire the Bastards! is a reminder that reviews are, at best, tools for triangulating what a book might be. The real work—deciding whether it’s good—can only happen when you read it yourself.

[Oliver Bateman · Rating 5 out of 5]

jack green aka CC Reid did the work no one would ever dream of doing - and did it for free - when he read and reviewed 50+ reviews of William Gaddis' The Recognitions. I've yet to to finish the Recognitions (and I started it 15 years ago, though having it on the Kindle is now speeding things along), but you don't need to read the book to appreciate Reid's critiques of the slapdash "reviewing trade." He explores every lazy cliche of the business, cites numerous instances of plagiarism (either from each other or, more commonly, the book jacket), and generally bitches about how these people are just submitting work for pay. Of course they are! "Read it? I haven't even reviewed it!" was my dissertation advisor's go-to joke; there's simply too much to read, except for contrarian masochists like Reid or myself, and the "critical consensus" (as captured at Metacritic and elsewhere nowadays) is more overwhelming than ever before. Although it's a slight 80 pages, the unusual formatting and minuscule Dalkey Press font (disastrous, even if it approximates the source material) combine to make this closer to 130-140.

You can buy the source material for $7500: https://www.typepunchmatrix.com/pages... ("a masterpiece of mimeography," say the critics).

[Josh Doughty · Rating 3 out of 5]

You know when you search for any author on YouTube and in the midst of videos, you will find Franzen’s face with the title “Jonathan Franzen On Overrated Books”? This book is kind of like that.

While I will give Green credit regarding the state on how reviews are written (possibility that people leeching poor reviews from blurbs/flaps/other reviews still happening is not 0%), this book is tacky. I’m not sure if I like the book even existing. But I’m just another Bastard and I don’t quite know the etiquette on it all works.

Moore says the royalties are waiting for Green before newspaper begins, but how much could that possibly be?

It was nice seeing an almost equal amount of Wolfe name drops to Joyce, but comparing lengths to Sironia Texas more than once was not what I expected.

This book doesn’t even preach to the choir as the people who enjoy The Recognitions are fine without it and the people who don’t won’t want to continue further.

It’s hard to imagine a world where everyone lives the same experience to garner the same opinions.

So yeah, be careful with blurbs or something and be careful what you say as there just might be a Jack Green under your bed.

[Jacob Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

cranky. just how i like it

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

A strange artifact from 1962, this is a book-length essay/rant about how bankrupt the book-reviewing industry was back in 1955. The writer, a devotee of Gaddis' The Recognitions, read and reread the book in the late fifties, became convinced that it was one of the great books of the century, and then set out to see why no one else knew about it.

The reason, he soon discovered, was because of bad book reviewing. Few book reviewers were capable of giving a thoughtful review to an incredibly demanding 1,000-page post-modernist epic. (No surprise there.) Green alleges the reviewers were criminal hacks (and many clearly were—they plagiarized from the flap copy or from each other, or in skimming the book misread passages and summarized story points the precise opposite of what takes place in the novel), but the sadder truth is that most book reviewers made their living writing notices on a ceaseless flood of books. There just wasn't time for careful readings and rereadings, and so anything of real artistry—anything that wasn't decipherable in a quick first read—suffered.

Green's sustained rant, though, is incredibly entertaining (as well as insightful about Gaddis's novel; Green's was the first real piece of scholarship about the book). He wrote his essay in three consecutive issues of his underground newspaper called, appropriately enough, newspaper, which was produced on a typewriter, mimeographed, and written in an idiosyncratic style that employs no punctuation (unless quoting a more mainstream source) and uses long spaces as pauses or periods. (So, for instance, he would end a sentence this way the reader would understand that a stop had been reached unless the reader partook of the rampant hackery of most book reviewers & then damn them all to hell). Someone below notes that much of Green's argument suffers from the intolerance of the convinced—anyone who disagrees with his take on the novel is a moron or a hack or worse. But it's easy enough to see past that.

A fast read and a kind of brilliant document. Reminds us that the best reviews can only help us triangulate on books we might like, but not actually pronounce on their quality. That's something we have to decide on our own.

(Great background about this book on the Paris Review website here: http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...)

[Casey · Rating 3 out of 5]

Steven Moore "The fact that Gaddis's Recognitions did eventually rise to the surface after being torpedoed by the critics may seem to argue that book reviews aren't all that important: worthy books will prevail, forgotten masterpieces will be rediscovered and take their places in the canon. But a complacent confidence that future literary historians will sort things out is damaging to both writers and our culture."

Reading Jack Green's Fire the Bastards with this in mind is useful in developing an appreciation for what Green is up to here. Although his approach might be a bit grating at times, his all-out war on critics of Gaddis's The Recognitions who were lazy (those who plagiarized, or admit to not reading it all) and phony (those who didn't bother to read it and those whose statements about the novel seem derived from the blurb on the jacket), is an admirable pursuit. The ethos of letting future generations sort out the mess of now is a big problem (and not just in literature).

While some of the fuckups of details from the critics are understandable—The Recognitions is, after all, a complex work—the overwhelmingly negative response is not. So many critics sought to exculpate their dismissal by comparing it unfavorably to Joyce's Ulysses. As if hailing a widely acknowledged masterpiece as a masterpiece were some sign of authority of the modern literary field. As Green says, they would have been the critics of 1922, condemning Joyce's book in the same way they do Gaddis's.

I'll end here with a quote from Green that reminds me of a quote from The Recognitions:

"the difficult cliche [.....] writing above kindergarten level strews malicious landmines in your path, you thread thru with great 'effort' & no reward [.....] poetry should be translated to ny timesstyle so you get the literal meaning without difficulty [.....] critics prefer the same old unchallenging mush they get no pleasure from reading so they prefer anesthesia to the choice between pleasure & pain"*

*apologies to Green, I don't know how to make GR respect the spacing style he implements so instead of 6 or 7 spaces, I have used "[.....]"

[Joseph McKinney · Rating 5 out of 5]

This little book succeeds in being a cutting indictment of the review industry (which, Seven Green assures us in the foreword, has gotten little better since 1962), and it excels in all these wonderful little glimmers of Green's philosophy on writing and life. Two of my favorites, (I have added some periods to the original formatting bc I cannot figure out for the life of me how to indent this to properly mimic the original):

this time its the "constructive solution" cliche. a dirty one, perfected in the days when communists dominated reviewing in the u s & england. the perfect meeting of moscow & hollywood. give me happy endings! im so miserable! what cowardice. what if there is no "way out" except to die. for 1000s of years countless ways out have been peddled & we're no better off than before - the hydrogen bomb proves that.

but according to berger its easy! any good novelist finds "the way out," right in the last chapter. the bad novelist gropes around, but somehow he cant locate it. of course berger means a fake way out. he wants a writer to be a professional liar, not an artist

a writer can arrange for his characters to have relatively happy moments on the last page - but why should he?

the "difficult" cliche. writing above kindergarten level strews malicious landmines in your path, you thread thru with great "effort" & no reward. poetry should be translated to ny timesstyle so you get the literal meaning without difficulty. critics prefer the same old unchallenging mush. they get no pleasure from reading so they prefer anesthesia to the choice between pleasure and pain.

I wonder what Green would think of goodreads dot com.

[Feck · Rating 4 out of 5]

Biting and perfect encapsulation of the worthlessness of most published critique—literary or otherwise–backdropped by the largely unreceptive pop literary critics trying to swallow William Gaddis' postmodern behemoth The Recognitions. Jack Green's prose is hilariously blunt and his grammar purposefully oblique, it was a treat to see him be the Greenwich Village thorn in the side of the commercialized, steralized, and harmonized voices of the NY (soon worldwide) entertainment press. Criticisms of this specific era of literary critique remains timeless and echoes what we see today—in critique of literature, film, music, and so on. These things don't change.

[John C · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not so much a book as a polemic against reviewers of The Recognitions who failed to love it, appreciate it, or read it at all. It is hilarious and energetic; it is not substantive or particularly relevant - are there still published book reviews?

[Jason · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jack Green defends the honor William Gaddis’ “The Recognitions” by calling out, by name, every reviewer’s analysis he disagrees with. I found myself laughing out loud at times. I may or may not ever get to The Recognitions, but at least I know what I should think about it thanks to Mr Green’s opinionated defense.

[jay z · Rating 5 out of 5]

critics suck (except me I’m always right)

[walrus]

some things change some things dont a stack of inky paper gluebound cant defeat me wont

[jeremiah]

Fun reading this alongside The Recognitions.

As Wyatt said to Esther, Jack Green "is quite partial" to the word "boner." I can't say too much about this, as it's just Green's articles he strummed together in his idiosyncratic way of his (no punctuation, no capitalization) vituperating the 55 or so original book reviews of Gaddis' first novel.

Green walks the reader through most of the reviews in the 80 or so pages of this book, which was for me the most fun. The insipid reviews merited a book of their own, and this is as close one can get to such a book. Green's commentary is all right, sometimes dubious, e.g. his Ayn Rand allusions (??) and his occasional distortion of a review in order to make his own point.

I see this volume as a means to tell the story behind the post publication of The Recognitions. This is a central story to all of Gaddis' work, EVEN The Recognitions (post publication influencing the pre-publication or something?). For instance, one can look to the studdy poet and the half assed critic in The Recognitions and then to Thomas Eigen's failed book in JR. With that said, I understand why Steven Moore pushed to get these articles into print, without Green's consent.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Another reviewer has posted a link to the whole thing online)
Model criticism (for the most part) by the first significant critic of our man Bill Gaddis. Green is passionate about The Recognitions, and about defending it and by extension all fiction outside the stifling norm most criticism then (and now) upholds as the only way to write fiction.
Not quite five stars b/c i disagree with him on some points (rather than pointing out where the reviewers misread Gaddis on moral and political grounds he shoots down the idea of moral/political readings/requirements of art at all, possibly a reason Steven Moore is such a big fan) but I'd still mark it as a required read for anyone interested in literature, because it might inspire more criticism written with such passion and emotion (one advantage of Gaddis's obscurity is that he only attracts astute passionate critics like Green and Moore (at least from what I've seen)).

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

A compilation of the takedowns of the early critics of William Gaddis' Recognitions, which Green published in his self-published Newspaper which ran during the early-mid 60's.

It is detailed, honest, and kind of vicious but I don't feel bad because they all had it coming! Green also knows what he's talking about, he's got a strong knowledge of fictional themes and various elements of criticism.

This can also be read on The Gaddis Annotations.

[Lee Klein · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a pretty cool document to peruse if you've read "The Recognitions" -- it's definitely good for some semi-evil, palm-to-forehead laughs re: book-reviewer idiocy/hackery, but after ten pages the book's obsessiveness, lack of punctuation, and repetitiveness/pettiness wore on me, even if the repetitiveness, pettiness, obsessiveness, and punctuationlessness are really also what makes this worthwhile, especially if you're a professional book reviewer or a fan of Gaddis's big-ass book.

[Mister · Rating 3 out of 5]

A book that teaches you not to trust reviews.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

http://therumpus.net/2012/04/horn-rev...

[Christopher · Rating 3 out of 5]

Nice brash, ballsy call-out of criticism. Opinionated mother. Not sure if he's 100% correct in his defense but I wouldn't fight him on it. Only for fans of the Gaddis book.