Evan’s Reviews > The Recognitions > Status Update
Evan
is on page 370 of 956
Every time Gaddis wants to inject a touch of faux reality business it's always "He/she lit a cigarette." What literary crutch like this do we have today in this smokeless future? I guess, "he/she checked his/her phone for texts" ...
— May 21, 2021 09:01AM
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Evan’s Previous Updates
Evan
is on page 21 of 956
Re-starting this. Been wanting to get back to this for a long time. Made it to about page 420 a few years back but life interceded. Seems much more a breeze this time; given how difficult Joyce's Finnegan's Wake is by comparison. There's nothing here that seems to be stopping me. I'm liking it a lot more.
— 17 hours, 35 min ago
Evan
is on page 422 of 956
I need to get back on this. Of course, I will have to go all the way back and start over at page 1 having reached 422 a long-ass time ago but without the momentum of thought one accrues in the reading none of that previous effort matters now.
— Mar 26, 2025 04:13PM
Evan
is on page 400 of 956
It's taking awhile, but this is clearly doable. It's a toughie, no doubt, but not the most difficult book I've tackled. Let's keep going and maybe come out the other end in a month or two.
— May 21, 2021 04:32PM
Evan
is on page 326 of 956
Hemingway, or someone like him, makes a ubiquitous cameo, so another book goes onto my "hemingway ubiquitous cameo" shelf tag. I really like these New York bohemian passages in the book. They ring true.
— May 16, 2021 11:49AM
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May 21, 2021 11:51AM
I've caught myself doing this- deciding that the characters are smokers- while writing dialogue, to break up the monotony of "he said/she said." It's also partly a holdover from the days when my friends and I smoked, and perhaps evidence of my pathological refusal to acknowledge the realities of our present age.
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Mike wrote: "I've caught myself doing this- deciding that the characters are smokers- while writing dialogue, to break up the monotony of "he said/she said." ..."Gaddis does it an awful lot. I don't think I resort to this sort of thing much in my writing, actually. My third -- mammoth -- novel has lots of references to smoking, since it's integral to the themes of the book, and yet I think there is very little actual smoking done in the book, certainly not used to bridge gaps in dialogue, like some kind of movie cutaway. If there's an impending lull, I usually cutaway to a separate storyline and set of characters. I'm kind of jagged that way.
