The most stalwart admirer of The Recognitions was a journalist by the name of Jack Green, who wrote a seventy-nine page response to all of the negative reviews of the book, excoriating what he thought was lazy criticism and hack journalism.
However, many critics ignored the work, an esoteric handful applauded Gaddis's ambition and erudition, and some rose to its defense, heralding it as a masterpiece.
The writing was chalk full of literary and religious allusions that would make even the most attentive Joyce scholar reel with admiration, and its style and structure was reminiscent of some of the more urbane examples of modernist literature. Also added to this monolithic satire of modern art was a rag-tag bunch of Greenwich Village bohemians desperately seeking artistic purity. The novel itself dealt with the curious theme of artistic forgery, and concerned a young artist by the name of Wyatt Gwyon and his Mephistophelean contract with an American art dealer by the name of Recktall Brown. In 1955, eight years before Thomas Pynchon's V., and two years after Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, a young writer by the name of William Gaddis unleashed a nine-hundred and fifty-six page novel upon the scene of mid-twentieth century literature entitled The Recognitions. It will delight admirers of comic masterpieces like Slaughterhouse-Five, The Crying of Lot 49, and Catch-22. The Four Fingers of Death is a stunningly inventive, sometimes hilarious, monumental novel. In the ensuing days, it crawls through the heartbroken wasteland of a civilization at its breaking point, economically and culturally-a dystopia of lowlife, emigration from America, and laughable lifestyle alternatives. The arm may hold the secret to reanimation or it may simply be an infectious killing machine. Only a lonely human arm (missing its middle finger) returns to earth, crash-landing in the vast Sonoran Desert of Arizona. When a secret mission to retrieve a flesh-eating bacterium for use in bio-warfare is uncovered, mayhem ensues. Three space pods with nine Americans on board travel three months, expecting to spend three years as the planet's first colonists. Luckily, he swindles himself a job churning out a novelization of the 2025 remake of a 1963 horror classic, "The Crawling Hand." Crandall tells therein of the United States, in a bid to regain global eminence, launching at last its doomed manned mission to the desolation of Mars. Montese Crandall is a downtrodden writer whose rare collection of baseball cards won't sustain him, financially or emotionally, through the grave illness of his wife.
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