In his uncompleted, posthumous novel, Recovery, John Berryman creates a remarkable tension between traditional form and experimentation. As in Action Painting, the content and the form of Recovery are united to present and embody the visions and revisions, the versions and reversions of a suicidal alcoholic struggling with his disease. Recovery shows that addition is a major impediment to art, because it infects both language and imagination. In the novel, Alan Severance feels that only the truth can heal, but he discovers that language lends itself less easily to truth, than to wit, metaphor, story, myth, evasion, and delusion. Unlike the poet, the alcoholic confuses the essential differences between language and experience.

In Recovery, Berryman creates an original form that reveals the gradual movement of a mind away from delusion, evasion, and showmanship and toward truth and honesty.

"Recovery" implies a conventional plot or narrative with action rising...