In some quarters of the literary scene today William Gaddis's novel "The Recognitions" is bound to be praised to the skies, and this reviewer keeps wondering who is being taken in. Mr. Gaddis has immense erudition; he writes in at least four languages; his use of mythology is impressive—and he shows the decay of faith in the modern world in over 900 pages of bright chatter….

[Beneath] the elaborate religious superstructure of the story, and the series of parallel invocations to the pagan gods, "The Recognitions" is really a typical art novel of the 1920s. And the fatal flaw of this genre is simply that the central figures, as in Mr. Gaddis's case too, are only half-artists, who never really engage our sympathy or interest; who never represent anything but themselves….

It is quite possible that Mr. Gaddis is not even pretending to an elementary realism, since the...