The book Jonathan Franzen dubbed the ur-text of postwar ?ction and the ?rst great cultural critique, which, even if Heller and Pynchon hadnt read it while composing Catch-22 and V., managed to anticipate the spirit of bothThe Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, and the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.