I'm obsessive. When my attention is glinted, my interest piqued...I go all in. Somewhere in the first twenty pages of William Gaddis's The Recognitions I stopped being a person with other interests and became a person reading this book, and it held me there for three weeks. The normal response to a novel like that is to sit with it for a while, and bring it up too often in conversations. My response is to start a newsletter, so you can help carry some of this weight for me. Thank you, my dearest reader. I appreciate it.

The idea is forgery. Gaddis spent nearly a thousand pages, most of them about art and belief, to expose forgery at the human scale. It opens on a painter, Wyatt, who forges the Flemish masters. He doesn't just create copies. He paints in their literal manner, with the same devotion that made the originals, so thoroughly and completely, that the experts examine them and call them genuine. The paintings are real in every way except that Wyatt was the one who held the brush.

The Recognitions took me about three weeks to read. I spent another three weeks mulling over this novel, and noticing the fakes in every place I looked. So, now I'm asking for three of your weeks to observe the fakes with me, then I stop for the summer. Week one, someone fakes a painting. Week three, the someone is you.

You can expect these newsletters to be published over the next three weeks, starting this Friday, July 17.