Stephen Moore is the world's foremost expert on William Gaddis, and his eponymous work is the pinnacle of scholarship ever undertaken on the writer's work and life.

In this book, Moore, a PhD candidate and former editor-in-chief of Dalkey Archive Press, analyzes all five of Gaddis's novels. He examines their complex architecture, how they work, and why they are so important, supporting his analysis with detailed biographical information. Two chapters of the monograph are devoted to each of Gaddis's most significant works—The Recognitions and J.R.—and a chapter to three of his later works. This is the definitive study of how the great writer's works are structured and why they matter.
In the concluding section, Moore analyzes Gaddis's influence on American novelists who followed in his footsteps—Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Robert Coover, William Vollmann, and others. Despite being a scholarly work, Moore, in the words of writer Jonathan Franzen, is "a scholar whose criticism is a model of clarity and intelligent enlightenment."
Above all, this book is an outstanding work of writing.