Postscript on Dara and Gaddis

Last month, I sketched out the case that Manuel Puig may have had more to do with the look and sound of Evan Dara’s novels than William Gaddis. But, while setting it up, I wrote that he had broken his silence on only one occasion, in swatting away Tom LeClair’s query about the influence of Gaddis, shortly after the publication of The Easy Chain.  In fact, he responded to Steven Moore about this same topic in 2014, which Moore included in his expanded edition of William Gaddis.  Here is the relevant excerpt from page 213:

“…Tom LeClair was right to bring up The Recognitions in his review of Evan Dara’s first novel, The Lost Scrapbook (1996), which, like his subsequent novels, has sheets of Gaddisian dialogue, though this is only coincidental.*

* “Asked about Gaddis’s possible influence, Dara told me that while working on The Lost Scrapbook he head that J R was a novel in dialogue and checked it out from The American Library in Paris: ‘Took the novel home, plunked it open, tapped it shut — didn’t want the influence’ (email January 19, 2014).”

Until Dara publishes his own Temple of Texts, we’re left to continue listening hard to trace the origins and chart the echoes of his voices, without the author’s hand on our shoulder.