Although Gaddis was one of the great satirists of twentieth-century America, these letters make clear that he was not anti-American. Taken together, his novels – The Recognitions (1955), JR (1975), Carpenter’s Gothic (1985), A Frolic of His Own (1994), and the short, posthumously published Agapē Agape (2002) – offer a wildly inventive and, most importantly, comic take on America. For example, JR – Gaddis’s finest book, in my opinion – employs a cacophony of dialogue to chart the course of a schoolboy who builds an enormous financial empire.

The stresses that can afflict collections of letters – the invasion of privacy, the absence of countering voices – are acutely evident here. Gaddis often bemoaned what he saw as ‘our current tendency to transform the so-called creative artist into a performer’. He actively resisted talking publicly about himself. While he did endure a few interviews (you can find him on YouTube, sitting awkwardly in a darkened room, smoking while warily answering Malcolm Bradbury’s long-winded questions), he believed – fiercely – that the published work should speak for itself. He called letters ‘detritus’.

Steven Moore began collecting Gaddis’s letters while Gaddis was still alive, prompting an irritated Gaddis to tell a third party that ‘My letters – & I think no one’s – are written for publication (unless they are in which case they’re probably full of lies).’ Moore’s introduction, slightly defensive and proprietorial, begins by admitting that ‘It’s hard to say whether William Gaddis would have approved of this book.’ But Moore stands his ground convincingly enough, pointing out that Gaddis carefully prepared his archive for posterity and told his children ‘that he relished the idea of scholars poring over his papers and making all sorts of discoveries’. In any case, nobody who chooses to read this book – as I have done – has any business questioning the morality of its publication.

Moore states that his main ‘justification’ for publishing Gaddis’s letters ‘is to enable greater insight into his work’, leaving as secondary the need to provide ‘enough personal matter … to allow it to function as a kind of autobiography in letters’. The resultant version of Gaddis’s life and times is detailed and fascinating but also full of abbreviations and omissions. One example of many: in 1945, after a minor drunk-and-disorderly incident, Gaddis was asked to leave Harvard University. But in the book, readers learn of this only via Moore’s brief note, with no sense of how Gaddis reacted. In part, such gaps are unavoidable. Moore cannot conjure letters that never existed or have not survived; he cannot craft a seamless narrative from fractured source material. But the book contains less than a quarter of the available letters: by prioritising Gaddis’s writings over his life experiences, Moore provides a diminished portrait of Gaddis the man.

For pure reading pleasure, the early sections of the book are the best. As a young man, Gaddis wandered through parts of the United States, Central America, and Europe, often taking on manual labour as he felt his way into writing fiction. In one marvellous long letter from Houston in 1947, Gaddis recounted a comical tale of woe and misfortune as he and a friend attempted to drive from Washington to Houston in a misfiring Cord:

We ate, considered, reconsidered, and started again west, stopping at a gas station for water (as, I have neglected to say, we have been doing every score of miles since we left). There was a small dog, the black spots of his coat blending gently into the white with the aid of the automobile grease in which he slept, and eyebrows which curled distantly away from his unreasonable cheerful face.

Decades later, Gaddis wrote to Moore that ‘my early letters were many times written with the vain notion of eventual publication & thus obviously much embarrassing nonsense’. Whether or not that’s true – or partly true, or sometimes true – the letters show Gaddis teaching himself to tell stories his way.

Almost all of the published letters from these years are to his mother, Edith (his parents separated when he was a young boy). His tone to her was chatty, affectionate, and respectful, and yet his observations were acute, his manner of expression already clearly his own. He dispensed self-deprecation liberally to deflect her worries and objections, and rarely admonished her with this degree of force: ‘Incidentally please don’t ever say to me again, Maybe it’s a test. About anything.’ He repeatedly asked her to run errands or to send him things, including books, boots, and, on one occasion, a machete. He requested money so often that it is one of the book’s comic high points when, years later, he wrote to his daughter about the importance of careful budgeting.

As a writer who quickly developed a reputation as an elusive and difficult genius, Gaddis’s letters from 1975, following the publication of The Recognitions, provide a fascinating if patchy insight into his writing practices and his influences. Moore finds it ‘startling to learn how hard Gaddis struggled to produce these novels’, an odd observation given the labyrinthine complexity of the novels (JR, for example, took him twenty years to finish). That said, Moore’s vast knowledge and interpretative grasp of Gaddis’s oeuvre provides important context, pointing out many hard-to-spot connections between the letters and the novels.

The book also chronicles Gaddis’s efforts to deal with publishers who let him down and critics who misread the books. In correspondence with postgraduate students and scholars, he was often impatient, bemused, or cutting: ‘whether you feel it’s “symbolically unified” interests you a great deal more than it does me’; ‘Your thesis relating JR to Don Quixote sounds sufficiently unique that I would certainly hesitate to intrude on it (I’m not being facetious)’. But at other times he displayed genuine interest in, and appreciation for, scholarly studies of his books.

Despite Moore’s emphasis on books and writing, the personal and the domestic continue to intrude – and continue to mess with Moore’s balancing act, with positive and negative consequences. Some of Gaddis’s letters to his daughter and son, both as children and adults, have a deep emotional resonance. There are fine letters to women he loved romantically – and wounded and perplexed laments as relationships sour. At times, the dominance of Gaddis’s voice and perspective, and the absence of other voices and viewpoints, is discomfiting.

The book ends with a brief but compelling afterword by Gaddis’s daughter. In offering a heartfelt and very personal portrait of Gaddis as a man and father, Sarah Gaddis provides a means to connect – and yet keep separate – the revered novelist and the private man. ‘In terms of the world,’ she says pointedly, ‘he wanted to belong, yet stubbornly remained an outsider.’