Gass’ prose style is so unique, I knew that I would love this book from the first few pages and it kept getting better. Gass’ language is in step with Faulkner, Stein, Pynchon, Gaddis, and Barthelme. Gass puts all his literary and philosophical influences in a blender and throws it very carefully on to the page. This is my first Gass and it was enough to convince me to read all of him.

“For that was the whole of life on the earth, our bodies for a time athwart another’s middle, our lives like leaves, generation after generation lifting the level of the land, the aim of each new layer the efficient smother of the last.”I am not quite sure how to go about reviewing something like this, so I will be using this space as a canvas board. Notes, thoughts, and passages that I thought were particularly poignant. Omensetter’s Luck is my first William Gass novel. It’s hard to make it thr...

If you are like me, one who loves the sounds of words, how they sing, sentences that embed in the mind with their craft, this is a book to relish. Phrase after phrase to read out loud, to listen. This is not completely accurate, the story spoke itself out loud to me as I read. It spoke in its voice. This was the voice, it seemed to me, of the work not of the author. All I was required to do was read and listen. Something similar generally happens but it is in the end my voice reading the work in...

THE REV. P BRYANT'S CHANGE OF HEARTOh the brows that furrowed like broiling cauliflowers – name the names… who first were they? Garima, M J Nicholls and bashful Ian Graye too, who kept his heart enclosed in heelskin normally, also from Nick Craske- which were a match for the beads…chatoyant…like Christ’s eyes…and from Hadrian and his lovely daughters April Meows Often With Scratching and Jennifer while later on as the night wore on and the watchmen wearied and ginger cookies served and the mumbo...

Why have You made us the saddest animal? (...) He cannot do it, Henry, that is why. He can’t continue us. All He can do is try to make us happy that we die. Really, He’s a pretty good fellow. This isn’t an easy book to read - but boy is the view along the way pretty. Gass’s alternately high and bawdy stream-of-consciousness rants made me feel at times like I was rereading Gravity's Rainbow . But as much as I love Pynchon’s maddening door-stopper, I don’t think he’s ever written anything ha

It was like this....A fox got trapped in Brackett Omensetter's well. They could see his eyes looking up. His eyes are like emeralds, they said. That's because they're borrowed from the fire at the center of the earth and they see like signals through the dark. Omensetter's landlord, Henry Pimber, came for the rent, nagged to do so by his wife. He looked down the well, seeing the dim points of red, and his heart contracted at the sight of their malice. Omensetter would have let the fox there. You...

Aesthetically speaking, William H. Gass’s novel set in rural Ohio is utterly close to perfection. But in a certain sense, art, if it is to be called a masterpiece should do more than just be perfect in form. It should, as bare as the word is, connect. I absolutely admire the prose, the wordplay, the little poems, and the revolving flow of consciousness in the novel. However, as fine as the form is, I experienced this feeling of disconnect. I was amused, of course, by both the wittiness and the b...

This book is elegant madness. Beauty given meaning both because and in spite of life's brutality. Chaos in 300 pages of one gorgeously rendered sentence chasing another and another and another down the spiral of ebbing sanity and diminishing credibility. The Writer is God. Don't you ever forget that, as this has always been the case. Much in the fashion of a lonely deity or (at the risk of redundancy) a scientific force dividing What a Thing Is in half to create What a Thing Isn't But the Opposi...

Israbestis Tott is like a well, full to the brim with stories. He draws up stories daily, hourly, first lines spilling from his lips by the minute:In the mornings, Matt was like a bell...Omensetter was a wide and happy man... Furber never listened. He declaimed...Henry Pimber lay with lockjaw in his bed...There is the story of Kick’s cat, the story of the man who went to pieces, the story of the high and iron fence. There is the story of the Hen Woods burning, the story of the hunt for Hog Bellm...

..when I was a little boy and learning letters — A ..., B ..., C ..., love was never taught to me, I couldn't spell it, the O was always missing, or the V, so I wrote love like live, or lure, or late, or law, or liar. Omensetter’s Luck is an ode to words. While in most of the fiction writing, the characters, the plot, the beginning, the middle & the end, all gives rise to the words, it’s the other way round in case of this book, and William Howard Gass is a wordsmith and a tough task master. It’...

… Words were superior; they maintained a superior control; they touched without your touching; they were at once the bait, the hook, the line, the pole, and the water in between.I’ve always admired the craftsmanship that goes into building a piece of fine furniture or sewing a handmade garment or painstakingly painting a piece of china. I guess you could say William Gass is a craftsman of a different kind, a craftsman of words. It’s remarkable to me how this man took 26 simple letters and creat

A wonderful postmodern novel set in Gilean, Ohio in the 1890s. Brackett Omensetter arrives in the town with his family. He appears to be at one with the world; I’ve seen the word congruity used to describe his relationship with the world. His wagon is open and rain seems inevitable, but does not come. He moves into a property which is flooded regularly, but while Omensetter is there the land floods around his property, but he remains dry. He disturbs the locals; his landlord, Henry Pimber seems

First time reading William H. Gass, and although I'd planned to go for his novel 'The Tunnel' first, I had no issues with picking Omensetter's Luck. Not an easy read by far, and a strange work at that - one minute felt like Thomas Pynchon, the next like a mix of Cormac McCarthy, Sinclair Lewis and Flannery O'Connor. It's the kind of book I wish I'd read in an underground bunker away from any noise or distraction, and absolutely the sort of book that I will have to read again. A few things I'm ce...

In his afterword, Gass kibitzes about the strange route to finally scorch Omensetter’s Luck into print. His original MS was filched by a creepy colleague (a possible candidate for the punning Culp in The Tunnel) and rewritten tirelessly over the unhappy fifties and sixties, with the occasional interlude for prawn-poisoning and Accent success. Eventually the novel appeared in 1966 with help from his friends, falling to earth like a particularly tetchy meteorite. Comparisons to Faulkner, Joyce and...

"I Know Not Whence...Nor Whither, Willy-Nilly Blowing"William H. Gass positions words on the page, one after the other. Soon, a sentence takes shape, then a paragraph, then a chapter, then a section, then a novel in its entirety.The words are not necessarily directional from the outset. A sentence goes in the direction dictated by each additional word. They don’t necessarily follow a preordained sequence or work towards a goal:"I know not whence, like water willy-nilly flowing... Nor whither, wi...

Word, word, what is a word,Can it be seen, can it be heard,down with the fish, up with the bird,floating obscene, flying absurd?--- A [word] is a [word] is a [word].-Gertrude Stein Obscene. A man who uses a great many words to express his meaning is like a bad marksman who, instead of aiming a single stone at an object, takes up a handful and throws at it in hopes he may hit. -Samuel Johnson, lexicographer Absurd.---Do you see where I'm getting?Am I not being clear?I was doing quite well,Dan...

According to some interviews and things like that Omensetter's Luck was DFW's favorite books. My own track record with reading DFW-recommended books is hit and miss, sometimes they seem to work out and other times (as in the case of a Curtis White novel) I am just left feeling blah and unimpressed. This book falls into the second category.Parts of the book are really great and some of the writing is phenomenal but I felt that the whole subject matter of the book just didn't do too much for me. I...

A revelatory sense of wonder awaits anyone who is yet to discover and read this fine novel. On finishing the story I sat in awe; head buzzing with rich and vivid imagery and sounds; the rhythms of speech; the sing-song lilts and verbal ticks of each individual character. Gass's writing is truer and more real than anything I have read. It's a brave book in style and structure —giving over the core of the book to the feverish, and often disorientating, inner thoughts and visions of a disturbed man...

In one way Gilean was more punished than Egypt, he thought, since Egypt was never visited by a plague of lies.In his first novel, William Gass traverses the Faulkner-Hawthorne territory, with faltering steps in the beginning but by the middle of it; Omensetter's Luck assumes all the tragic intensity and fatalism of a biblical tale.So what do we have here– small town= small minds; but no, those folks in riverside Gilean, Ohio were doing well enough till one man's bitterness turned the whole town...

This is very difficult for me to rate. The first two short parts are magnificent. The long middle third is mostly taken up with the long, rambling stream-of-consciousness logorrhea of Jethro Furber -- a very complex character, in the final analysis, but which is difficult to follow and unravel (though the general outlines are clear enough). The final section brings together all the threads of plot and character and language... and yet, I couldn't help but feel that the magnificent potential of O...