‘What was truly shocking about his collection was not how many humans were reported murdered, but how many murderers were humans.’Is our identity a product of our history? Do we bear the burden of our fellow man? How do we go about our lives free of guilt, free of the filth that we see all around us? Following the life of Joseph Skizzen, a former Austrian whose father’s penchant for rotating identities landed him in America as an unlisted immigrant, William H. Gass’ third novel, Middle C explore...

Middle C is a genius’s account of mediocrity. How does it feel if one is just a run-of-the-mill individual stranded in the middle of the road?Once upon a time there was a professor of music whose best instrument was hypocrisy, and who pretended to be concerned about the fate of the human race, when, in fact, he hoped it would vanish from the face of the earth the way a fog dense enough to obscure the landscape slowly diminishes, rising like steam from a damp land, so that the earth could smile a...

This last novel from Gass, who moved from American Master to Worldwide Genius status with his opus The Tunnel, is a dusty and wistful elegy of small-town creak, soul-torn skiffle, and melancholy hurt. Skizzen is the protagonist, a mere “sketch” of a man whose quietly desperate rise from C-grade student and library assistant to bluffing and fearful music professor is chronicled here in full Gassian splendour: a prose that thrives on melody. Gass is the most musical stylist alive: his sentences da...

The orchestra is finishing the last of its warm-up exercises. A diminutive figure walks on stage, to scattered applause, bows slightly to the audience, turns to the orchestra and taps a baton lightly on the bar of the podium before raising gloved hands. A certain quiet is descending throughout the concert hall...Miriam*, whom Joey Skizzen** thought of as his mother, Nita, began to speak about the family’s past, but only after she decided that her husband was safely in his grave.His frowns could

Listen to that. We have arrived at our station. The noon bell rings across the quad. You may scuffle out. Our time is up.I finish this heartbreaking, elegiac, magnificent novel on the day that William H. Gass has died at the age of 93. This is the first novel I have read from him, so while I can look backwards at Omensetter's Luck and especially The Tunnel, there will be no forthcoming novels from Mr. Gass, so it is with a sense of ending beyond that of the usual with which I close the sky-blue

"If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard." - William H. GassSo everyone knows that Gass will be turning 89 soon. Instead of spending his 80s sitting in a rocking chair on his porch and yelling "Get off my lawn." at the neighborhood kids, he was writing. This. He was writing this beautiful, complex and nuanced work for last several years, diligently honing and perfect...

I’m certain other folks will come along and write up lovely long reviews of Middle C; it’s certain that it’s happening now actually. Nick's is great. Look for Kris's or Nathan's or Ali’s or Megha’s or countless others. Has MJ read this? They’re good people spreading the good word, go give them a “like”, it’s just a click away. But my eyes are tired, there’s this dull pain in the front of my skull and I might be going blind from reading books. That would be the end of a world for sure. Losing sig...

A note about the plot:Meet Joseph Skizzen. Or is it Joey? Or is it Professor Skizzen? It seems that even Joseph can't decide who he is, so how is the reader supposed to choose? I liken these discrepant parts of Joseph's persona to the Freudian tripartite of the id, ego & superego. Joey is the id -- he's the childlike part of Joseph's psyche, while Professor Skizzen is the superego, or the conscience. But what if your entire superego is a lie? How can anyone have a strong sense of self if one is

“Honey, you are a baby in this world and don't know how to howl yet.” ― William H. Gass, Middle C All the world was a stage. But not for all the world.Another great author I backed into. Don't misinterpret me. I haven't just run backward over/into Gass. I haven't just "discovered" or "uncovered" the author. I've quoted him often. I've admired him and scanned used bookshelves for him. In my collegiate years I presumed to know more about Gass than I had a right to presume. I've carefully kept The

Gass once wrote that he sought the world in a word. It is worthy of note that in this novel he seeks a symphony amid the cacophony in "Middle C" and seeks to hear the music so defined as much by stops and silences as by tone and atonality.If there were a handful of novelists from this era whom I would strive most to emulate, William H. Gass would be one of them along with William Gaddis, Thomas Pynchon and John Barth. This writing is exquisite, elegant, true and even breathtaking in its use of l...

Me: Guess what? I did not enjoy this book at all.You: Me: Not at all. That’s right, I said it.You: You: Me: Please, let me explain. It’s just that, well, I’d never even heard of William H. Gass before. But I got very excited—“Oooh! Another author I’ve somehow missed and now discovered thanks to Goodreads!”—when I read some friends’ reviews like this and this and this. So many five stars! Well, I’m here to balance out the scales. This being my first time reading Gass, I couldn’t help but have a

I read Middle C with a sense of curiosity. I was initially directed to him along with other postmodernists by a “if you like Dave Eggers you might be interested in..” popup on my internet browser’s search engine. He later turned up in the dirty dozen listed in Jonathan Franzen’s essay, “Mr. Difficult”. Naturally, I thought, look out; this guy is going to be tough. Then I read Willie Master’s Lonesome Wife, which I thought was a bit of a chaotic mess. What I found upon reading Middle C was a smal...

I’ve taken my time reading this; mainly because I didn’t want it to end. Gass is a master craftsman; you can drift along so easily in the prose that you don’t realise how good it is. Gass plays with words with a light touch and even makes up/develops a few (gossipacious anyone? According to my spell-check it isn’t a word!)One of the central themes is clearly identity. Our protagonist has several identities, indeed names. Joseph/Joey Skizzen (Yussel Fixel briefly thanks to a father who thought th...

...he would like to have looked out on it a little like God on the first day and observed the mess we had made of ourselves, and seen spread out over infinity a single placid sea of shit. He would have liked to be there at the end to find accounts rendered and justice done. Given a choice of passing a single verdict on entire human race and humanity based either upon the right choice of words or right choice of music, what would you possibly choose? Professor Skizzen might convince you that s

What was most extraordinary about this novel, I think, was how subtle its meta/PoMo qualities were: the unreliable narrator; unreliable/meta text itself; and the threading of the central metaphor through plot, character, essay and style...Its subject matter was the same that has obsessed Gass throughout his novels - the mundane, average, everyday roots of all the violence and horror in the world. The betrayal and the hypocrisy displayed by Joseph at the end of the novel is a more subtle reflecti...

The quip, what a novel is: a) something in prose (and we expect a bit of poetry thrown in, too) b) of a certain length (and here “certain” means “indeterminate”) [AND] c) which has something wrong with it.Gass’s Middle C can thusly be understood as a perfect novel. Or nearly perfect because we are not quite sure whether there is enough wrong with it. One might insist that all novels have their “flaws” and I would concede. But what is a “flaw” in relation to a thing which by its very nature is im...

Review of the 2012 New York Alfred Knopf uncorrected proof.Middle CWilliam H. GassFiction396 pages‘A literary event —the long awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by one of the most revered American writers of our time, author of the universally acclaimed The Tunnel’But you already knew that… If Michael Silverblatt describes The Tunnel as ‘A bleak, black book... Engendering awe and despair’ then Middle C is ‘a spirited and symphonic book, affirming life and individuality’.It is brilliant.

Middle C is a World War II novel, but I think it is a disservice to classify it immediately as such. Most novels I come into contact with that have been labeled that way are melodramas that happen to use the war as a way to give depth to an otherwise pedestrian plot of people coming and going and coming back (or not) again. While there is a certain amount of that here, the twist with this one is that the going and coming takes place almost entirely inside the head of one person, rather than amon...

FOOD FOR THOUGHT:A Counterfeit Self-Analysis"The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from the sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life-assertion of the last one."Gass' Caveat to the Sceptical Reader/Reviewer"Never make a marginal note or a clever remark you will surely regret, and always assume the author is smarter than you are..."Honey, I'm ready for my popcorn and scotch!Ballad of a Fa...

WARNING: This review will make NO reference to that 30-something-year-old Paris Review interview William Gass did, quips from which seem to be the required keys to all subsequent reviews of his work. Instead, one from an interview with John Madera:"There’s a war going on between people who believe in universals and people who don’t, or Aristotle who’s always so nicely in between, who said that the universal does not exist apart from the particular. It is the structure of the particular."Middle C...