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Middle C
A literary event—the long-awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by the acclaimed author of The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex, most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime."—Michael Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times ; "An extraordinary achievement."—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post ); Omensetter's Luck ("The most important work of fiction by an American in this literary generation"—Richard Gilman, The New Republic ); Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife ; and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country ("These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also replenish the language."—Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times ). Gass' new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a life—futile, comic, anarchic—arranged in an array of vocabularies, altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both theme and structure, set in the key of middle C. It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is relocated to a small town in Ohio, where Joseph Skizzen grows up, becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father, and creates as well a fantasy self—a professor with a fantasy to establish the Inhumanity Museum...as Skizzen alternately feels wrongly accused (of what?) and is transported by his music. Skizzen is able to accept guilt for crimes against humanity and is protected by a secret self that remains sinless. Middle C tells the story of this journey, an investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another. William Gass set out to write a novel that breaks traditional rules and denies itself easy solutions, cliff-edge suspense, and conventional surprises... Middle C is that book; a masterpiece by a beloved master.
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First published March 12, 2013
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About the author
William H. Gass
63 books688 followersWilliam Howard Gass was an American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, and former philosophy professor.
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.
He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.
Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.
Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The
Gass was born in Fargo, North Dakota. Soon after his birth, his family moved to Warren, Ohio, where he attended local schools. He has described his childhood as an unhappy one, with an abusive, racist father and a passive, alcoholic mother; critics would later cite his characters as having these same qualities.
He attended Wesleyan University, then served as an Ensign in the Navy during World War II, a period he describes as perhaps the worst of his life. He earned his A.B. in philosophy from Kenyon College in 1947, then his Ph.D. in philosophy from Cornell University in 1954, where he studied under Max Black. His dissertation, "A Philosophical Investigation of Metaphor", was based on his training as a philosopher of language. In graduate school Gass read the work of Gertrude Stein, who influenced his writing experiments.
Gass taught at The College of Wooster, Purdue University, and Washington University in St. Louis, where he was a professor of philosophy (1969 - 1978) and the David May Distinguished University Professor in the Humanities (1979 - 1999). His colleagues there have included the writers Stanley Elkin, Howard Nemerov (1988 Poet Laureate of the United States), and Mona Van Duyn (1992 Poet Laureate). Since 2000, Gass has been the David May Distinguished University Professor Emeritus in the Humanities.
Earning a living for himself and his family from university teaching, Gass began to publish stories that were selected for inclusion in The Best American Short Stories of 1959, 1961, 1962, 1968 and 1980, as well as Two Hundred Years of Great American Short Stories. His first novel, Omensetter's Luck, about life in a small town in Ohio in the 1890s, was published in 1966. Critics praised his linguistic virtuosity, establishing him as an important writer of fiction. In 1968 he published In the Heart of the Heart of the Country, five stories dramatizing the theme of human isolation and the difficulty of love. Three years later Gass wrote Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife, an experimental novella illustrated with photographs and typographical constructs intended to help readers free themselves from the linear conventions of narrative. He has also published several collections of essays, including On Being Blue (1976) and Finding a Form (1996). His latest work of fiction, Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas, was published in 1998. His work has also appeared in The Best American Essays collections of 1986, 1992, and 2000.
Gass has cited the anger he felt during his childhood as a major influence on his work, even stating that he writes "to get even." Despite his prolific output, he has said that writing is difficult for him. In fact, his epic novel The Tunnel, published in 1995, took Gass 26 years to compose. An unabridged audio version of The Tunnel was released in 2006, with Gass reading the novel himself.
When writing, Gass typically devotes enormous attention to the construction of sentences, arguing their importance as the basis of his work. His prose has been described as flashy, difficult, edgy, masterful, inventive, and musical. Steven Moore, writing in The Washington Post has called Gass "the finest prose stylist in America." Much of Gass' work is metafictional.
Gass has received many awards and honors, including grants from the Rockefeller Foundation in 1965, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 1970. He won the Pushcart Prize awards in 1976, 1983, 1987, and 1992, and in 1994 he received the Mark Twain Award for Distinguished Contribution to the Literature of the Midwest. He has teaching awards from Purdue University and Washington University; in 1968 the Chicago Tribune Award as One of the Ten Best Teachers in the Big Ten. He was a Getty Foundation Fellow in 1991-1992. He received the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997; and the American Book Award for The
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September 14, 2022
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?
The novel is a story of an ultimate nonentity surrounded by falseness and living a life of a complete fraud. Maneuvering between The Recognitions by William Gaddis and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, William H. Gass creates his own postmodernistic Notes from Underground of a contemporary man from under the floor.
Being neither a musician nor a composer the main characters manages to pose as a musicologist and this is a piece of his musicology for you:
But however mediocre one is, one always tries to dig one’s own burrow and to occupy one’s own niche… However mediocre one is, there is always someone boasting even more mediocrity.
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 again as it must have once, in the days of simple cells, titanic trees, or even reptiles with necks grown long in order to reach the leaves.
The novel is a story of an ultimate nonentity surrounded by falseness and living a life of a complete fraud. Maneuvering between The Recognitions by William Gaddis and Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor, William H. Gass creates his own postmodernistic Notes from Underground of a contemporary man from under the floor.
Being neither a musician nor a composer the main characters manages to pose as a musicologist and this is a piece of his musicology for you:
Pop buyers preferred singers who couldn’t sing and musicians who couldn’t play because these performers were – as they rose out of sight in their idolaters’ eyes – like pop people themselves, their incompetence was the common touch and made them seem more sincere. Folk music, for instance, had to seem simple, uncouth, and untutored, or it wasn’t folk.
But however mediocre one is, one always tries to dig one’s own burrow and to occupy one’s own niche… However mediocre one is, there is always someone boasting even more mediocrity.
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November 9, 2023
‘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 explores with bitter wit our sense of identity formation n a world steeped in evil, violence, guilt and shame. Through mellifluous prose that rivals the classical compositions studied by Joseph, and with a fearless look into the hearts of mankind, Gass takes the reader on a journey through false identities and facades in the quest for the middle C.
Each page of Middle C is a passage of linguistic achievement. There is a marvelous musicality to his flow and phrasings, such as ‘the bogey beggar man said from beneath the bill of his red BEER CAP’, and the consistently beautiful similes feel, like pianos that ‘echoes like a range of hills’, read as if they are words bled from the vibrating strings of violins. The consistently astounding prose leads one to imagine Gass waving his pen as if conducting a symphony of language. He explores the incredible versatility of free-indirect narration, however, instead of weaving from the narrator to the characters as if tying together a seam, Gass straddles the line at all times, occupying both the narrator and character, creating a zone where the two voices create an inseparable blend. This technique gives complete creative allowance to orchestra Joseph while pulling the reader back and forth across time and place without need of transitions beyond riding Joseph’s emotional quandaries to the new event along the jigsawed timeline. The narrative can suddenly shift from a third person description of his room in the Inhumanity Museum and then back a few years to a discourse on music history in the classroom simply by following his train of thought, all while maintaining an uninterrupted flow without inflicting the reader with motion sickness. Gass is then able to shape much of the reader's perspective on Joseph through Joseph's own words and eyes, which is essential in a novel focusing on false histories. While Joseph reshapes his history to fit his needs in society, the stories reprint themselves in his own memory as half-truths, and the reader is subjected to Joseph's own view of reality, which may or may not be mingled with falsehoods. This free-indirect narrative technique also allows for his unique forms and lack of typical grammatical indications of dialogue. The dialogue in Middle C is just barely more structured than that commonly found in a Saramago novel, with no quotation marks and usually no line breaks to denote a new speaker. The book is a piece of composition, and each character is another note on the staff reverberating with one another, and to separate each note out through special indication would ruin the harmonious flow. Structure and form is given an atonal freedom to shift and reshape itself to fit the aesthetic climate of each scene.
Not unlike a piece of musical composition, Gass moves across the life of Joseph Skizzen as if it were ‘variations on a theme’. Much like the way Joseph perfects his sentence on humanity through variations of words, tweaking the highs and lows as if creating the perfect hook in a song by achieving a twelve-tone row of text as in accordance with Schoenberg’s musical technique, Gass perfects an image of his focal character by offering variations on Joseph’s actions across the whole of his life. ‘How fluid names were, now as then’ Joseph is told. How fluidly his father, Rudi Skizzen, became the Yussel Fixel—adopting the role of a Jewish family to secure a passage from Austria to London for him and his young wife in order to escape the coming Nazi atrocities—then the role of English Ray Scofield, and how fluidly the reader witnesses Joey grow into Joseph and Professor Skizzen¹. Each new identity is simply a variation on the Leitmotif of one individual, the scale of notes from past identities being played in different melodies flowing from and into one another, individual in the moment yet harmonious in entirety. While his father attempted to become an atonal piece of composition, switching keys and identities as if changing socks, Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen reaches for the middle C, the centered-most note on the piano scale, to live ‘an unnoticed life’ in order to mask his fraudulent history, his atonal existence. Joseph tries to hide in the open and flees from any potential scandal that could draw unwanted eyes prying into his false history.
To keep an impenetrable wall around his falsehoods, Professor Joseph chooses subjects of study that intimidate his colleagues.
4.5/5
‘The next time you enjoy—say—a kiss, think of it for a moment as a moist slur of notes, and the experience showing up in your consciousness, as well as that of your companion, when your lips touch, is a chord of a chorus in a world of cacophony.’
‘When the world ends, the word will write on.'
¹ Names are very fluid in this novel aside from Joseph and his father (his mother, Nita/Miriam, however, rejects their notions of changing faces and remains Miriam as well as attempts to hold on to her Austrian roots. Her faithfulness to her faith is another story.), such as how everyone seems to pronounce the town differently: Urichtown/Uhrichsville/Whichstown, each with a slightly different connotation towards the place.
² Religion comes under Gass’ aim rather often in this novel, even Martin Luther himself of whom Joey writes in a class essay that Luther’s decision to become a monk in a monastery that he would ‘later decide wasn’t worth much, and no place to be if you wanted to get right with God – since the church wasn’t right with God either – so his choice of monastery…to honor his piety was the choice of the Devil’s…and a sign he was a sinner not a saint.’ While, ultimately, this reflects Joey’s youthful disgust with those who resemble his father’s interchangeable beliefs, if also is used by Gass to posit that religion is often a strong front to hide a weak interior. Ironically, this is the way Professor Joseph conducts himself.
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 explores with bitter wit our sense of identity formation n a world steeped in evil, violence, guilt and shame. Through mellifluous prose that rivals the classical compositions studied by Joseph, and with a fearless look into the hearts of mankind, Gass takes the reader on a journey through false identities and facades in the quest for the middle C.
Each page of Middle C is a passage of linguistic achievement. There is a marvelous musicality to his flow and phrasings, such as ‘the bogey beggar man said from beneath the bill of his red BEER CAP’, and the consistently beautiful similes feel, like pianos that ‘echoes like a range of hills’, read as if they are words bled from the vibrating strings of violins. The consistently astounding prose leads one to imagine Gass waving his pen as if conducting a symphony of language. He explores the incredible versatility of free-indirect narration, however, instead of weaving from the narrator to the characters as if tying together a seam, Gass straddles the line at all times, occupying both the narrator and character, creating a zone where the two voices create an inseparable blend. This technique gives complete creative allowance to orchestra Joseph while pulling the reader back and forth across time and place without need of transitions beyond riding Joseph’s emotional quandaries to the new event along the jigsawed timeline. The narrative can suddenly shift from a third person description of his room in the Inhumanity Museum and then back a few years to a discourse on music history in the classroom simply by following his train of thought, all while maintaining an uninterrupted flow without inflicting the reader with motion sickness. Gass is then able to shape much of the reader's perspective on Joseph through Joseph's own words and eyes, which is essential in a novel focusing on false histories. While Joseph reshapes his history to fit his needs in society, the stories reprint themselves in his own memory as half-truths, and the reader is subjected to Joseph's own view of reality, which may or may not be mingled with falsehoods. This free-indirect narrative technique also allows for his unique forms and lack of typical grammatical indications of dialogue. The dialogue in Middle C is just barely more structured than that commonly found in a Saramago novel, with no quotation marks and usually no line breaks to denote a new speaker. The book is a piece of composition, and each character is another note on the staff reverberating with one another, and to separate each note out through special indication would ruin the harmonious flow. Structure and form is given an atonal freedom to shift and reshape itself to fit the aesthetic climate of each scene.
Not unlike a piece of musical composition, Gass moves across the life of Joseph Skizzen as if it were ‘variations on a theme’. Much like the way Joseph perfects his sentence on humanity through variations of words, tweaking the highs and lows as if creating the perfect hook in a song by achieving a twelve-tone row of text as in accordance with Schoenberg’s musical technique, Gass perfects an image of his focal character by offering variations on Joseph’s actions across the whole of his life. ‘How fluid names were, now as then’ Joseph is told. How fluidly his father, Rudi Skizzen, became the Yussel Fixel—adopting the role of a Jewish family to secure a passage from Austria to London for him and his young wife in order to escape the coming Nazi atrocities—then the role of English Ray Scofield, and how fluidly the reader witnesses Joey grow into Joseph and Professor Skizzen¹. Each new identity is simply a variation on the Leitmotif of one individual, the scale of notes from past identities being played in different melodies flowing from and into one another, individual in the moment yet harmonious in entirety. While his father attempted to become an atonal piece of composition, switching keys and identities as if changing socks, Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen reaches for the middle C, the centered-most note on the piano scale, to live ‘an unnoticed life’ in order to mask his fraudulent history, his atonal existence. Joseph tries to hide in the open and flees from any potential scandal that could draw unwanted eyes prying into his false history.
’He wasn’t fleeing from, he was running toward, and what he hoped to learn would be free and unassigned, known only to himself; so that, consequently, to the world Joseph would remain undefined—a vague reference.’Identity becomes a major motif as we watch each progression of linguistic chords play out and flow into another passage of life. Joseph rejects attachments and scorns those with them, such as his distaste for his sisters ‘attachement to something so shallow as school.’ He attempts to conceal his fabricated history, yet is forever haunted by it. Like the modern composers he teaches, he rejects history, wishing to believe, like Miss Spikey says, that ‘History is dead as the nex [sic] chicken I eat’, yet cannot feel the burdens of his past creeping into his present. Are we just a flow of events, our identity formed by the timeline of our actions, as one phrase of music builds out from the former notes? Like the works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, soaked in the guilt of his Puritan roots, do we bear the shame of our forefathers? Joseph is disgusted with the human race as a whole, keeping a collection of news articles documenting the atrocities committed by our fellow man throughout history, and wonders if mankind deserves to exist. ‘He who has lived and thought can never… look on mankind without dis-dain [sic].’ Gass depicts every person as bearing their weight in guilt, guilt of their former transgressions, and the guilt of mankind stemming back from Adam, and shows that we all construct facades of ourselves to hide our filthy souls. No matter how hard Joseph tries to remove himself from the world and all it’s misdeeds, the more he is pulled through the mud and potential scandals. ‘His father had a dream: to keep his hands forever clean. Joey wasn’t clear whether his father had ever understood that it takes a lot of digging in the dirt to do that.’
To keep an impenetrable wall around his falsehoods, Professor Joseph chooses subjects of study that intimidate his colleagues.
‘[H]e recognized very early the importance of snobbery as a support for principals…. The snob in motion is hard to head off. But the seventh sense the snob attains is most dearly prized: that of superior taste. And the smug possession of taste is far more infuriating to the wide world (which is, of course, lamentably without it) than any offensive lyrics or annoying noise.’By holding strong convictions (despite not actually believing them) and a head full of esoteric knowledge, nobody would dare challenge his authority. Much like the fascists from which his father fled, a strong adamant authority defies those who would wish to crack it open and expose the weaknesses inside. Although he is a fake, he is superior to those who are authentic, yet Gass questions if anyone is truly an authentic human. While Professor Joseph and his false credentials are entirely an existence made from a lie, so do each and every one of us hide somehow, like Miriam hiding in her Autstrian roots and her garden (itself both a symbol of Eden and fascism), the sister who ‘was concealing herself beneath a blanket of middle-class comfort’ to escape her family shame, the sinners who hide behind their professed religion², or the university staff who are all enter the faculty meeting in fear because ‘[t]hat’s what happens when you carry around a guilty conscience.’ Are we all, as the saying goes, merely players who fret upon a stage? But if so, then what does that make the world?
’But if all the word were a stage, what was backstage, what lurked in the wings, and where were the actors and the actresses when they weren’t on, and why did everybody talk all at once, and the people playing at war shout their lines while the people playing at peace were trying to read theirs, and why were only some shows sold out to an audience more often than not anxiously fanning their faces and drinking booze, because wouldn’t they be participants, too? And would there be music coming from the pit? Backstage, to be sure, was a deity devising the lines, and a whole host of angels, devils perhaps, imps and fairies, raing curtains and dressing persons, contriving designs and prompting the forgetful. Every performance would have to be a play about a play within a play. It was a daze-inducing thought.’Gass seems right at home in every page of the novel, pulling his full range of experiences together to create this quiet, yet irresistible story. In an extraordinary chapter, in which Joseph beings conducting his sentence which, in its infancy reads ‘The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure’, calls to mind Gass’ essays on sentence structure and language as he examines what even the tiniest alterations of words imply in their connotations and configurations. Having spend many years teaching at Universities, Gass seems to be reliving his days behind the podium through his text, flourishing it with fascinating historical facts and prompting the reader to participate and do their homework. Neatly embedded in the text and lecture scenes are unanswered questions posed to the student and numerous allusions of which he draws the reader’s attention to as if begging them to raise their hands and explain. The novel is overflowing with disdain for faculty meetings, University politics, and fellow professors that makes one wonder how much is Skizzen and how much is Gass. In fact, much of the Professor section of the novel was inspired by an event is Gass’ own history, reproduced here as told to Greg Gerke by Gass in Volume 14, Number 2 of Tin House Magazine.
’The new book, though, is based more on an actual event. When I first started to earn my living in the world, I was teaching at a college called Wooster, in Ohio. And there arrived on the campus one day an Englishman who taught history. The officials had hired him. He was charming, and had huge audiences for his classed. He’d been there about two or three months when the authorities came around and said, “This guy is a fake, a bigamist, and his name is Peters, and he’s wanted by the English and Canadian police.” And everybody was shocked, because everybody had made him over as such a brilliant man and so forth. That was all that actually happened, but I thought, Well, I want to talk about—or deal with—somebody who’s a counterfit of that sort…As a fraud, he’s better than most genuine people.’While the novel isn’t perfect—but what novel truly is? —it is a fantastic achievement and a celebration of the versatility and musicality of language as well as it’s long history and progression beyond modernism. Like the composers who reject the tradition to forge a new path, they have grown out of the past. While Gass’ novel has all the postmodern flourishes, it’s long, life-story narrative and separation into numbered chapters seem to invoke a subtle nostalgia for the modernism from which it has progressed. Gass takes a morbid and critical eye at humanity, reminding us that we are born to die, and forcing us to take a good hard look at the world we exist in. Should we bear the shame of our race? Should we accept the atrocities? It is shown that we, as individuals, are but notes on the staff of humanity, and all harmonize together to sing the song of our species. As traditions of music attempted to upset and overthrow one another, we as people do the same, creating a violent cacaphony in our world.Middle C is a phenomenal novel that quietly pushes forward through passages of poetic brilliance that make it nearly impossible to set down.
4.5/5
‘The next time you enjoy—say—a kiss, think of it for a moment as a moist slur of notes, and the experience showing up in your consciousness, as well as that of your companion, when your lips touch, is a chord of a chorus in a world of cacophony.’
‘When the world ends, the word will write on.'
¹ Names are very fluid in this novel aside from Joseph and his father (his mother, Nita/Miriam, however, rejects their notions of changing faces and remains Miriam as well as attempts to hold on to her Austrian roots. Her faithfulness to her faith is another story.), such as how everyone seems to pronounce the town differently: Urichtown/Uhrichsville/Whichstown, each with a slightly different connotation towards the place.
² Religion comes under Gass’ aim rather often in this novel, even Martin Luther himself of whom Joey writes in a class essay that Luther’s decision to become a monk in a monastery that he would ‘later decide wasn’t worth much, and no place to be if you wanted to get right with God – since the church wasn’t right with God either – so his choice of monastery…to honor his piety was the choice of the Devil’s…and a sign he was a sinner not a saint.’ While, ultimately, this reflects Joey’s youthful disgust with those who resemble his father’s interchangeable beliefs, if also is used by Gass to posit that religion is often a strong front to hide a weak interior. Ironically, this is the way Professor Joseph conducts himself.
April 10, 2013
"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. Gass
So 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 perfecting each sentence. No middling C's for this man, he will settle for nothing less than an A++. Is he really writing using the same words and following the same grammar as so many other authors do? Really hard to believe. His sentences don't merely convey one thing or the other. They perform a whole choreographed sequence and deliver a best-on-the-broadway level performance. If you are reading Gass, please be sure to read, pause and re-read and feel the pulse and the rhythm of his prose.
As great as he is at crafting these well-manicured sentences, he is just as adept at creating a character. Skizzen is going to stay on my mind for a while. Gass really puts "multi" into a multi-dimensional character. Skizzen's character is built up in such an intriguing style - one sentence at a time, one thought at a time. His relationships with his mother and his sister while they all deal with displacement in their own ways, his interactions with each of those unique and memorable characters he meets at different stages of his life, all contribute pieces to the puzzle. Even the absentee father is a big part of the person Joey is.
Gass has structured this work intricately, interleaving vignettes from different parts of Joey's life. What formed the main thrust of the narrative for me was the dichotomy (or what turned out be trichotomy) between Joey/Joseph Skizzen's selves. I kept looking for clues that will help me reconcile his different identities , and figure out how the younger Joey morphed into the adult Prof. Skizzen. Does our past need to be a part of who we are? Is any one of his identities more real than the others? Or is everything we get to see on the outside a mere representative sketch (meaning of word 'Skizzen') of a person? In creating the character of Skizzen, Gass provides a wonderful mediation on the notion of self and identity.
While Joey's ambition of being invisible and inconsequential may not seem like a lofty one, it certainly isn't the worst thing a person has ever aimed for. Sure he is not helping a blind person cross the road, but he is not hurting anyone either. He may not be working towards making the world a better place, but he is trying to keep his hands clean of the moral tarnish of the world. A world whose wrongs he finds too much for him to accept and forgive. He is someone who finds his sanctuary in a library or at a piano, how harmful could he be!
In addition to some of these main themes, there are several little moments that will leave a mark on the readers. There is a lot of depth to this work, some of which I am sure of having missed. Nick's review talks a bit about the relationship of Middle C with music. I am hoping there will be more reviews expounding how music informs the structure and the ideas in the novel.
I did briefly consider awarding 4 stars to Middle C . As impressive and near-perfect this book is, I can't help thinking that Gass might be holding back here. I noticed some very bright sparks in places, mostly during Joey's monologues. But those were rather short lived. I would love to see those sparks leap into big flames and engulf the entire book. I would love to see Gass's manic energy and passion being unleashed with full force. The reviews over here establish beyond doubt that The Tunnel is where I want to be. I am sure I will totally dig The Tunnel. Till then it is 4.987654321 stars.
April 19, 2020
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 that it would be a good idea to change his family’s identity from Austrian to Jewish as the Nazis came to power). Joseph starts life in Austria, moving to England with his parents (living through The Blitz) and finally to America, where he grows up. Joseph’s father disappears before they leave England and he is left with his mother and sister. They end up in Woodbine Ohio, where after schooling; brief stints working in a music shop and a library Joseph passes himself off as an academic in a small college where he teaches music. He specialises in twentieth century music; particularly atonal music and Schoenberg. In his spare time and in his spacious attic Joseph also collects newspaper clippings which depicts human inhumanity. These he pins around the walls and collects for his Inhumanity Museum. Joseph’s interior life is also rich and he spends a good deal of time working on a particular phrase/idea. “The fear that the human race might survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure”.
Gass creates some wonderful characters along the way, but the flow and depth of the book is not about the plot which drifts along merrily without a great deal of action. The themes in the book run very deep and I suspect I’ve missed several of them.
There is a clear reference to Candide at the end; Joseph says of his mother, “She couldn’t cultivate her garden forever”; in contrast to Candide telling Pangloss “we must cultivate our garden”. I wonder if that is Gass’s sign off; who knows. Everything is transient and identity comes to an end. Of course Voltaire is attacking the optimism of Liebniz in Candide. The debate about Candide is still rumbling on, but whether you want to see the gardening in Middle C as a Garden of Eden motif (as in Voltaire) is open to debate (I can find arguments for and against). I think the Inhumanity Museum also feeds into the themes in Candide. I also think Voltaire’s best of all possible worlds arguments provide a counterpoint to Skizzen’s workings on “The fear that the human race might survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure”. Candide has greatly influenced many of the great modern writers (Pynchon, Beckett, Vonnegut to name a few). I think as Middle C is analysed the Candide links will be developed and these rather disconnected ramblings are just a few musings along the way.
Music and fakery are also themes; Joey pulls off fakes with his driver’s licence and his teaching post. Skizzen is the German plural word for sketch and we are treated to almost a series of sketches that make up Joey. It might also be instructive to play with the sound of the word and Skizzen might become schism; but then we do have Joey, Joseph and Professor Skizzen. Another avenue to follow. The music references may be orchestral and the protagonists instruments, each playing their part. Enough rambling; there is a sinister shadow in the background, the Nazis and the holocaust.
There is a striking quote on p240 “The leader raises his baton; Stukas scream from the skies”. This follows the Odysseus analogy and is a clear musical reference. There are many levels of meaning but what came into my mind most clearly was Adorno’s post war comments about how it was impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. This feels like Gass is working out how to write literature after Auschwitz (but the Inhumanity Museum is still in the attic). These literary and musical variations sparkle with ideas and the structure of the novel becomes more interesting the more you think about it.
Gass has always said that to write he has to be angry, has to hate and he channels the rage wonderfully, dissecting and perhaps updating Candide with our modern inhumanities.
I think I could probably continue to write about this book and already looking at what I have written I want to change and add. That might be a good time to leave in alone for now.
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 that it would be a good idea to change his family’s identity from Austrian to Jewish as the Nazis came to power). Joseph starts life in Austria, moving to England with his parents (living through The Blitz) and finally to America, where he grows up. Joseph’s father disappears before they leave England and he is left with his mother and sister. They end up in Woodbine Ohio, where after schooling; brief stints working in a music shop and a library Joseph passes himself off as an academic in a small college where he teaches music. He specialises in twentieth century music; particularly atonal music and Schoenberg. In his spare time and in his spacious attic Joseph also collects newspaper clippings which depicts human inhumanity. These he pins around the walls and collects for his Inhumanity Museum. Joseph’s interior life is also rich and he spends a good deal of time working on a particular phrase/idea. “The fear that the human race might survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure”.
Gass creates some wonderful characters along the way, but the flow and depth of the book is not about the plot which drifts along merrily without a great deal of action. The themes in the book run very deep and I suspect I’ve missed several of them.
There is a clear reference to Candide at the end; Joseph says of his mother, “She couldn’t cultivate her garden forever”; in contrast to Candide telling Pangloss “we must cultivate our garden”. I wonder if that is Gass’s sign off; who knows. Everything is transient and identity comes to an end. Of course Voltaire is attacking the optimism of Liebniz in Candide. The debate about Candide is still rumbling on, but whether you want to see the gardening in Middle C as a Garden of Eden motif (as in Voltaire) is open to debate (I can find arguments for and against). I think the Inhumanity Museum also feeds into the themes in Candide. I also think Voltaire’s best of all possible worlds arguments provide a counterpoint to Skizzen’s workings on “The fear that the human race might survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure”. Candide has greatly influenced many of the great modern writers (Pynchon, Beckett, Vonnegut to name a few). I think as Middle C is analysed the Candide links will be developed and these rather disconnected ramblings are just a few musings along the way.
Music and fakery are also themes; Joey pulls off fakes with his driver’s licence and his teaching post. Skizzen is the German plural word for sketch and we are treated to almost a series of sketches that make up Joey. It might also be instructive to play with the sound of the word and Skizzen might become schism; but then we do have Joey, Joseph and Professor Skizzen. Another avenue to follow. The music references may be orchestral and the protagonists instruments, each playing their part. Enough rambling; there is a sinister shadow in the background, the Nazis and the holocaust.
There is a striking quote on p240 “The leader raises his baton; Stukas scream from the skies”. This follows the Odysseus analogy and is a clear musical reference. There are many levels of meaning but what came into my mind most clearly was Adorno’s post war comments about how it was impossible to write poetry after Auschwitz. This feels like Gass is working out how to write literature after Auschwitz (but the Inhumanity Museum is still in the attic). These literary and musical variations sparkle with ideas and the structure of the novel becomes more interesting the more you think about it.
Gass has always said that to write he has to be angry, has to hate and he channels the rage wonderfully, dissecting and perhaps updating Candide with our modern inhumanities.
I think I could probably continue to write about this book and already looking at what I have written I want to change and add. That might be a good time to leave in alone for now.
Read
May 20, 2017The 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 imperfect, that were it perfect would disintegrate or calcify? Rather than pick out some detracting feature of a work of art such as a novel, rather than identify what’s “wrong” with it, isn’t the work of the critic to identify what makes a work work, to identify how it is organized and brought into being; and that the very thing which makes this work of art this work of art is precisely its flaws, its less-than-perfectness, around which the whole thing gets its bearing and comes into being? And perhaps more than any other form of art, it is the novel which finds itself precisely in its flaws. Painting, sculpture, poetry, music... do not these art forms attain to perfection? The novel, once perfected, calcifies.
But the novel then is that which most fully reflects in its form the experience of being human, which is to say “flawed,” having something constitutively wrong with it. And should the flaws and imperfections be removed from the novel or from the human being both would immediately cease to be that which they are. That flaw of being human can be identified in any number of ways -- original sin, the fall, sexuality, rationality, language, the urge to art, throwness, out-of-balance, Higher, torn. Failed. Fraud.
Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen is a fraud, like his father before him. Which is to say that he is an everyperson, us. Like us he will be denounced, found out. But how to continue through existence as a fraud, when denunciation threatens us at every turn? We seek justification for our ways. Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen will justify himself as not that, as not human, as not that against which he has collected an enormous, overflowing mass of data, clippings, instances, episodes damning humanity’s inhumanity against human being in his attic Inhumanity Museum. This fascination with the evil that men do justifies Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen in his removal of himself from the scene of human being, as his father removed himself from the threatened nazification of Austria by recourse to fraudulent self-identification and re-identification, by the re-branding and re-naming of his family; that Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen will not participate in being authentically human, a terrible thing to be, for sure. Rather, in opposition to the work of his pretended hero, Schoenberg, Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen will work himself into a fake centering by way of averageness--Middle C. At least his hands won’t be dirtied. Being human--failed, fraudulent, or carrying dirtied hands.
But as with Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen’s attempt to construct himself as durchschnittlich, his reverence for Schoenberg is a fake, a mere strategy to intimidate his colleagues and stave them off from discovering that here stands no authentic, unified human being; someone just like themselves. He would be middle C, but thereby he gives the lie to his worship of Schoenberg for whom there is no central note, no grounding tone and no home to which one might musically return. If Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen believes that he can hide within an average note, he has made explicit his incomprehension of Schoenberg’s music, a music which has no privileged, central tone but which treats the twelve notes of the series as of equal value, stress and privilege. There is no grounding note, no averagely central middle C, but a movement through twelve, each in its turn; each in our turn we shall be denounced as frauds.
Perfection, despite our ontological status, is that which we find ourselves compelled to pursue, compelled to fail to reach and then to compensate by a fantasy of becoming angels or animals. Or to create a work of art. Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen’s work of art is his sentence, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Through courses of kicking a can around his attic he hones this sentence into a perfect form. And he believes he attains it when it falls into a shape which resembles Schoenberg’s twelve tone row:
“First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive.”
But such a measure of perfection gets itself assbackwards. The twelve tone row is not that to which one aspires, but is the very material itself with which one begins. He has created a sentence which mirrors the fundamental unit of serial composition, but in order to do so he has failed to grasp the manner in which the row functions. It is the nearly random row (throw your d-12) which lacks any characteristic at all except for the mere fact of each note not being any other of the 12 notes. From this disordered mess of 12 a composition is pieced together according to rules which have no foundation outside themselves; artificial constraints, but intentionally artificial, unlike the ideological presupposition of the diatonic system whose artificiality is mistaken as “natural.” In the same way in which Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen has pursued the perfection of a sentence by failing to grasp its method, so too being human, fraudulent, is to believe that we are following a self-justifying rule which leads to perfection, only to find ourselves ensconced in Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum.
Is it dark? A dark book? Pessimistic and depressing? Why all this stuff about fraud? Why shouldn’t we believe nicer things about ourselves? No no no. Not at all. Gass’s book is a hopeful book. It is only the presuppositions of what it’s like to be a human being which appear so down, what it’s like if we do not pretend to be something we are not. Here is our authenticity and unity of personhood -- to not deny our fraudulent, failed status. But what we have in Middle C is a hopefulness that we can make it through, that we may not be denounced, that perhaps we can be good to our mothers, that despite being mistreated on every hand we will NOT join Kohler’s Party of Disappointed Persons. Rather than fool ourselves into a middle C we may find ourselves at home with our identities strewn across a twelve tone row, as the way we find ourselves, and perhaps give off on the threat of denunciation because the obligation to become unified, authentic selves would transform us into something we are not and in fact the largest project which can be asked of us is to come home to the way we find ourselves with no center or privileged note, but only a row which repeats itself even as it transforms itself with every iteration.
________________
A Note on the Type
This book was set in Adobe Garamond. Designed for the Adobe Corporation by Robert Slimbach, the fonts are based on types first cut by Claude Garamond (c. 1580-1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and is believed to have followed the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him that we owe the letter we now know as "old style." He gave to his letters a certain elegance and feeling of movement that won their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.
Composed by North Market Street Graphics, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics, Berryville, Virginia
Designed by Maggie Hinders
[The binding of this thing is what ought to be standard for hd's; the kind which, in profile, traces a curve rather than the typical straight line. Beautiful. And it’s a page-turner]
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 imperfect, that were it perfect would disintegrate or calcify? Rather than pick out some detracting feature of a work of art such as a novel, rather than identify what’s “wrong” with it, isn’t the work of the critic to identify what makes a work work, to identify how it is organized and brought into being; and that the very thing which makes this work of art this work of art is precisely its flaws, its less-than-perfectness, around which the whole thing gets its bearing and comes into being? And perhaps more than any other form of art, it is the novel which finds itself precisely in its flaws. Painting, sculpture, poetry, music... do not these art forms attain to perfection? The novel, once perfected, calcifies.
But the novel then is that which most fully reflects in its form the experience of being human, which is to say “flawed,” having something constitutively wrong with it. And should the flaws and imperfections be removed from the novel or from the human being both would immediately cease to be that which they are. That flaw of being human can be identified in any number of ways -- original sin, the fall, sexuality, rationality, language, the urge to art, throwness, out-of-balance, Higher, torn. Failed. Fraud.
Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen is a fraud, like his father before him. Which is to say that he is an everyperson, us. Like us he will be denounced, found out. But how to continue through existence as a fraud, when denunciation threatens us at every turn? We seek justification for our ways. Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen will justify himself as not that, as not human, as not that against which he has collected an enormous, overflowing mass of data, clippings, instances, episodes damning humanity’s inhumanity against human being in his attic Inhumanity Museum. This fascination with the evil that men do justifies Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen in his removal of himself from the scene of human being, as his father removed himself from the threatened nazification of Austria by recourse to fraudulent self-identification and re-identification, by the re-branding and re-naming of his family; that Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen will not participate in being authentically human, a terrible thing to be, for sure. Rather, in opposition to the work of his pretended hero, Schoenberg, Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen will work himself into a fake centering by way of averageness--Middle C. At least his hands won’t be dirtied. Being human--failed, fraudulent, or carrying dirtied hands.
But as with Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen’s attempt to construct himself as durchschnittlich, his reverence for Schoenberg is a fake, a mere strategy to intimidate his colleagues and stave them off from discovering that here stands no authentic, unified human being; someone just like themselves. He would be middle C, but thereby he gives the lie to his worship of Schoenberg for whom there is no central note, no grounding tone and no home to which one might musically return. If Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen believes that he can hide within an average note, he has made explicit his incomprehension of Schoenberg’s music, a music which has no privileged, central tone but which treats the twelve notes of the series as of equal value, stress and privilege. There is no grounding note, no averagely central middle C, but a movement through twelve, each in its turn; each in our turn we shall be denounced as frauds.
Perfection, despite our ontological status, is that which we find ourselves compelled to pursue, compelled to fail to reach and then to compensate by a fantasy of becoming angels or animals. Or to create a work of art. Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen’s work of art is his sentence, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Through courses of kicking a can around his attic he hones this sentence into a perfect form. And he believes he attains it when it falls into a shape which resembles Schoenberg’s twelve tone row:
“First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive.”
But such a measure of perfection gets itself assbackwards. The twelve tone row is not that to which one aspires, but is the very material itself with which one begins. He has created a sentence which mirrors the fundamental unit of serial composition, but in order to do so he has failed to grasp the manner in which the row functions. It is the nearly random row (throw your d-12) which lacks any characteristic at all except for the mere fact of each note not being any other of the 12 notes. From this disordered mess of 12 a composition is pieced together according to rules which have no foundation outside themselves; artificial constraints, but intentionally artificial, unlike the ideological presupposition of the diatonic system whose artificiality is mistaken as “natural.” In the same way in which Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen has pursued the perfection of a sentence by failing to grasp its method, so too being human, fraudulent, is to believe that we are following a self-justifying rule which leads to perfection, only to find ourselves ensconced in Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen’s Inhumanity Museum.
Is it dark? A dark book? Pessimistic and depressing? Why all this stuff about fraud? Why shouldn’t we believe nicer things about ourselves? No no no. Not at all. Gass’s book is a hopeful book. It is only the presuppositions of what it’s like to be a human being which appear so down, what it’s like if we do not pretend to be something we are not. Here is our authenticity and unity of personhood -- to not deny our fraudulent, failed status. But what we have in Middle C is a hopefulness that we can make it through, that we may not be denounced, that perhaps we can be good to our mothers, that despite being mistreated on every hand we will NOT join Kohler’s Party of Disappointed Persons. Rather than fool ourselves into a middle C we may find ourselves at home with our identities strewn across a twelve tone row, as the way we find ourselves, and perhaps give off on the threat of denunciation because the obligation to become unified, authentic selves would transform us into something we are not and in fact the largest project which can be asked of us is to come home to the way we find ourselves with no center or privileged note, but only a row which repeats itself even as it transforms itself with every iteration.
________________
A Note on the Type
This book was set in Adobe Garamond. Designed for the Adobe Corporation by Robert Slimbach, the fonts are based on types first cut by Claude Garamond (c. 1580-1561). Garamond was a pupil of Geoffroy Tory and is believed to have followed the Venetian models, although he introduced a number of important differences, and it is to him that we owe the letter we now know as "old style." He gave to his letters a certain elegance and feeling of movement that won their creator an immediate reputation and the patronage of Francis I of France.
Composed by North Market Street Graphics, Lancaster, Pennsylvania
Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics, Berryville, Virginia
Designed by Maggie Hinders
[The binding of this thing is what ought to be standard for hd's; the kind which, in profile, traces a curve rather than the typical straight line. Beautiful. And it’s a page-turner]
March 22, 2013
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 sight. I don’t want concerned comments in the thread below because I’m not really going blind (not that I know of) but my eyes are tired, my head hurts and the world lurches along toward its ugly tired destiny like a migraine. We’re all here (I mean on Goodreads, not “in the world” or alive or what have you) because we know that running against the flood currents of death, debasement, degradation, lies, soul-sucking sellers of pablum, hucksters of all ilks, corporate con men, murderous politicians, unflinching criminals, money grubbers, terrorist armies, state-sponsored genociders, animal torturers, users and abusers and rapists not just of bodies but of worlds, against this blood-dimmed ebb there flows a counter-current, the other tide- ART, thought, the illuminated stream we sit peacefully on the shore of, waiting for the trees to drop little flowers and ruby-green leaves onto the sun-blasted surface so that we might watch their undulating progress drift on around the bend. Petals on a river like Ulysses' vessels setting out; the wild songs of the winds in the valleys, arbors, and hills; a quiet moment stolen from the clatter of the city when the crowd parts and for once the sunlight doesn't hurt and machines stop screaming; a genuinely unexpected embrace of a sweetened moment- or rarer, a good deed done with no hand upturned for recompense; a carefully wrought sentence, which is like a river; a just-caught image of unforeseen beauty that passed over like cloud-shadow; a few notes that caress our blood emanating from a vibrating string across the room, proving that everything resonates on its own particular frequency, and frequently those frequencies overlap. Artists are sometimes generous people. Middle C is a generous book. It’s a poultice for the laceration, a dressing on the wound of being alive. Cold water where it burns. A white rose to lay on the coffin that your friends will bear. But it reminds you that you’re still burned, punctured, doomed. Because anything else would be dishonest. Gass is generous and honest, and writes perfect sentences at that. I’m having trouble remembering things (not the specifics of Middle C, the cover of that’s just been closed and it’s all orchard-in-spring fresh) but about myself and what I wanted to do with my life when I was young. There’s lots of that to go around, the loss of self, the hiding of self, the making up of multiple selves until the self is many-faceted and unrecognizable even to our infant eyes (but what we thought we wanted was unity, what happened to that?...) And where’s the shame in hiding, if you’re prey to constant hunters? If you're the sprig of grass the mower's destined for? Then mask yourself like the butterfly that seems a mottled tree’s bark. Spring’s here, and the cycles haven’t slowed. In fact they’re accelerating. Cherry blossoms are quick to scatter the pavement. They’re beautiful when they die. I can hear bird songs above the traffic sometimes. If you found yourself at the ocean’s edge, it might roar like a chorus. Between the constellations that twinkle over the ocean, where human voices barely reach, there is music. It used to be called The Music of the Spheres, Musica Universalis. As the universe accelerates away from the origin point of the big bang, it gets colder and quieter. Not just gigantic things like stars and planets are moving away from each other, but the tiniest particles, too. Every damn piece of creation is parting company in little increments, and one day the dust of our bones will be as distant from each other, particle to particle, as our living minds are now from Sirius. Farther in fact. In the end, electron and proton and neutron, even those devilish buggers photons will say their goodbyes and part ways like scorned lovers on an autumn evening. A long, dark winter will set in. Eventually, with no bone dust within gravity’s reach of other bone dust, there won’t be any heat left to make anything work or move anymore. And if nothing moves and nothing can change, then what is there left to say by that big mouth who’s usually talking our ears off, Time? Nothin’. Time won’t even get the chance to say “goodbye” (and “eternity” was just another con man). If ears were around to hear, would the stilled universe sing like locusts? I hate hypotheticals. So pay attention to those among us who are generous, now, in the present. If Vico was right, we'll get to see them again on the other side, maybe get a chance to repay their grace.
"Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson Blues? I'm going down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you."
"Have you ever heard about the Higgs Boson Blues? I'm going down to Geneva baby, gonna teach it to you."
April 24, 2013
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 without roots? His father changed identities from Austrian citizen to Jewish refugee to Englishman as if it were common practice. Then he hopped on a boat for America, abandoning his family, leaving them with nothing but their (fake) name and a faint hope for a better life in a new country.
So the rest of the Skizzen clan embark on a journey to the United States in search of the patriach and illegally settle in Ohio. What's a man without a name to do? Come clean and risk deportation? Or make up a whole new life for himself? I'm sure you can guess which road Joseph Skizzen chose.
Joseph's mother, on the other hand, feels so rootless that she ends up literally surrounding herself with roots. Her plants, flowers, vegetation of all sorts become her lifeline. We all crave that feeling of groundedness, and if our roots have been yanked from the soil, perhaps all we can do is grow new ones.
++++++++
A note about the Skizzen - Gass connection:
Like Skizzen, Gass's family was displaced by circumstance. Gass wrote, "Though I was born in Fargo... before I was six months old I had, like Moses, floated away in a woven wicker laundry basket to Ohio ... Thus I grew up... my family moving, as rents and renting went, from house to house - and I, from school to school - throughout the Depression."
Like Gass, Skizzen immerses himself in books. Like Gass, Skizzen works in academia. Like Gass, Skizzen obsesses over a sentence.
~~~~~~~~~~
A note about the sentence:
Skizzen spends a great deal of time working and reworking a sentence:
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
Skizzen obsesses over this sentence until he finally achieves a lyricism that he is satisfied with.
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive.
This is a direct reflection of Gass's own meticulous composition of sentence. Watson Holloway in his book William Gass writes, "Spiraling or tunneling out from the center involves not writing but rewriting. He starts with a sentence, writes it over again many times, and adds other sentences to expand the original idea. Eventually paragraphs and pages appear."
*********
A note about the M’s
William Gass dedicates this novel "For Mary, never more so." I don't think it is accidental that all of the women in Joseph Skizzen's life are represented with names that begin with M: Miriam, Major, Miss Spikey, Miss Moss -- perhaps each of these women in some way represent Gass's wife Mary? Just speculating...
------------
A note about the Inhumanity Museum:
Until now, I have failed to mention the Inhumanity Museum. Joseph Skizzen has an odd hobby. He likes to cut articles out of news papers describing all sorts of atrocities, murders, wars, ecological disasters, you name it, and hang them on fly paper all over his room. He's literally surrounding himself in negativity. Does this make him feel better about his own life of lies? I don't know, again, speculating...
-----
A note about the rating:
Until today, I had only given this book 4 stars, but it has provided enough food for thought to deserve another star. Yes, it lacks the innovation of Omensetter's Luck and yes it's more about character and story than presenting verbal puzzles for readers to solve. But if one judges this book by its own merits, without comparing it to OL, it's stands on its own two feet as a remarkable work of fiction.
August 11, 2014
Review of the 2012 New York Alfred Knopf uncorrected proof.
Middle C
William H. Gass
Fiction
396 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. It is beautiful - lyrical, dense and engrossing.
A work of genius writing skill. And for me, sentence-for-sentence is the most eloquent prose, in his novel writing, to date.
The protagonist Joseph Skizzen is an immigrant searching for a sense of identity; his family is relocated from London during the war to a small town in Ohio. Joseph’s father abandons the family in London and Joseph becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father and evolves to create, as well, a fantasy self, a professor with a fantasy goal: establish the Inhumanity Museum.
Yes there are similarities here, thematically, to Gass’s earlier novels, the protagonists internal obsession with a physical, structural artefact; with the creation of said artefact. Yes Omensetter’s Luck was located in Ohio and yes there is a protaganist’s preoccupation with history —WWII and the Holocaust— and The Individual’s place within it; individuality and sense-of-self, but Middle C is a greater composition and ensemble story.
Structurally —unlike the quirks, exaggerations or skews in pace and style in either Omensetter’s Luck or The Tunnel— there is an equilibrium at play here; a balance and pitch; a measure and count perfectly sustained. While these earlier stylings resonate with me personally —for I love the weird overly extended inner madness of Jethro Furber[Omensetter’s Luck] and the dark Byzantine inner monologues of William Frederick Kohler[The Tunnel]— Middle C feels the most consistent. The story moves along at a graceful and controlled up-tempo pace and we experience the characters from both our protagonist’s view second person perspective. The dialogue and character interactions attain the same magical quality as hinted at in Omenetter’s Luck (‘What’s Kitt’s cat’s name? Kitt’s cat.’). While the novel, at 396 pages, is shorter than The Tunnel it is certainly more expansive in story, location, character and momentum. There are still moments of discord and darkness but artfully balanced.
As Joseph Skizzen —skizzen in translation means draft or sketch, incidentally— begins to settle in Ohio he encounters several characters from neighbouring towns. These encounters are told in vignettes where their back stories are told in an elliptical fashion. During the course of Joseph's life he revisits and revises a single sentence pertaining to the existence of the human race - it's a compelling mirror of Joseph's evolving self and shifting perspectives over time and allows for some virtuoso sentence craft and word play from the author.
From music shops to libraries; from piano teaching to lecturing, the characters Joseph encounters are all entirely unique and utterly individual. A smorgasbord of peculiarities. The portrayal of his mother; their relationship and their scenes in his mother’s garden are lovely. Joseph’s mother takes not only reprieve and renewal from her garden but romantic transportation back to the old days. And who other than Gass could write such compelling chapter finding parallels between the meditative beauty of gardening and the regimented ferocity of the Third Reich?
Joseph evolves to become a professor of music and in a lecture to his students extols the premise of Bella Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra - he reads directly from the programme, quoting Bartok, as printed for the concerto’s premiere in 1944:
‘The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life assertion of the last one’
And it’s possible —outside the novels use of Middle C as metaphor for attaining acceptance via bland conformity— to interpret this as a reflection of William H. Gass’s literary output.
Professor Joseph Skizzen continues to describe the Concerto’s structure as a mingling and clashing of competing kinds of music, the instruments that play them and the totalitarian contexts which the large ensembles necessarily require their musicians to perform. And it is here I feel Gass alludes to the nature of individuality, of an intermingling of nationalities and personalities.
Skizzen describes the piece as break away from the musical 'tyranny' (naughty me quoting unccorected proof here) of the diatonic scale.
This uncorrected proof's blurb reads: ‘Middle C tells the story of the journey and investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another’ and it’s in this paradox, this magnificent writing that Gass reaches his perfect pitch.
Beautiful - in both spirit and style. A book I will read many times over. If only he could write these masterpieces quicker...
And the artwork is perfect.
[Is it a coincidence a piano typically contains 88 keys and William Gass is 88]
Middle C
William H. Gass
Fiction
396 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. It is beautiful - lyrical, dense and engrossing.
A work of genius writing skill. And for me, sentence-for-sentence is the most eloquent prose, in his novel writing, to date.
The protagonist Joseph Skizzen is an immigrant searching for a sense of identity; his family is relocated from London during the war to a small town in Ohio. Joseph’s father abandons the family in London and Joseph becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the abandonment of his father and evolves to create, as well, a fantasy self, a professor with a fantasy goal: establish the Inhumanity Museum.
Yes there are similarities here, thematically, to Gass’s earlier novels, the protagonists internal obsession with a physical, structural artefact; with the creation of said artefact. Yes Omensetter’s Luck was located in Ohio and yes there is a protaganist’s preoccupation with history —WWII and the Holocaust— and The Individual’s place within it; individuality and sense-of-self, but Middle C is a greater composition and ensemble story.
Structurally —unlike the quirks, exaggerations or skews in pace and style in either Omensetter’s Luck or The Tunnel— there is an equilibrium at play here; a balance and pitch; a measure and count perfectly sustained. While these earlier stylings resonate with me personally —for I love the weird overly extended inner madness of Jethro Furber[Omensetter’s Luck] and the dark Byzantine inner monologues of William Frederick Kohler[The Tunnel]— Middle C feels the most consistent. The story moves along at a graceful and controlled up-tempo pace and we experience the characters from both our protagonist’s view second person perspective. The dialogue and character interactions attain the same magical quality as hinted at in Omenetter’s Luck (‘What’s Kitt’s cat’s name? Kitt’s cat.’). While the novel, at 396 pages, is shorter than The Tunnel it is certainly more expansive in story, location, character and momentum. There are still moments of discord and darkness but artfully balanced.
As Joseph Skizzen —skizzen in translation means draft or sketch, incidentally— begins to settle in Ohio he encounters several characters from neighbouring towns. These encounters are told in vignettes where their back stories are told in an elliptical fashion. During the course of Joseph's life he revisits and revises a single sentence pertaining to the existence of the human race - it's a compelling mirror of Joseph's evolving self and shifting perspectives over time and allows for some virtuoso sentence craft and word play from the author.
From music shops to libraries; from piano teaching to lecturing, the characters Joseph encounters are all entirely unique and utterly individual. A smorgasbord of peculiarities. The portrayal of his mother; their relationship and their scenes in his mother’s garden are lovely. Joseph’s mother takes not only reprieve and renewal from her garden but romantic transportation back to the old days. And who other than Gass could write such compelling chapter finding parallels between the meditative beauty of gardening and the regimented ferocity of the Third Reich?
Joseph evolves to become a professor of music and in a lecture to his students extols the premise of Bella Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra - he reads directly from the programme, quoting Bartok, as printed for the concerto’s premiere in 1944:
‘The general mood of the work represents, apart from the jesting second movement, a gradual transition from sternness of the first movement and the lugubrious death-song of the third, to the life assertion of the last one’
And it’s possible —outside the novels use of Middle C as metaphor for attaining acceptance via bland conformity— to interpret this as a reflection of William H. Gass’s literary output.
Professor Joseph Skizzen continues to describe the Concerto’s structure as a mingling and clashing of competing kinds of music, the instruments that play them and the totalitarian contexts which the large ensembles necessarily require their musicians to perform. And it is here I feel Gass alludes to the nature of individuality, of an intermingling of nationalities and personalities.
Skizzen describes the piece as break away from the musical 'tyranny' (naughty me quoting unccorected proof here) of the diatonic scale.
This uncorrected proof's blurb reads: ‘Middle C tells the story of the journey and investigation into the nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another’ and it’s in this paradox, this magnificent writing that Gass reaches his perfect pitch.
Beautiful - in both spirit and style. A book I will read many times over. If only he could write these masterpieces quicker...
And the artwork is perfect.
[Is it a coincidence a piano typically contains 88 keys and William Gass is 88]
September 2, 2016
...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 such judgment will gain an immortal identity once its formation is done with a judicious mix of both but before that, it has to go through many phases to achieve a supposed perfection.
According to Joseph it will start like this:
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
But the end result won’t be attained very easily. In return however, you’ll get something I can easily enunciate as an impeccable and incredible achievement in novel writing. William Howard Gass in his latest offering, Middle C has done it again and I’m not even exaggerating. While going through my notes today which were heavily quoted with passages from this book, I was overcome with this inexplicable sense of honor one feels in the presence of something or someone divine and I’m grateful to experience the same.
Following a discourse of myriad pretensions and forged identities, Middle C recounts the story of Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen who has a family history of acting on the mantra: Don’t be yourself. It has its origin with the advent of World War II era and the anticipation of its dreadful consequences in Austria from where Joey’s father along with his family fled to London and then alone to America in a hope to escape the world’s moral tarnish. But such escapade rarely ends in happily ever afters and Joey is eventually left with an identity he alone has to make sense of.
Everything seemed borrowed, nothing new. He felt a bit borrowed himself.
What a perplexing thing identity is! Even though it helps in maintaining a lawful and organized course of civilization, it also brings into focus our glaring dependence upon it from the time of our birth till the time of our death (In most of the cases we need to prove that we’re dead, too). Everyone needs a validation of our existence, whether it comes to admission in an educational institute to getting a job with a potential employer or undergoing various arrangements at a personal level. So what one should do in a situation when there is no concrete evidence of our origin, no testimony of our achievements and no acknowledgement of our talents? Well if you can’t make it then simply Fake it. I’m not saying that but Joey does. He is not very ambitious in his search for an identity in a foreign land and is happy with mediocrity but in doing so he aims for a place from where he can see everyone else but others won't be able to see him. In this process, we follow his life journey where he narrates about Joey by being Joseph, about Miriam, his mother, by being Joey, about Joseph by being Professor or whatever he wants to be. He talks about his college colleagues, discuss his reminiscences and describe his ‘Inhumanity Museum’ (as the title suggests!). Another thing of interest for Joseph is the love for music but there are variations. If Joey’s musical preferences lies on the lines of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata , Professor Skizzen unabashedly claims a love for Schoenberg Moses Und Aron. He has to teach a class in a college and ultimately needs to show off his ‘modern’ tastes to his students. Moreover, he needs to figure out an effectual use of twelve-tone row with respect to a sentence he's obsessed with. All this makes for a highly interesting, erudite and occasionally funny reading experience but at the same time we also need to figure out what really constitute the identity of Joey and see to it that we don’t become another pawn at the hands of a veteran player.
With heavenly sentences constructed by Herr Gass which enchantingly moves in a rhythm of some blissful music, a reader is perpetually faced with a paradox of being happy at reading a string of beautiful words and at the same time feeling a sense of remorse at the message those words carry.
What was truly shocking about his collection was not how many humans were reported murdered, but how many murderers were humans.
We probably don’t need repeated reminders about the demonic and wicked nature of our species but going by the incorrigibility the mankind exercise almost on day to day basis, such reminders is exactly we should get. There are times when this book seems to be moving in circles providing no definite conclusion in sight. There are times when some doubts are raised regarding a likely trick being played on us by the narrator and there are times when a mind is clouded by an apprehension that one won't be able to grasp the 'whole point' at the end, but we should be comfortable by the fact at every turn of the page that we're safe in hands of someone who knows very well the power of his words and that they always carry a lesson worth learning. As for Mr. Gass, we should read him essentially because he writes.
And here’s marking my review-with-a-Soundtrack debut, brought to you by Joey/ Joseph Skizzen/ Prof. Skizzen. Enjoy!
Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C68Skz...
Sadko Song of India, Rimsky Korsakov
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZK93C...
Home Sweet Home, Nellie Melba
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMi16n...
C. Czerny's Quartet for four pianos
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KYBdLY...
Ignacy Jan Paderewski - Chopin, Polonaise in A Flat
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RyHAly...
Franz Liszt - Liebestraum - Love Dream
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpOtuo...
Suicidio- Zinka Milanov
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjDVBJ...
Erik Satie- Trois Gymnopédies
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7DBoi...
Absence, Eleanor Stebber
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu0s8l...
Arnold Schoenberg: Moses Und Aron
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOWjQu...
Anton Webern Symphonie op.21
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBf2K4...
Béla Bartók - Music for strings, percussion and celesta
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFTGdF...
David Oistrakh plays Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fNCeYK...
Mahler Das Lied von der Erde
- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQZ51u...
It was a moment in which sorrow became sublime and his own misfortunes were, momentarily, on someone else’s mind.
August 20, 2013
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 dance across the page like the wander of a waltz or the prance of a polka. His internal rhyme, bouncy assonance, restless alliteration, and Stein-song repetitions lead to sentences that create the power and rapture of music. All prose should aspire to the condition of music, and Gass, more so than Nabokov or Theroux or Flaubert, makes each sentence a sonata. The pleasure in rolling a Gass original on your lips, sounding the syllables, sucking on the sentences, slurping back the sounds, is like soaking in a symphony or sliding your hands into sand. When William Gass departs this planet, the timeless pleasure and passion of his words will remain and strike with the force of humanity. Middle C is a bleak, world-weary book in content: Skizzen is a borderline psychotic, a backwoods creep who lives with his mother and compiles cuttings for his Inhumanity Museum, passing the days in a dusty delusion as to his somebody status, drifting into a misanthropy and terror likely to steal his sanity. Gass cuts to the heart of what it means to hate and hurt. This novel is a tragic, beautiful, moving creation. It will haunt your memory like a doleful piano in some far-off room. Gass crafts the best sentences of any writer alive. Fear his thunder and read this wonder.
February 7, 2017
“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 Tunnel displayed, peacocking, on my shelf for decades. I've collected Gass essay collections, Gass criticisms, other Gass fictions. But all my Gass has, until today, remained unread, his books unopened, those pages uncut, words undisturbed.
'Middle C' is a funky book. A musical prose that dances around the center. A mediocre family in flight, in disguise from Austria to London to the Middle of Middle America. A narrator that hides and disguises, that plots and twists. He jumps from school to store to library to university. He climbs the American ladder, remaking each rung as he climbs. He creates a fictional life and dreams that mankind must perish but also fears we might just survive. He creates an inhumanity museum for himself; an exhibit of disasters and man-made horrors, clipped from papers and hung on flypaper. He lives with his mother, dreams of his father, and gains a certain satisfaction "at being to the world an artifice".
This isn't a plot driven novel. It is an ode to identity, a concerto between the two-selves of a man whose two identities (Joey and Joseph) are the contrapuntal themes we ALL listen to, if we listen closely, to those fuguing, fuging voices in our own head.
― 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 Tunnel displayed, peacocking, on my shelf for decades. I've collected Gass essay collections, Gass criticisms, other Gass fictions. But all my Gass has, until today, remained unread, his books unopened, those pages uncut, words undisturbed.
'Middle C' is a funky book. A musical prose that dances around the center. A mediocre family in flight, in disguise from Austria to London to the Middle of Middle America. A narrator that hides and disguises, that plots and twists. He jumps from school to store to library to university. He climbs the American ladder, remaking each rung as he climbs. He creates a fictional life and dreams that mankind must perish but also fears we might just survive. He creates an inhumanity museum for himself; an exhibit of disasters and man-made horrors, clipped from papers and hung on flypaper. He lives with his mother, dreams of his father, and gains a certain satisfaction "at being to the world an artifice".
This isn't a plot driven novel. It is an ode to identity, a concerto between the two-selves of a man whose two identities (Joey and Joseph) are the contrapuntal themes we ALL listen to, if we listen closely, to those fuguing, fuging voices in our own head.
April 10, 2014
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 opens with "Miriam, whom Joey Skizzen thought of as his mother...." Well, that's an odd way to put it, isn't it? He thought of her as his mother? More on this later in the Weird Theories section.
Although it attempts to disguise itself as an utterly Middle C kind of book, this might become one of those novels that will have its fans accused of only pretending to like it to seem smart; you know: those literary snobs who'd go around accusing detractors of being dumb. It takes very little perusing of modern classics on GoodReads to find several reviews that would have you believe that less "pretentious" readers are routinely attacked and belittled for not liking (insert "difficult" author here) . These claims are never illustrated with any specifics, leading one to conclude that they are not based on actual experiences of being called stupid, but more on the experience of being made to feel that way by a book that took some work.
Naturally it's always unsatisfying to exercise anger toward an inanimate object such as a book, and if the author is distant or dead, whom can you accuse but its readers? Ya gotta blame somebody, right? Someone has to be guilty. Maybe even everyone. Well, everyone else. This novel is about that everyone-else feeling regarding Humanity's worst behavior. It sounds and resounds the theme of human guilt and the untenable paradox in which we cannot deny that we are part of that great whole called Humanity, that Humanity has committed innumberable atrocities, and the feeling that this makes Humanity "other" to our horrified selves who rightly reject such, yet, by doing do, recoil from the concept of common Humanity, surely a prerequisite for comitting inhumane acts. To remain untainted, our protagonist Joey Skizzen must lie himself into detached purity and breach multiple ethical mores, especially those regarding authenticity, authority, and honesty, comically dramatizing this paradox.
"What he really wanted the world to see, were his lifelong ruse to be discovered, was the equivalent of Moses's tablets before they got inscribed: a person pure, clean, undefiled, unspoiled by the terrible history of the earth. So he could rightly say to his accusers (and accused he would be): When you were destroying yourselves and your cities, I was not there; when you were debasing your noble principles, I was not there; when you were fattening on lies like pigs at a trough, I was not there; when you were squeezing life from all life like water from a sponge, I was not there. So see me now! Untarnished as a tea service!"
But it still required a dedicated ruse and innumberable lies. [If I had more room I'd explore further the idea of Moses's "pure" tablets before being incribed by assumptions of human guilt. Even as a kid I thought "What, so before that, murder was ok?" initiating a long slide into disbelief.]
But this paradox does not only problematize the universalized concept of Humanity in relation to the Self; conversely it also problematizes our most cherished myth, Selfhood, in the sense of a stable discrete identity. This is the scheme by which Middle C links the themes of personal identity, Humanity's atrocities, and the potential solace found in Form and Style: Form as in the patterns and structures imposed upon sound in music, and Style by which Gass composes from the Babel of human language some startlingly beautiful passages that clamor to be read aloud, asserting their primacy as the basic unit of the novel as art. "Because music has sounds all its own that nothing else, no else like thing, no motion that the muck of matter makes." At first it's confusing until you realize the whole sentence swirls and sucks toward that word MAKES, its parts drawn to it differently.
The readerly delights of assonance, consonance, alliteration, craftily symmetric sentences or contrapuntal metrics are so rare in novels, as if publishers see such things and forward the manuscript to the closet where they store the poetry department. But Gass is a writer for whom the sentence is the thing, and a sentence without sound is mere information. As if to inform everybody that I am absolutely right about this, Gass told John Madera in an interview:
"I want the oral tradition. You go back to John
Donne’s prose, or any of those writers, you get plenty of that, you
get rhyming, alliteration, you get all kinds of other connections,
all other devices of suggestion, and echoing, and so forth, because
they were talking to hundreds, sometimes a thousand people in
a church. Their sermon had to go out verbally and they had to
use all the mnemonic devices they could, because they wanted to
embed the so-called message. It was the word, it was the 'living
word,' and all that, that they wanted to stress. It was the same
time the opera begins, masques and so forth. They were trying to
figure out how music and its nature, and language and its nature,
could cohabit."
Gass performs an impressive reversal of the assumed hierarchy by which individual sentences accumulate to create the magic of character and plot, while Middle C's plot, people, and settings supply the context and raw material for sentence-level sublimity. "The scrap in the scrap yard seemed scrappier than he remembered: the large piles of metal were now small and ate slowly at one another like couples in a lengthy marriage."
While certain passages wow as quotes out of context, they truly gleam within the whole, their parts taking on stress and tone from what we already know, given rhythm and resonance by a master of rhetoric. "He wanted that Greyhound to drive him away from his past, but his past had assumed the shape and function of the bus."
The results are often even grotesque in brilliance, magnificently inventive tropes set in service to surprisingly beautiful renderings of sometimes even repellent material. This is not to say that Gass neglects character, plot, or setting. All are clearly drawn. This is not a difficult or unclear book and while the chronology is mixed by jumping back and forth between two phases (coming-of-age Joey/Joseph and grown-up Professor Joseph Skizzen), the events and characters provoke no confusion overall; the devil is in the details, where there is much deviltry indeed, but I will get to that later in Weird Theories..
Even though Gass himself in interviews and essays is a little dismissive of the importance of character development and the cause-and-effect schematics of plot, it is untrue that this book neglects either. While issues of identity are put to rigorous tests with the main character's oscillations over time between Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen, that is not the same thing as doing away with character. And while the book is full of discursive asides that loop and undulate like vines around and between scenes of a mediocre life, cramming the interstices with meditations on gardening, music, bibliophilia, identity, culpability, authenticity, more music, and the passage of time, stuff does happen, actions have consequences, and they even rise to a (gasp) climax! In other words, there is definitely a plot.
With the assumption it will bleed into everything else, let's start with character. Joey Skizzen, son of Rudi and Nita Skizzen who fled pre-Nazi Austria by pretending to be Jews, was born during the London blitz and, after Rudi disappeared, ended up an undocumented resident of Ohio with a family of changed names. As Dawn Powell once said,"Everyone is from Ohio," and our hero Joey is a very middling sort of Everyman who's somehow even more C-student middling than your average Everyman. His character has been compared to any number of dark contemplative protagonists, but as Professor Skizzen he reminded me most of Ignatius J. Reilly of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece Confederacy of Dunces: when a cop asks Ignatius if he has a job, he replies "I dust a bit. In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."
Professor Skizzen does not just indict the century, but all of mankind, becoming a hoarder of atrocity accounts and photos for his private archive of pogroms, genocides, massacres, etc. which reminded me of smart women I've known who nurtured fascinations with serial killers, scaring themselves to death with amassed reading material whose collection was, like Joseph's, motivated less by repulsion than appetite, a curiosity about accounts which somehow simultaneously defy belief and confirm dark suspicions. While Joseph's fascination seems to be founded upon an ethic above comprehending all such slaughter, the obsession's comic morbidity mocks such distance while bringing ambiguous gravity to the seemingly sourceless guilt that underlies most of Joseph's decisions. It certainly underlies his obsessive editing of the obsession's own someday final summation:
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
His inability to stop trying to perfect that statement expands the attempt into a scaffold girding the whole book. He worries that sentence like a sore tooth, the mechanics of which will be familiar to any good GoodReadster who clicks on "preview" repeatedly, compulsively, shifting between that clean illusory final public font and the cruddier backstage typeface world of blinking cursor, malleable copy, and html tags.
"Since he couldn't be sure whether the sentence was a war wound or a tapeworm, he didn't know what to do." Pardon my mixt metaphors, but Joseph at first moves the fulcrum of the sentence from word to word, like an actor auditioning different syllables to see how they handle the stress and what that does to the whole. Each choice ("fear," or "concern"? "replaced" or "succeeded"?) spurs associational reveries ranging from the quotidian to the apocalyptic, always inventive, sometimes birthing new verbs: "Unless there is a universal flood and fish school in corner offices; unless there is an atomic wind and an image of our race is burned into the side of a glass cliff" or "Nevertheless what Joseph Skizzen regretted most was that he would die before the decision to end Creation had been made, before the disease of human life had mortaled even earth." School. Mortaled. Luvvit.
Please do not let the word associational scare you away if you happen to have been traumatized by a stream-of-consciousness text when you were a child. This book is not like that. The only challenge lies in the fact that much of it is contemplative--as opposed to dramatic--by which I mean the actions and the words and the thoughts that make up experience (or the plot) aren't served well by conventional narrative parsing:
X thought A while he did B.
"What in god's name are you doing?" shrieked Y.
X thought C.
Why? You know that your inner voices of thought carry on long beyond the limits supported by the above formula. The flimsy prop of "She thought..." strains under the weight of even one paragraph of decent thinking and begs for dismissive pejoratives such as "long-winded" even if the thoughts are rendered as succinctly as possible, because the problem isn't the volume of the thoughts, but the limits of that form. IMHO. Gass never gives us thoughts that his own struts cannot support. He responsibly blends contemplation with dramatization and dialog in such a way that no conventions are unduly strained.
Gass has hinted in interviews that there is another structure scaffolding the book: the twelve tone scale. According to experts, that's the modernist replacement for the traditional tonal music whereby twelve notes are chosen to serve as the successive guiding themes of a piece. I'm not the one to ask further questions on this, as all I know about music I learned listening to Bauhaus while smearing on blunt-nibbed eyeliner during those dark dark days for American literature we now call the Reagan Era. You know, when MFA programs realized there actually was a concrete thing they could teach anyone signed up to their Writer career program? Lose those adjectives! Ditch all adverbs! Is that a subordinating conjunction followed by TWO dependent clauses? Do you want an F? Can you write "angsty" a la Parade Magazine? Great job, Tama, here's the phone number of a powerful agent. Knowing less than zero about music did not lessen my appreciation of this book but it might have retarded my ability to notice the hidden structure Gass hinted about: by which 12 different themes are arranged much in the way of 12-tone music.
I was unable to detect any such overarching structure, but perhaps he agrees with Zadie Smith who at once encouraged and cautioned writers, saying that having a scaffold to structure your novel is fine, but in the end you should have enough faith in your novel to let it stand on its own. Before I realized its number, however, I did notice that one particular chapter was a little different from the others, which (word count permitting) I will discuss below in The Curious Case of Chapter 12.
In a book full of interesting reversals, Gass games the way our parents assign our first identities: Joey Skizzen's given identity is a forgery imposed by his father before his disappearance, thus Joey's birthright is fraudulence itself, bestowed by its absent author in absent authority: he can't be consulted for any grounding facts. Joey grows to set himself apart from others, schoolmates, society, and family. However, this is not done to assert his individuality but in an effort to efface any noticeable trace of himself. Unlike his sister, who easily sheds the cloak of The Other to jump with both feet into cheerful assimilation, Joey internalizes the idea of "keeping your head down" to an absurd degree, creating no mere social distance between himself and others, but attempting an ethical and moral one as well, in quarantine from the general guilt of all Humanity.
In another interesting reversal, Joey's self-imposed meditative isolation does not solidify, distill, intensify, or distinguish his own sense of identity in the way it does in books where too many other people fragment a protagonist's ethos, where only solitude restores solidity. In fact, it is during his most solipsistic phases that his sense of self is most diffuse, his hunger for a grounded identity is most frustrated, and his sense of a central core of his own consciousness is the most elusive; whereas he seems the least unfocused, the more clearly delineated as a person, when he has broken his isolation through a social bond to another person. As he does this with a rarity that strains credibility, he sees his identity split and copy and mutate and divide like Xerox card-trick bacteria. Pardon my nonsense James Wood-style in-apposite mixed metaphor but it is true that Joseph's mutability of identity is most wild and free when not tamed by connection to others.
The first such stabilizing connection is with the arthritic piano instructor Mr. Hirk. Joey is assigned to his house for weekly lessons and while the two bump egos they begrudgingly dig a subterranean conduit of wordless mutual respect and understanding under the guises of rebellious student versus ogre teacher as the roles reinforce one another and thus harden into a protective crust over their own tonal intimacy. This is where Joey first finds some kind of purpose while giving purpose to his purpose-giver. This is where he learns the rudiments of melody, counterpoint, and the lowbrow folk competence that would seem to take him nowhere but down but . It's the first time he really feels anything:
"Now, when Joey left, with a gratitude that exceeded any he had ever felt, he would squeeze Mr. Hirk's upper arm (because he didn't dare put pressure on him anywhere else); Mr. Hirk would sigh hoarsely and watch Joey bike, it must have seemed nimbly, away, leaving Mr. Hirk alone in his room with his body's disability and his machine's recalcitrance until another Saturday came along. Joey always cranked the Victrola one more time before he left, so a few sides could be managed if Mr. Hirk could spindle a record--hard to do with his crabbed hands growing crabbier by the week."
I found this far more touching than any common novel's tactics working at the level of wounded children or endangered maidens, and not only because here, as elsewhere, as everywhere, the magic occurs at the sentence level and it shows the difference between entrancing and manipulative:
"Although Mr. Hirk formed his sentences with reasonable clarity, his words emerged as if they too were rheumatic, bent a bit, their heads turned toward the ground, their ears reluctant to arrive," while realizing the arc of Hirk's back traces a labored curve of unappreciated effort and pained solemnity toward the ultimate distant end of that geometrically inevitab--
But the end can't dominate all that precedes it, at least until intervening meanings exhaust themselves, and if anyone can do that,
Oh crap, sorry. Not only did the above image not throw up the mouse-rollover text "GAS CAN!" (HAW! Get it?) but I am also out of room. My review was too long. I will post the remainder in "creative writing" https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/.... I do hope that if you hate my whole review you'll come back HERE and say so. I apologize. I'm clearly not wired for Twitter.
"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 opens with "Miriam, whom Joey Skizzen thought of as his mother...." Well, that's an odd way to put it, isn't it? He thought of her as his mother? More on this later in the Weird Theories section.
Although it attempts to disguise itself as an utterly Middle C kind of book, this might become one of those novels that will have its fans accused of only pretending to like it to seem smart; you know: those literary snobs who'd go around accusing detractors of being dumb. It takes very little perusing of modern classics on GoodReads to find several reviews that would have you believe that less "pretentious" readers are routinely attacked and belittled for not liking (insert "difficult" author here) . These claims are never illustrated with any specifics, leading one to conclude that they are not based on actual experiences of being called stupid, but more on the experience of being made to feel that way by a book that took some work.
Naturally it's always unsatisfying to exercise anger toward an inanimate object such as a book, and if the author is distant or dead, whom can you accuse but its readers? Ya gotta blame somebody, right? Someone has to be guilty. Maybe even everyone. Well, everyone else. This novel is about that everyone-else feeling regarding Humanity's worst behavior. It sounds and resounds the theme of human guilt and the untenable paradox in which we cannot deny that we are part of that great whole called Humanity, that Humanity has committed innumberable atrocities, and the feeling that this makes Humanity "other" to our horrified selves who rightly reject such, yet, by doing do, recoil from the concept of common Humanity, surely a prerequisite for comitting inhumane acts. To remain untainted, our protagonist Joey Skizzen must lie himself into detached purity and breach multiple ethical mores, especially those regarding authenticity, authority, and honesty, comically dramatizing this paradox.
"What he really wanted the world to see, were his lifelong ruse to be discovered, was the equivalent of Moses's tablets before they got inscribed: a person pure, clean, undefiled, unspoiled by the terrible history of the earth. So he could rightly say to his accusers (and accused he would be): When you were destroying yourselves and your cities, I was not there; when you were debasing your noble principles, I was not there; when you were fattening on lies like pigs at a trough, I was not there; when you were squeezing life from all life like water from a sponge, I was not there. So see me now! Untarnished as a tea service!"
But it still required a dedicated ruse and innumberable lies. [If I had more room I'd explore further the idea of Moses's "pure" tablets before being incribed by assumptions of human guilt. Even as a kid I thought "What, so before that, murder was ok?" initiating a long slide into disbelief.]
But this paradox does not only problematize the universalized concept of Humanity in relation to the Self; conversely it also problematizes our most cherished myth, Selfhood, in the sense of a stable discrete identity. This is the scheme by which Middle C links the themes of personal identity, Humanity's atrocities, and the potential solace found in Form and Style: Form as in the patterns and structures imposed upon sound in music, and Style by which Gass composes from the Babel of human language some startlingly beautiful passages that clamor to be read aloud, asserting their primacy as the basic unit of the novel as art. "Because music has sounds all its own that nothing else, no else like thing, no motion that the muck of matter makes." At first it's confusing until you realize the whole sentence swirls and sucks toward that word MAKES, its parts drawn to it differently.
The readerly delights of assonance, consonance, alliteration, craftily symmetric sentences or contrapuntal metrics are so rare in novels, as if publishers see such things and forward the manuscript to the closet where they store the poetry department. But Gass is a writer for whom the sentence is the thing, and a sentence without sound is mere information. As if to inform everybody that I am absolutely right about this, Gass told John Madera in an interview:
"I want the oral tradition. You go back to John
Donne’s prose, or any of those writers, you get plenty of that, you
get rhyming, alliteration, you get all kinds of other connections,
all other devices of suggestion, and echoing, and so forth, because
they were talking to hundreds, sometimes a thousand people in
a church. Their sermon had to go out verbally and they had to
use all the mnemonic devices they could, because they wanted to
embed the so-called message. It was the word, it was the 'living
word,' and all that, that they wanted to stress. It was the same
time the opera begins, masques and so forth. They were trying to
figure out how music and its nature, and language and its nature,
could cohabit."
Gass performs an impressive reversal of the assumed hierarchy by which individual sentences accumulate to create the magic of character and plot, while Middle C's plot, people, and settings supply the context and raw material for sentence-level sublimity. "The scrap in the scrap yard seemed scrappier than he remembered: the large piles of metal were now small and ate slowly at one another like couples in a lengthy marriage."
While certain passages wow as quotes out of context, they truly gleam within the whole, their parts taking on stress and tone from what we already know, given rhythm and resonance by a master of rhetoric. "He wanted that Greyhound to drive him away from his past, but his past had assumed the shape and function of the bus."
The results are often even grotesque in brilliance, magnificently inventive tropes set in service to surprisingly beautiful renderings of sometimes even repellent material. This is not to say that Gass neglects character, plot, or setting. All are clearly drawn. This is not a difficult or unclear book and while the chronology is mixed by jumping back and forth between two phases (coming-of-age Joey/Joseph and grown-up Professor Joseph Skizzen), the events and characters provoke no confusion overall; the devil is in the details, where there is much deviltry indeed, but I will get to that later in Weird Theories..
Even though Gass himself in interviews and essays is a little dismissive of the importance of character development and the cause-and-effect schematics of plot, it is untrue that this book neglects either. While issues of identity are put to rigorous tests with the main character's oscillations over time between Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen, that is not the same thing as doing away with character. And while the book is full of discursive asides that loop and undulate like vines around and between scenes of a mediocre life, cramming the interstices with meditations on gardening, music, bibliophilia, identity, culpability, authenticity, more music, and the passage of time, stuff does happen, actions have consequences, and they even rise to a (gasp) climax! In other words, there is definitely a plot.
With the assumption it will bleed into everything else, let's start with character. Joey Skizzen, son of Rudi and Nita Skizzen who fled pre-Nazi Austria by pretending to be Jews, was born during the London blitz and, after Rudi disappeared, ended up an undocumented resident of Ohio with a family of changed names. As Dawn Powell once said,"Everyone is from Ohio," and our hero Joey is a very middling sort of Everyman who's somehow even more C-student middling than your average Everyman. His character has been compared to any number of dark contemplative protagonists, but as Professor Skizzen he reminded me most of Ignatius J. Reilly of John Kennedy Toole's comic masterpiece Confederacy of Dunces: when a cop asks Ignatius if he has a job, he replies "I dust a bit. In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip."
Professor Skizzen does not just indict the century, but all of mankind, becoming a hoarder of atrocity accounts and photos for his private archive of pogroms, genocides, massacres, etc. which reminded me of smart women I've known who nurtured fascinations with serial killers, scaring themselves to death with amassed reading material whose collection was, like Joseph's, motivated less by repulsion than appetite, a curiosity about accounts which somehow simultaneously defy belief and confirm dark suspicions. While Joseph's fascination seems to be founded upon an ethic above comprehending all such slaughter, the obsession's comic morbidity mocks such distance while bringing ambiguous gravity to the seemingly sourceless guilt that underlies most of Joseph's decisions. It certainly underlies his obsessive editing of the obsession's own someday final summation:
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
His inability to stop trying to perfect that statement expands the attempt into a scaffold girding the whole book. He worries that sentence like a sore tooth, the mechanics of which will be familiar to any good GoodReadster who clicks on "preview" repeatedly, compulsively, shifting between that clean illusory final public font and the cruddier backstage typeface world of blinking cursor, malleable copy, and html tags.
"Since he couldn't be sure whether the sentence was a war wound or a tapeworm, he didn't know what to do." Pardon my mixt metaphors, but Joseph at first moves the fulcrum of the sentence from word to word, like an actor auditioning different syllables to see how they handle the stress and what that does to the whole. Each choice ("fear," or "concern"? "replaced" or "succeeded"?) spurs associational reveries ranging from the quotidian to the apocalyptic, always inventive, sometimes birthing new verbs: "Unless there is a universal flood and fish school in corner offices; unless there is an atomic wind and an image of our race is burned into the side of a glass cliff" or "Nevertheless what Joseph Skizzen regretted most was that he would die before the decision to end Creation had been made, before the disease of human life had mortaled even earth." School. Mortaled. Luvvit.
Please do not let the word associational scare you away if you happen to have been traumatized by a stream-of-consciousness text when you were a child. This book is not like that. The only challenge lies in the fact that much of it is contemplative--as opposed to dramatic--by which I mean the actions and the words and the thoughts that make up experience (or the plot) aren't served well by conventional narrative parsing:
X thought A while he did B.
"What in god's name are you doing?" shrieked Y.
X thought C.
Why? You know that your inner voices of thought carry on long beyond the limits supported by the above formula. The flimsy prop of "She thought..." strains under the weight of even one paragraph of decent thinking and begs for dismissive pejoratives such as "long-winded" even if the thoughts are rendered as succinctly as possible, because the problem isn't the volume of the thoughts, but the limits of that form. IMHO. Gass never gives us thoughts that his own struts cannot support. He responsibly blends contemplation with dramatization and dialog in such a way that no conventions are unduly strained.
Gass has hinted in interviews that there is another structure scaffolding the book: the twelve tone scale. According to experts, that's the modernist replacement for the traditional tonal music whereby twelve notes are chosen to serve as the successive guiding themes of a piece. I'm not the one to ask further questions on this, as all I know about music I learned listening to Bauhaus while smearing on blunt-nibbed eyeliner during those dark dark days for American literature we now call the Reagan Era. You know, when MFA programs realized there actually was a concrete thing they could teach anyone signed up to their Writer career program? Lose those adjectives! Ditch all adverbs! Is that a subordinating conjunction followed by TWO dependent clauses? Do you want an F? Can you write "angsty" a la Parade Magazine? Great job, Tama, here's the phone number of a powerful agent. Knowing less than zero about music did not lessen my appreciation of this book but it might have retarded my ability to notice the hidden structure Gass hinted about: by which 12 different themes are arranged much in the way of 12-tone music.
I was unable to detect any such overarching structure, but perhaps he agrees with Zadie Smith who at once encouraged and cautioned writers, saying that having a scaffold to structure your novel is fine, but in the end you should have enough faith in your novel to let it stand on its own. Before I realized its number, however, I did notice that one particular chapter was a little different from the others, which (word count permitting) I will discuss below in The Curious Case of Chapter 12.
In a book full of interesting reversals, Gass games the way our parents assign our first identities: Joey Skizzen's given identity is a forgery imposed by his father before his disappearance, thus Joey's birthright is fraudulence itself, bestowed by its absent author in absent authority: he can't be consulted for any grounding facts. Joey grows to set himself apart from others, schoolmates, society, and family. However, this is not done to assert his individuality but in an effort to efface any noticeable trace of himself. Unlike his sister, who easily sheds the cloak of The Other to jump with both feet into cheerful assimilation, Joey internalizes the idea of "keeping your head down" to an absurd degree, creating no mere social distance between himself and others, but attempting an ethical and moral one as well, in quarantine from the general guilt of all Humanity.
In another interesting reversal, Joey's self-imposed meditative isolation does not solidify, distill, intensify, or distinguish his own sense of identity in the way it does in books where too many other people fragment a protagonist's ethos, where only solitude restores solidity. In fact, it is during his most solipsistic phases that his sense of self is most diffuse, his hunger for a grounded identity is most frustrated, and his sense of a central core of his own consciousness is the most elusive; whereas he seems the least unfocused, the more clearly delineated as a person, when he has broken his isolation through a social bond to another person. As he does this with a rarity that strains credibility, he sees his identity split and copy and mutate and divide like Xerox card-trick bacteria. Pardon my nonsense James Wood-style in-apposite mixed metaphor but it is true that Joseph's mutability of identity is most wild and free when not tamed by connection to others.
The first such stabilizing connection is with the arthritic piano instructor Mr. Hirk. Joey is assigned to his house for weekly lessons and while the two bump egos they begrudgingly dig a subterranean conduit of wordless mutual respect and understanding under the guises of rebellious student versus ogre teacher as the roles reinforce one another and thus harden into a protective crust over their own tonal intimacy. This is where Joey first finds some kind of purpose while giving purpose to his purpose-giver. This is where he learns the rudiments of melody, counterpoint, and the lowbrow folk competence that would seem to take him nowhere but down but . It's the first time he really feels anything:
"Now, when Joey left, with a gratitude that exceeded any he had ever felt, he would squeeze Mr. Hirk's upper arm (because he didn't dare put pressure on him anywhere else); Mr. Hirk would sigh hoarsely and watch Joey bike, it must have seemed nimbly, away, leaving Mr. Hirk alone in his room with his body's disability and his machine's recalcitrance until another Saturday came along. Joey always cranked the Victrola one more time before he left, so a few sides could be managed if Mr. Hirk could spindle a record--hard to do with his crabbed hands growing crabbier by the week."
I found this far more touching than any common novel's tactics working at the level of wounded children or endangered maidens, and not only because here, as elsewhere, as everywhere, the magic occurs at the sentence level and it shows the difference between entrancing and manipulative:
"Although Mr. Hirk formed his sentences with reasonable clarity, his words emerged as if they too were rheumatic, bent a bit, their heads turned toward the ground, their ears reluctant to arrive," while realizing the arc of Hirk's back traces a labored curve of unappreciated effort and pained solemnity toward the ultimate distant end of that geometrically inevitab--
But the end can't dominate all that precedes it, at least until intervening meanings exhaust themselves, and if anyone can do that,
Oh crap, sorry. Not only did the above image not throw up the mouse-rollover text "GAS CAN!" (HAW! Get it?) but I am also out of room. My review was too long. I will post the remainder in "creative writing" https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/.... I do hope that if you hate my whole review you'll come back HERE and say so. I apologize. I'm clearly not wired for Twitter.
June 29, 2013
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 language. What a master in meta-fiction is Gass.
The lines of this book breathe with the spirit of a prodigious concert pianist who has learned to play by ear but is so talented that he can convince his bumpkin audience of the worthiness of his humbly trained, musical gifts: it's as if he were playing by reading the music of fake books for beginners and embellishing and possibly lumbering through the technically tough spots. But it's still his music ringing in his own ears and it possesses mystical qualities, which mend him and send his flagging, defeated spirits to soaring.
He is playing out his life in the key of C, which is well worth noting because it dwells in the perfect center of the existential keyboard. This is a novel about quotidian life and how to improvise on the jazz standard to make good music your own.
The protagonist lives in the Midwest in the center of the nation which snobby East Coasters deem flyover states. He plays not in the existential key of B -- neither to B minor, nor to B major -- but in the humblest of musical keys.
Consider that the nom de plume of Middle C is B-Sharp.
One wonders if new technology could help us discover more precise new digital tones such as B-Sharp+ and E-Sharp+ (aka F+) to extend the basic alphabet of music to create new tonal notes and invent new sub-tonal, but not off-key tones, for the keyboard and to expand the fundamental audio colors, dialects and accents of music. (Please don't email me that this can't be done.)
Possibly the most prolific note in the simplest of all keys of the scale -- Gass plays in the key of "see." This note is distinguished on the piano or organ keyboard by its juxtaposition next to the most visionary key -- C-Sharp. The C and C-Sharp comprise the graphic point-counterpoint among ebullient chords major and sullen chords minor on the book's Tiffany-green cover.
Gass taught at colleges and universities in the Midwest in St. Louis and Wooster. In a small Midwestern town the scope of life seems to diminish and the petty becomes magnified to the point at which life becomes a series of innocuous, random events accented on a scale of many octaves high and low by grand human gestures of kindness, love and the bitterness of intrusive cruelty and even epic instances of inhumanity. Based upon Joey-Joseph-TheProfessor's experiences in Austria in flight from the Nazis to London during the Great War then to America, he appears to develop multiple personalities where he seeks spiritual and intellectual refuge over the course of his life.
Joey is the child of a father who has abandoned him, probably a reference to Gass's existential inferences to man as a waif created by a God who has forsaken his creature to fend for himself in a brutal universe beyond the reach and grasp of all human understanding. Joseph is the man in midlife establishing a humble independence with a fake driver's license by driving a halting, fitful, broken-down, abandoned junk car, aptly named The Bumbler -- Gass has perfect pitch, once again. As the professor he has fooled them am all with his pretense and dilettante wit at the head of the class as he yearns for but never really believes in his own authentic existence.
In the key of C of life in the middle of the keyboard in the Midwest leading a middling life as an intellectual middleman, what is this lower-middle class soul to do with his few talents? He fakes what he considers himself to be almost like some antithesis of Holden Caulfield. Although others may deem him exceptional, he can barely stand to dwell socially among them in their own small, shared world because his mind elevates him and most are beneath him, and even with all of the mediocrity and small-town hick nature of his town, he is still a giant among men because he lives in the land of the Lilliputians.
So what does he do when asked to perform in concert for the President of the college with a diva? Hum a few bars and he fakes it. More than passably. And who can blame him?
When his gifts are higher, then he flaunts them as the professor. When he is a lesser luminary, as Joey, he fakes it.
Thank God for the purity of the music because amid all of this small town meaninglessness, absurdity, pettiness and mediocrity, there is still the beauty and grandeur of the music. And like art and writing, music brings to life a sensibility which is rich and true and meaningful. He dwells in this symphonic world because he can do no other amid the overwhelming cacophony of inhumanity -- they should make a museum about it and he should be the curator.
Of course, there's the obvious symbolism of the garden in the Heartland of America among the fertile fields of corn, puny green hills and spreading dairy farms where Gass sets his narrative. Probably because that's where Gass has found himself, improbably, as a professor but seeking to make an issue of the garden because the Earth Mother, Miriam, is an avid gardener, a true, nurturing, Mother Nature figure, and the novel concludes with a reference to Voltaire which is meant to end the both subtle and sometimes graphic cacophony of Gass with a grace note.
This garden stands in stark contrast to his secret desire to build an Inhumanity Museum defining throughout history the atrocious treatment of powerful human beings to the powerless in the key of B. Have you read "Cloud Atlas"? He just can't get over how badly humanity abuses itself leaving us collectively abandoned in a world of infinite, inescapable sin without redemption, both petty and atrocious, East of Eden -- alas, as everyone knows, such is the human condition.
The writing of Gass is exquisite in so many places and this brief line jumped out about a pin taken to a stuffed doll, which then "bled red thread."
If it is impossible to escape the quotidian quality of existence, in "Middle C" Gass applies a calming balm as if to say that it's okay if life's everydayness wastes lost and unrecoverable time to kidnap you from authentic existence because the experience of quotidian life is still a fact of life and it, too, must be lived because it is ultimately inescapable. Despite the quotidian nature of life, magnificent symphonies still reside there amid the inhumanity, as well, and many of them -- even those in the key of C -- are well played even by those with a tin ear and many of them are simply to die for which makes everyday life all the more worth living.
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 language. What a master in meta-fiction is Gass.
The lines of this book breathe with the spirit of a prodigious concert pianist who has learned to play by ear but is so talented that he can convince his bumpkin audience of the worthiness of his humbly trained, musical gifts: it's as if he were playing by reading the music of fake books for beginners and embellishing and possibly lumbering through the technically tough spots. But it's still his music ringing in his own ears and it possesses mystical qualities, which mend him and send his flagging, defeated spirits to soaring.
He is playing out his life in the key of C, which is well worth noting because it dwells in the perfect center of the existential keyboard. This is a novel about quotidian life and how to improvise on the jazz standard to make good music your own.
The protagonist lives in the Midwest in the center of the nation which snobby East Coasters deem flyover states. He plays not in the existential key of B -- neither to B minor, nor to B major -- but in the humblest of musical keys.
Consider that the nom de plume of Middle C is B-Sharp.
One wonders if new technology could help us discover more precise new digital tones such as B-Sharp+ and E-Sharp+ (aka F+) to extend the basic alphabet of music to create new tonal notes and invent new sub-tonal, but not off-key tones, for the keyboard and to expand the fundamental audio colors, dialects and accents of music. (Please don't email me that this can't be done.)
Possibly the most prolific note in the simplest of all keys of the scale -- Gass plays in the key of "see." This note is distinguished on the piano or organ keyboard by its juxtaposition next to the most visionary key -- C-Sharp. The C and C-Sharp comprise the graphic point-counterpoint among ebullient chords major and sullen chords minor on the book's Tiffany-green cover.
Gass taught at colleges and universities in the Midwest in St. Louis and Wooster. In a small Midwestern town the scope of life seems to diminish and the petty becomes magnified to the point at which life becomes a series of innocuous, random events accented on a scale of many octaves high and low by grand human gestures of kindness, love and the bitterness of intrusive cruelty and even epic instances of inhumanity. Based upon Joey-Joseph-TheProfessor's experiences in Austria in flight from the Nazis to London during the Great War then to America, he appears to develop multiple personalities where he seeks spiritual and intellectual refuge over the course of his life.
Joey is the child of a father who has abandoned him, probably a reference to Gass's existential inferences to man as a waif created by a God who has forsaken his creature to fend for himself in a brutal universe beyond the reach and grasp of all human understanding. Joseph is the man in midlife establishing a humble independence with a fake driver's license by driving a halting, fitful, broken-down, abandoned junk car, aptly named The Bumbler -- Gass has perfect pitch, once again. As the professor he has fooled them am all with his pretense and dilettante wit at the head of the class as he yearns for but never really believes in his own authentic existence.
In the key of C of life in the middle of the keyboard in the Midwest leading a middling life as an intellectual middleman, what is this lower-middle class soul to do with his few talents? He fakes what he considers himself to be almost like some antithesis of Holden Caulfield. Although others may deem him exceptional, he can barely stand to dwell socially among them in their own small, shared world because his mind elevates him and most are beneath him, and even with all of the mediocrity and small-town hick nature of his town, he is still a giant among men because he lives in the land of the Lilliputians.
So what does he do when asked to perform in concert for the President of the college with a diva? Hum a few bars and he fakes it. More than passably. And who can blame him?
When his gifts are higher, then he flaunts them as the professor. When he is a lesser luminary, as Joey, he fakes it.
Thank God for the purity of the music because amid all of this small town meaninglessness, absurdity, pettiness and mediocrity, there is still the beauty and grandeur of the music. And like art and writing, music brings to life a sensibility which is rich and true and meaningful. He dwells in this symphonic world because he can do no other amid the overwhelming cacophony of inhumanity -- they should make a museum about it and he should be the curator.
Of course, there's the obvious symbolism of the garden in the Heartland of America among the fertile fields of corn, puny green hills and spreading dairy farms where Gass sets his narrative. Probably because that's where Gass has found himself, improbably, as a professor but seeking to make an issue of the garden because the Earth Mother, Miriam, is an avid gardener, a true, nurturing, Mother Nature figure, and the novel concludes with a reference to Voltaire which is meant to end the both subtle and sometimes graphic cacophony of Gass with a grace note.
This garden stands in stark contrast to his secret desire to build an Inhumanity Museum defining throughout history the atrocious treatment of powerful human beings to the powerless in the key of B. Have you read "Cloud Atlas"? He just can't get over how badly humanity abuses itself leaving us collectively abandoned in a world of infinite, inescapable sin without redemption, both petty and atrocious, East of Eden -- alas, as everyone knows, such is the human condition.
The writing of Gass is exquisite in so many places and this brief line jumped out about a pin taken to a stuffed doll, which then "bled red thread."
If it is impossible to escape the quotidian quality of existence, in "Middle C" Gass applies a calming balm as if to say that it's okay if life's everydayness wastes lost and unrecoverable time to kidnap you from authentic existence because the experience of quotidian life is still a fact of life and it, too, must be lived because it is ultimately inescapable. Despite the quotidian nature of life, magnificent symphonies still reside there amid the inhumanity, as well, and many of them -- even those in the key of C -- are well played even by those with a tin ear and many of them are simply to die for which makes everyday life all the more worth living.
July 13, 2014
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 amongst a cast of carefully coiffed couples.
In this novel, Gass takes on one of the major crises of the war, one that sometimes goes underwritten in favor of the perfectly understandable urge to deal with the devastating effects of all the death and carnage and trauma that took place. One of the overlooked traumas, perhaps even one that read to most people as a triumph, ultimately, was the crisis of Displaced People. As Tony Judt notes:
"Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43. With the retreat of the Axis armies, the process was reversed. Newly resettled Germans joined millions of established German communities throughout eastern Europe in headlong flight from the Red Army. Those who made it safely to Germany were joined there by a pulsating throng of other displaced persons.
... What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer... At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one or two major exceptions, boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
So, in the end, ironically, the Allies helped Hitler get part of what he wanted. The countries of Europe were more ethnically homogenous and politically cohesive than they had been before the war. Ancient diasporas were destroyed. People were tossed into categories, even those people who were officially 'stateless' after having their homelands dissipated or absorbed, and, at times, forced to go somewhere and become someone they had no interest in being. A major category here were people from the future Soviet bloc countries who had a very real fear of persecution by the Red Army, simply for knowing what it was like to live in the West, and, until the Cold War heated up, were sent back kicking and screaming, whether they liked it or not.
Gass' main character did not endure one of these directly traumatic instances of forced identity. His was delivered to him indirectly, by a father who fled in quite another direction. His father was the one who made sure that that happened. An Austrian before the war started who saw which way the wind was blowing, he took the agency that still remained to him at that point and firmly chose that he would not have the forced identity of a Nazi thrust upon him. However, there are caveats to that. The first is that he suddenly became a man of many names (Rudi Skizzen, Yankel Fixel, Raymond Scofield), many nationalities and many religions, depending on the moment involved. He took on a Jewish identity at first, clearly preferring the role of the victim to the ruling butchers. But as he soon found out, having succeeded, under his victim's disguise, getting out of the country, this would not be the last time he would have to change the essentials of who and what he was (at least according to that time period- name, nationality, religion) in order to receive help or get by.
The second caveat is that he didn't only make this choice for himself. He made it for his family, who had to live with the consequences of it.
This novel is the story of one of his children, who was born when his father was already on his third name, trying to pick up his father's legacy and make a living for himself with the tools he's been handed. He struggles to form an identity for himself for, as near as I can tell, over fifty years. He's a child who is already born knowing he has a dual identity. Over the course of his life, it becomes clear that his major life's work, the legacy he will leave behind, is to leave no legacy at all- to successfully "pass" as it were, among others, as someone who has lived one life, as one person, honorably. And how do you do that? Aye, there's the rub.
The major answer seems to be that you make many many sacrifices. Joey, as a boy, is quite fond of music. He has an aging piano teacher whose fingers prevent him from playing as he once did, but who still has enough passion and drive to want to infuse it, to see it live on in a student. It is a promising relationship, one that seems right out of central casting for a coming-of-age movie. That is, until Joey's mother brings it to an involuntary close. Joey needs to get a job quickly thereafter.
Nonetheless, music seems to be the one genuine thing about him. It's the one thing that he makes a part of himself, that remains consistent across his identities over the years, across the towns and places he's been. It is sometimes done dishonestly, almost always incompletely, most certainly pitched both to the tune of his own self-indulgence, along with an eye to what might help him get on. But in music, there's something genuine about him that we don't see anywhere else. His identities don't seem to allow for it. Some of the most beautiful passages in this work come from Joey's love for and engagement with music:
"Caruso's sound-sounds- hollow, odd, remote-that created a past from which ghosts could not only speak to admonish and astound, they could sing again almost as they once sang, sang as singing would never be heard sung again, songs and a singing from somewhere outside the earth where not an outstretched arm, not a single finger, could reach or beckon, request or threaten or connive."
"When Monteverdi wished to say "joyful is my heart" he did so in the major third; when Handel refers to life's sweetest harmonies, he does so in the major third; what is central to the Ode to Joy but the major third? In La Traviata, when they all lift their glasses and cry "Drink!" "Libiamo!" they do so to the major third, and what does Wagner use, at the opening of The Ring, to describe the sensuously amoral state of nature? He employs the major third; then just listen to that paean of praise in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms or the finale of Shostakovich's Fifth, and you will hear again the major third.
And the spider heard it, suspended there between floor and ceiling, felt it in the thin silver thread he hung from vibrated in sympathy with Chopin, with the etude's instructional thirds. Joey- look at the green-gray light in this room, at this secondhand light, the pallor of death... and what do you hear in my voice? You hear the minor sixth- the sixths that the spider fled from, the gold ring in Rhinegold- the source of so much contention- Leonora's bitter tears in Fidelio, sorrowful Don Quixote, yes, sixths serve anguish, longing, despair, so tell me why should the spider stay when the line he clings to trembles like a tear? Only we wallow in bitterness only we choose gray-green lives and devote ourselves to worlds, like the shadow-lean leaves of those ghost plans littering the floor- leaves, worlds- which do not exist, the traces of a light which is no longer there."
But all this passion is mitigated and hidden. Joey, someone who enjoys improvisation, fun, figuring things out on his own and pushing on through, is not able to make use of his talents, because his identity demands that he take on music that will never thrill his heart- only because he needs to survive.
Another aspect of this is that, because he is so busy trying to act like a person, within the bounds that he feels comfortable with, he is unable to handle the moments when you actually should be a person, for real. Joey/Joseph has a bad and years-drawn-out negative reaction to his sister getting married and, especially, having a baby. In language that at first read as incestuous, Joseph describes his bitterness that Debbie didn't stay in her short cheerleader's skirt forever. But ultimately, I think the language was much more about resentment- that Debbie had cast off all the burdens of the past. That she had melted into a new family, with seemingly no regrets and no difficulty, absorbed completely into a new way of life. She did it in a way that was not open to him, and therefore, she didn't have to play a role anymore. He was angry at her for being a whole person. Even more so because she seemingly took his last fellow sufferer, his mother, with her. His mother who had, seemingly like him, developed a passion to bury herself in and a role to satisfy the neighborhood, suddenly seemed to have feelings that were not appropriate to a lady who should be hiding her shame just as he was, who should be on the look out through her lilies and roses for trouble coming to meet them. His mother, with this news of his sister, heals and seems to be recovering something of that old self she's left behind- something that connects, for her, something that she can truly be a part of and pass on. Joey still doesn't feel that option for himself, he lives in such fear. He is also, in his heart, still the child who sat at his mother's feet absorbed by tales of Austria, wondering why they ever left:
"She painted cockcrow and sunset on a postcard and mailed it to them in their imaginations. She made them hear fresh milk spilling int he pail. Woodpiles grew orderly and large while they listened. Flowers crowded the mountain trails and deer posed in glades cut by streams whose serene demeanor was periodically shattered by leaps of trout that only lacked for lemon."
It is no accident that Austria always forms such a large part of his identity. It is an ideal that he creates for himself, largely out of homage to his mother's imagination.
His reaction to Marjorie's (admittedly quite opportunistic and power-imbalanced) advances towards him, after a period of what some would describe as extended friendship and flirting, are similar.
This discussion of identity, however, spends less of its time showing what it looks like in Joey's actions, and a lot more time showing what it feels like to think through it and process through life with at least two different men inside your head, if not more. Some of its power is in Gass' concern with prose that creates the mood of anxiety that he desires. I've always believed in the incantory power of lists, and so does Gass' main character. It's lists on top of lists, sometimes building into a rage, sometimes spiraling out of control. He renders the mind of someone constantly caught in a loop rather well- how it might be packed with comforting melodies, repetitive, distracting, small concerns (the sentence, that bloody sentence) or how well concealed it might be behind a great deal of smoke, mirrors and bluster meant to distract you from seeing that there even is a curtain, never mind the man behind it. It's quite skillful, and worth the price of admission.
All the above praise is sincere. However. And this is quite a however. The book starts like magic, with passages that trill along like the best scales. It has passion, and drive, and it knows where its going, and its characters are caught in a complex web that we slowly watch them live with, bury, or modify, as necessary. All of Joey's early journey with music is a real joy to experience. It brought back some of my own early experiences with music, even. The end isn't so bad- there's some of the spark of the beginning revealing itself again. But the middle of this book is really just far, far too long. It depicts nothing but a miserable black hole of a person exhibiting what a big black hole he is, and just how miserable he can possibly make it for himself and everyone around him. At some moments this seems as though it is mostly in the service of providing the sort of back-and-forth flashback structure that he's set up between Joey and Joseph, and we need a lot of time to show Joey's progress to Joseph. However, I got the point of Joseph-the-middle-section after about his first chapter, and every other chapter in the middle sort of made me want to tear out my own hair. The point was heavy-handed to begin with- I don't think we needed that much time with it. It made the book come off as increasingly pompous and distancing. I think that the structure could have been sacrificed in favor of spending a lot more time with Joey, who was, frankly, much more interesting, nuanced, and compelling to be around. Sure, that's part of the point. But that meant that I missed out on a lot of what I wanted to see.
In the rush to the conclusion, I never felt like we never really satisfactorily saw how Joey became Joseph. We just sort of jumped from one youthful crisis to his final job and his final position and his final persona making. Was It didn't feel genuine to me. If we are going to reach the miserable little man we spent close on a hundred pages with in the middle, then I want a whole lot more time showing me how he got there. I know what he's about once he gets there. You can leave that part out. It would have been much more effective in a short chapter at the beginning and end of the section- maybe a short echo in the middle to remind us where we're going. But no more. It almost made me too disgusted with to continue. So readers, be warned about that middle. It was a bit of a trudge.
In the style of authors of skill and thought, he delivered probably the best and most fitting indictment of his book right within its text:
"In this way, though, he discovered there was something unsafe about books. You began one; you were suitably entranced; the style, the subject, the arrangement… each seemed so satisfying that the eye could scarcely wait for the page to turn. It was, he remembered, how his fingers felt when they were playing well and music was majestically flowing from them as if by magic. But then the Paderewski passage would occur, a gesture that stooped, a boast the offended, an idea that was as grotesque as a two-headed calf, a sentiment that steamed like rotting flesh, like a childhood ramble in the ruins that suddenly betrayed you with a sight not meant for living eyes. You'd turn like the globe did in a day. You'd learn that men were murdered over the meaning of a wafer."
That's pretty much what happened to me for the middle third of this book. (Ironically, given Gass' stated sentiments about that chord above.) And yet, in terms of crafting his sentences, continually weaving his characters into who he wanted them to be, discussing identity, Gass still does it with enough skill that I can't really deny him a fourth star. It does not reflect my enjoyment level, and I still felt that there could have been structural improvements, but the quality of the writing is such that he won me back over in the end.
I would recommend it, if you're into this sort of thing. But just be prepared to commit and push on through if you feel discouraged. I got enough of a payoff in the end to satisfy me. It was worth it.
In this novel, Gass takes on one of the major crises of the war, one that sometimes goes underwritten in favor of the perfectly understandable urge to deal with the devastating effects of all the death and carnage and trauma that took place. One of the overlooked traumas, perhaps even one that read to most people as a triumph, ultimately, was the crisis of Displaced People. As Tony Judt notes:
"Between them Stalin and Hitler uprooted, transplanted, expelled, deported and dispersed some 30 million people in the years 1939-43. With the retreat of the Axis armies, the process was reversed. Newly resettled Germans joined millions of established German communities throughout eastern Europe in headlong flight from the Red Army. Those who made it safely to Germany were joined there by a pulsating throng of other displaced persons.
... What was taking place in 1945, and had been underway for at least a year, was thus an unprecedented exercise in ethnic cleansing and population transfer... At the conclusion of the First World War it was borders that were invented and adjusted, while people were on the whole left in place. After 1945 what happened was rather the opposite: with one or two major exceptions, boundaries stayed broadly intact and people were moved instead.
So, in the end, ironically, the Allies helped Hitler get part of what he wanted. The countries of Europe were more ethnically homogenous and politically cohesive than they had been before the war. Ancient diasporas were destroyed. People were tossed into categories, even those people who were officially 'stateless' after having their homelands dissipated or absorbed, and, at times, forced to go somewhere and become someone they had no interest in being. A major category here were people from the future Soviet bloc countries who had a very real fear of persecution by the Red Army, simply for knowing what it was like to live in the West, and, until the Cold War heated up, were sent back kicking and screaming, whether they liked it or not.
Gass' main character did not endure one of these directly traumatic instances of forced identity. His was delivered to him indirectly, by a father who fled in quite another direction. His father was the one who made sure that that happened. An Austrian before the war started who saw which way the wind was blowing, he took the agency that still remained to him at that point and firmly chose that he would not have the forced identity of a Nazi thrust upon him. However, there are caveats to that. The first is that he suddenly became a man of many names (Rudi Skizzen, Yankel Fixel, Raymond Scofield), many nationalities and many religions, depending on the moment involved. He took on a Jewish identity at first, clearly preferring the role of the victim to the ruling butchers. But as he soon found out, having succeeded, under his victim's disguise, getting out of the country, this would not be the last time he would have to change the essentials of who and what he was (at least according to that time period- name, nationality, religion) in order to receive help or get by.
The second caveat is that he didn't only make this choice for himself. He made it for his family, who had to live with the consequences of it.
This novel is the story of one of his children, who was born when his father was already on his third name, trying to pick up his father's legacy and make a living for himself with the tools he's been handed. He struggles to form an identity for himself for, as near as I can tell, over fifty years. He's a child who is already born knowing he has a dual identity. Over the course of his life, it becomes clear that his major life's work, the legacy he will leave behind, is to leave no legacy at all- to successfully "pass" as it were, among others, as someone who has lived one life, as one person, honorably. And how do you do that? Aye, there's the rub.
The major answer seems to be that you make many many sacrifices. Joey, as a boy, is quite fond of music. He has an aging piano teacher whose fingers prevent him from playing as he once did, but who still has enough passion and drive to want to infuse it, to see it live on in a student. It is a promising relationship, one that seems right out of central casting for a coming-of-age movie. That is, until Joey's mother brings it to an involuntary close. Joey needs to get a job quickly thereafter.
Nonetheless, music seems to be the one genuine thing about him. It's the one thing that he makes a part of himself, that remains consistent across his identities over the years, across the towns and places he's been. It is sometimes done dishonestly, almost always incompletely, most certainly pitched both to the tune of his own self-indulgence, along with an eye to what might help him get on. But in music, there's something genuine about him that we don't see anywhere else. His identities don't seem to allow for it. Some of the most beautiful passages in this work come from Joey's love for and engagement with music:
"Caruso's sound-sounds- hollow, odd, remote-that created a past from which ghosts could not only speak to admonish and astound, they could sing again almost as they once sang, sang as singing would never be heard sung again, songs and a singing from somewhere outside the earth where not an outstretched arm, not a single finger, could reach or beckon, request or threaten or connive."
"When Monteverdi wished to say "joyful is my heart" he did so in the major third; when Handel refers to life's sweetest harmonies, he does so in the major third; what is central to the Ode to Joy but the major third? In La Traviata, when they all lift their glasses and cry "Drink!" "Libiamo!" they do so to the major third, and what does Wagner use, at the opening of The Ring, to describe the sensuously amoral state of nature? He employs the major third; then just listen to that paean of praise in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms or the finale of Shostakovich's Fifth, and you will hear again the major third.
And the spider heard it, suspended there between floor and ceiling, felt it in the thin silver thread he hung from vibrated in sympathy with Chopin, with the etude's instructional thirds. Joey- look at the green-gray light in this room, at this secondhand light, the pallor of death... and what do you hear in my voice? You hear the minor sixth- the sixths that the spider fled from, the gold ring in Rhinegold- the source of so much contention- Leonora's bitter tears in Fidelio, sorrowful Don Quixote, yes, sixths serve anguish, longing, despair, so tell me why should the spider stay when the line he clings to trembles like a tear? Only we wallow in bitterness only we choose gray-green lives and devote ourselves to worlds, like the shadow-lean leaves of those ghost plans littering the floor- leaves, worlds- which do not exist, the traces of a light which is no longer there."
But all this passion is mitigated and hidden. Joey, someone who enjoys improvisation, fun, figuring things out on his own and pushing on through, is not able to make use of his talents, because his identity demands that he take on music that will never thrill his heart- only because he needs to survive.
Another aspect of this is that, because he is so busy trying to act like a person, within the bounds that he feels comfortable with, he is unable to handle the moments when you actually should be a person, for real. Joey/Joseph has a bad and years-drawn-out negative reaction to his sister getting married and, especially, having a baby. In language that at first read as incestuous, Joseph describes his bitterness that Debbie didn't stay in her short cheerleader's skirt forever. But ultimately, I think the language was much more about resentment- that Debbie had cast off all the burdens of the past. That she had melted into a new family, with seemingly no regrets and no difficulty, absorbed completely into a new way of life. She did it in a way that was not open to him, and therefore, she didn't have to play a role anymore. He was angry at her for being a whole person. Even more so because she seemingly took his last fellow sufferer, his mother, with her. His mother who had, seemingly like him, developed a passion to bury herself in and a role to satisfy the neighborhood, suddenly seemed to have feelings that were not appropriate to a lady who should be hiding her shame just as he was, who should be on the look out through her lilies and roses for trouble coming to meet them. His mother, with this news of his sister, heals and seems to be recovering something of that old self she's left behind- something that connects, for her, something that she can truly be a part of and pass on. Joey still doesn't feel that option for himself, he lives in such fear. He is also, in his heart, still the child who sat at his mother's feet absorbed by tales of Austria, wondering why they ever left:
"She painted cockcrow and sunset on a postcard and mailed it to them in their imaginations. She made them hear fresh milk spilling int he pail. Woodpiles grew orderly and large while they listened. Flowers crowded the mountain trails and deer posed in glades cut by streams whose serene demeanor was periodically shattered by leaps of trout that only lacked for lemon."
It is no accident that Austria always forms such a large part of his identity. It is an ideal that he creates for himself, largely out of homage to his mother's imagination.
His reaction to Marjorie's (admittedly quite opportunistic and power-imbalanced) advances towards him, after a period of what some would describe as extended friendship and flirting, are similar.
This discussion of identity, however, spends less of its time showing what it looks like in Joey's actions, and a lot more time showing what it feels like to think through it and process through life with at least two different men inside your head, if not more. Some of its power is in Gass' concern with prose that creates the mood of anxiety that he desires. I've always believed in the incantory power of lists, and so does Gass' main character. It's lists on top of lists, sometimes building into a rage, sometimes spiraling out of control. He renders the mind of someone constantly caught in a loop rather well- how it might be packed with comforting melodies, repetitive, distracting, small concerns (the sentence, that bloody sentence) or how well concealed it might be behind a great deal of smoke, mirrors and bluster meant to distract you from seeing that there even is a curtain, never mind the man behind it. It's quite skillful, and worth the price of admission.
All the above praise is sincere. However. And this is quite a however. The book starts like magic, with passages that trill along like the best scales. It has passion, and drive, and it knows where its going, and its characters are caught in a complex web that we slowly watch them live with, bury, or modify, as necessary. All of Joey's early journey with music is a real joy to experience. It brought back some of my own early experiences with music, even. The end isn't so bad- there's some of the spark of the beginning revealing itself again. But the middle of this book is really just far, far too long. It depicts nothing but a miserable black hole of a person exhibiting what a big black hole he is, and just how miserable he can possibly make it for himself and everyone around him. At some moments this seems as though it is mostly in the service of providing the sort of back-and-forth flashback structure that he's set up between Joey and Joseph, and we need a lot of time to show Joey's progress to Joseph. However, I got the point of Joseph-the-middle-section after about his first chapter, and every other chapter in the middle sort of made me want to tear out my own hair. The point was heavy-handed to begin with- I don't think we needed that much time with it. It made the book come off as increasingly pompous and distancing. I think that the structure could have been sacrificed in favor of spending a lot more time with Joey, who was, frankly, much more interesting, nuanced, and compelling to be around. Sure, that's part of the point. But that meant that I missed out on a lot of what I wanted to see.
In the rush to the conclusion, I never felt like we never really satisfactorily saw how Joey became Joseph. We just sort of jumped from one youthful crisis to his final job and his final position and his final persona making. Was It didn't feel genuine to me. If we are going to reach the miserable little man we spent close on a hundred pages with in the middle, then I want a whole lot more time showing me how he got there. I know what he's about once he gets there. You can leave that part out. It would have been much more effective in a short chapter at the beginning and end of the section- maybe a short echo in the middle to remind us where we're going. But no more. It almost made me too disgusted with to continue. So readers, be warned about that middle. It was a bit of a trudge.
In the style of authors of skill and thought, he delivered probably the best and most fitting indictment of his book right within its text:
"In this way, though, he discovered there was something unsafe about books. You began one; you were suitably entranced; the style, the subject, the arrangement… each seemed so satisfying that the eye could scarcely wait for the page to turn. It was, he remembered, how his fingers felt when they were playing well and music was majestically flowing from them as if by magic. But then the Paderewski passage would occur, a gesture that stooped, a boast the offended, an idea that was as grotesque as a two-headed calf, a sentiment that steamed like rotting flesh, like a childhood ramble in the ruins that suddenly betrayed you with a sight not meant for living eyes. You'd turn like the globe did in a day. You'd learn that men were murdered over the meaning of a wafer."
That's pretty much what happened to me for the middle third of this book. (Ironically, given Gass' stated sentiments about that chord above.) And yet, in terms of crafting his sentences, continually weaving his characters into who he wanted them to be, discussing identity, Gass still does it with enough skill that I can't really deny him a fourth star. It does not reflect my enjoyment level, and I still felt that there could have been structural improvements, but the quality of the writing is such that he won me back over in the end.
I would recommend it, if you're into this sort of thing. But just be prepared to commit and push on through if you feel discouraged. I got enough of a payoff in the end to satisfy me. It was worth it.
May 18, 2013
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 reflection of those on display in the Tunnel and Luck, though its origins are similar.
There are already wonderful reviews here from people much better at writing them than I, so I will simply point you in their direction....
There are already wonderful reviews here from people much better at writing them than I, so I will simply point you in their direction....
August 7, 2025
DNF at 44%.
This will sound like hyperbole, but I truly can't recall the last time I read such a smug, self-indulgent, nothing-burger of an exercise in self-pleasure. I genuinely despise this book. It has nothing to say—it just whines and whines and strikes poses. What an unpleasant experience. Truly the most annoyed I've been by a book in ages.
This will sound like hyperbole, but I truly can't recall the last time I read such a smug, self-indulgent, nothing-burger of an exercise in self-pleasure. I genuinely despise this book. It has nothing to say—it just whines and whines and strikes poses. What an unpleasant experience. Truly the most annoyed I've been by a book in ages.
May 30, 2013
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 few minor problems with his story telling. You know, little things like plot, characters, and theme.
The first few chapters are promising enough. The patriarch of the Skizzen/Fixel/Scofield family changes the family’s collective identity like he changes his clothes. As the book jacket promises, the family moves from Austria, to London, to Ohio. However, then the father disappears and so does all of the action. His son, Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen takes the protagonist baton. And guess what, he’s confused about his identity. (There’s one of the killer themes in this book: who are we? What makes us who we are? How many selves do we have? Etc.) If someone “were to open him up like a tin, what sort of selves packed so closely would he see?” (128). Frankly, I don’t care. “His identity, Joseph Skizzen slowly realized, was wholly his affair” (141). Good, then let me stop reading about it. Oooh, there’s such a metaphysical, intrapersonal schism to this character named Skizzen. This is a bildungsroman wherein the character’s main goal in life is “to pass through life still reasonably clean of complicity in human affairs” (353). To quote my own Life of Pi review “For a book like this to work—a book centered entirely on one (human) character—the reader needs to really care about that character. That character needs to come alive.” Joseph Skizzen just doesn’t come alive for me, and, while there are other characters, they are each all too flat.
Who else am I supposed to like? His mother who is defined by her yearning for the old country and, especially, her gardening. Miss Spiky, a caricature at best. Those two librarians he worked with or the homeless guy who came in from time to time, nothing more than plopped in filler. The personified oven in this idiotic sentence: “Sugar buns, well, what a treat, Joey said, though neither listened, except perhaps the stove did, despite having its door closed” (259). Other stupid food clichés—“Oh dear, he realized suddenly that his mother had accused him of crying. She didn’t know it was over spilled milk. Well, the cookies hadn’t crumbled, had they?” (292). No, there is nothing in the characterization (or even the writing—something so many others have lauded) that tickled my fancy.
Next, there’s the oppressively didactic (right word here?) theme that humanity sucks. Joseph’s obsession with his sentence and, perhaps more so, his straight-out-of-a-television-serial-killer’s “museum” of inhumanity is more than a bit heavy handed. This reads like it was written by a curmudgeonly old man; some of it actually reminded me a lot of Vonnegut’s writings at the end of his career. However, I still enjoyed Vonnegut’s non-fiction, which didn’t purport to veil a theme behind a raggedy blanket of a story.
Did I hate this book? No, I just didn’t like it. I don’t know how Gass and Bellow became tenuously linked in my mind, but I’d recommend The Adventures of Augie March any day.
Finally, it took me over a month to read this book, which is just unacceptable. Yeah, I had a lot going on, but every time I did pick it up, I could only make it through like 10 pages in a sitting. It just was not a pleasure to read and did not entice me to keep coming back to it—that part was a struggle.
So do you understand why it’s only a one star book?
You:
Me: Whatever, maybe I just don’t like any book in which ”C” is featured prominently in the title.
A Favorite Quotation “Among the flaws in Joey’s character, which, at this age he was quick to reveal, was his adolescent’s demand for praise and reassurance before doing anything more meritorious than exist” (99).
Sorry, Joey, no praise from this reader.
Currently reading
August 18, 2013The 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 silence
her in mid-sentence,
even his smiles were curved in condescens-
ion, though at this time in his absence,
her beloved husband’s virtues, once
admitted to be many, were written in lemon juice.
He had a glare to bubble paint,
she said.
Her recollection of that look caused hesitations still.
She would appear alarmed,
wave as if she saw something
gnatting near her face, and
stutter to a stop.
Joey was helped
to remember how, at suppertime,
for only then was the family gathered as a group,
the spoon
would become still
in his father’s soup,
his father’s head would rise
to face the direction of the offending remark,
his normally placid look
would stiffen,
and fires light in his eyes.
His stare seemed unwilling to cease,
although it probably was never held beyond the lifetime
of a minute.
But a minute … a minute is so long.
Certainly it continued
until his daughter’s or his wife’s uneasy
expression
sank into the bottom
of her bowl,
and the guilty head was bowed
in an attitude of apology and submission.
*Miriam = a religiously significant female name, **Skizzen = German verb (inf and third person singular/plural, first person plural) to sketch (etymology = imitate), or plural form of - within the opening bars the composer has alluded to the key themes of the piece.
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 silence
her in mid-sentence,
even his smiles were curved in condescens-
ion, though at this time in his absence,
her beloved husband’s virtues, once
admitted to be many, were written in lemon juice.
He had a glare to bubble paint,
she said.
Her recollection of that look caused hesitations still.
She would appear alarmed,
wave as if she saw something
gnatting near her face, and
stutter to a stop.
Joey was helped
to remember how, at suppertime,
for only then was the family gathered as a group,
the spoon
would become still
in his father’s soup,
his father’s head would rise
to face the direction of the offending remark,
his normally placid look
would stiffen,
and fires light in his eyes.
His stare seemed unwilling to cease,
although it probably was never held beyond the lifetime
of a minute.
But a minute … a minute is so long.
Certainly it continued
until his daughter’s or his wife’s uneasy
expression
sank into the bottom
of her bowl,
and the guilty head was bowed
in an attitude of apology and submission.
*Miriam = a religiously significant female name, **Skizzen = German verb (inf and third person singular/plural, first person plural) to sketch (etymology = imitate), or plural form of - within the opening bars the composer has alluded to the key themes of the piece.
December 8, 2017
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 Fat Man (With a Falafel in His Hand)
"...and I laughed like I always do
and I cried like I cry for you
and balloon man blew up in my hand.
He spattered me with tomatoes, hummus,
chickpeas and some strips of skin,
So I made a right on 44th
and I washed my hands when I got in..."
Robyn Hitchcock - "Balloon Man"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ePjG...
ON BEING FAIR TO [THE] MIDDLING:
When I Paint My Masterpiece
William H. Gass forces readers to reassess preconceived notions of verbal, if not necessarily literary, merit.
He clearly has an ambivalent, if not outright antagonistic, relationship with literary conventions (apart from the ones he's invited to speak at).
Narrative and plot, in particular, can be a burden for a writer, especially when the social interaction inherent in story-telling isn't what turns the writer on.
Many writers avoid the burden by not taking it on in the first place. Gass is one such.
Fair enough. The page is both palette and canvas, and writers have a chance to paint their masterpiece, their own way, unbound by convention.
Decisions about how and what they write, how and what they paint, when they stop, when the work is finished, are personal. Yet, ultimately, these subjective decisions are the basis upon which we readers decide, equally subjectively, just how good a writer they are and whether their work is writing or, frankly, just typing.
Gass demonstrated early in his writing career that he could put sentences together, that he had the writing chops if he wanted to utilise them. Since then, he's turned his back on them and simply dined out on his malingering reputation.
Knotting Your Own Noose
Freed of narrative compulsion, then, the page is a noose with which writers can hang themselves.
Gass toys with the noose for the 400 pages of this so-called novel. I'm grateful it wasn't a vollumannous 1,400 pages. But 400 is more than enough to demonstrate that there is a worm in the apple, and that the worm is an incorrigible susceptibility to middling, muddling self-indulgence. Observe him in action for 50 pages or so. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you'll notice this empty-handed painter sucking sweets is drawing crazy patterns on his sheets!
Do you really need so many words to tell (not show) us about your latest misanthropic preoccupations?
Backdroppings of a Nostalgic Vanguard
These are thinly disguised philosophical contemplations too lazy to be forged into something disciplined or robust in execution.
Identity, authenticity and recognition might be the stuff of 20th century literature, but here they're just a backdropping for a moan-a-thon of dubious wit.
Even then, the apparent perspective derives from the fifties, both in terms of the decade and the age.
Does the 21st century really need another pompous, barely-fictionalised diatribe about the poverty of language and contemporary music ("The beauty of music is offended by words") in contrast to the art and classical music of our own or our parents' youth?
Why does this supposed inventiveness with an old art form pour scorn on any new forms that might arise?
There is nothing so lonely and obsolete as an earlier generation's self-styled vanguard, especially when it is nostalgic for the days of its own self-importance.
Perchance to Ponder Upon the Ponderous
This is supposed to be the work of a renowned public intellectual. Yet, what ponderous pseudo-intellectualism abounds within! Gass' recent fiction reminds me of a baby making a mess in its own cot and then playing with it. Not even irony could increase its entertainment value. It's become a modus operandi that extends beyond one book to all that Gass writes, whether fiction or non-fiction (but who can tell them apart?). What a waste of his being, time and mind, and therefore of ours.
The Sustenance of Mediocrity
Remember the legend self-consciously built around Gass' sentence construction? Well, it's not evident here. This time, his statues are made of matchsticks.
Over time, Gass has made himself both irrelevant and irrevelant. His works, despite their length, are increasingly "puny as dwarfs among giants...[he impersonates a] middle-C mind [able] to sustain mediocrity," a weed in the garden of Eden.
His obsessive fondness for the territory of smirks, snickers, sniggers, vileness, scorn, smugness, vulgarity, greed, stupidity, strangles his creative urge beyond recognition as art. He aspires to a precious golden archness, but, honestly, reading this novel fast became a tiresome exercise in the tedium of the medium.
I waited in vain for just one sentence to occasionally poke its head through the canopy of mediocrity. Instead, time and again, I was plunged even deeper. As you would expect, I suppose, some of these sentences have to be read to be believed! (See the sampling below.)
The smell of his blue roses does not remain...
One of Gass' fictional factota proclaims, "I don't know if beauty is still possible in this world." Well, Gass himself makes no contribution to its store. To quote Bertrand Russell, as does the author, this is a "blot upon the fair face of this universe."
About 50 pages deal with any serious issues with sensitivity or sensibility. The 350 page remainder is a pasticcio of grumpy old piss-takes, skits and sketches that lecture and cajole without much art or fiction. Gass turns humble asides into haughty broadsides. Maybe the novel begs forgiveness. But mostly it just beggars belief. It would have been a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Mediocre Fiction (if that's not a Gassian redundancy).
Fake Recognitions
Notwithstanding Gass' musical caveat, there's no "life assertion" or affirmation evident in the novel. Where you would expect movements, Gass remains on his throne and goes through the motions. Gass is a God who despairs of the universe he has created. I mean, it's his creation. Why doesn't he just make one he and we can like more?
Like its subject matter, the characters are fake, the plot is fake, the fiction is fake. If only, like his peers John Barth and Robert Coover, there was a hint of playfulness or humour whose source wasn't such unrelenting jaundice:
"A fraud occurs when a fake is used to mislead...Your enthusiasms, your loyalties, are pretences."
A Glutton for Punnishment
The cover is the best part. Beneath the toffee coating, however, it's a delectebilitating smorgesbored array of wildly-confected literary desserts: a croquembouche of custard-filled undergraduate humour, a millephooey of juvenile pretension, a confederacy of sponges, a basket case of unholy Krapfen, a panna cotta of wibbly-wobbly gelatinous inconsistency, accompanied, as if all this wasn't enough, by a vacuous chorus of ready-made puffery from his flan base.
Inevitably and irresistibly for the author, this mousse is still a noose. Gass' half-baked, but trifling, slow food culinary concoction might be attractively presented and well-hanged for a painting, a sausage or a pudding, but ultimately it's neither particularly appetising nor well-hung, neither tasteful nor potent. Perhaps it needed another 30 minutes in the Dutch oven from whence it came? Or 30 minutes less? Or maybe it was just the recipe?
More Bile than Style
Anyway, what a disappointment! When I first scanned the book's cover and ran my fingers along its deckle edge, I was so hopeful and optimistic. I so wanted to say Yum! Instead, having made a meal of it, having got to the end, it's more Yuck! Blech! Belch! So, it's all over now, baby blue. Or is it? Maybe next time, he'll come to his senses, and neither of us will have anything to whinge about, assuming we both endure long enough.
C minus. Rounded down to two GR stars. Both book and author are wittingly overblown. Like a balloon man. With a falafel in his hand...
POST-SCRIPT:
The Jewish Dilemma
What is it about Gass and Jews, well, at least his perceived Jewish peers and rivals in the literary world?
"The Tunnel" was an envious, oft-times vicious, Bellovian pastiche.
In "Middle C", Gass conjures up an image of himself lying back in white Wolfian threads on his amply pillowed settee, his tongue firmly between his cheeks, peeling the grapes of Roth, in a vain quest for some sad-eyed malady of the lowlands that lies fermenting beneath the skin.
Like so many of his Post-Modernist peers who find comfort and tenure in the groves of academe, this is a literature of envy and prejudice whose highest aspiration seems to be to eviscerate and belittle a perceived rival in the public eye.
It can't be excused as a trait of just one fiction or character. It's pervaded Gass' work for over 50 years. It's as if he can write fiction about nothing else.
He leaves us with little choice: Give me Bellow or Roth, or give me nothingness.
LEFT-OVERS FROM THE FEAST:
A Modest Catalogue of Sententious Indulgences
[Hand-picked from Betwixt the Nondescription]
"He filled roles like a baker." (p7)
"Although his father could mimic British speech fairly well, his wife was unable to play the ape." (p14)
[Grammar query: whose wife do you think Gass is referring to? The father's or the son's?]
"The aforesaid president of the school was a jowl-shaking enthusiast and mother's boy whose specialty was the cultivation of a secularised piety more sugary than any breakfast bun." (p93)
"The faculty comprised old men whose privates were presumed to be long past erection..." (p98)
"Liberal feelings, a desire to help the unfortunate, led to sloppy record keeping, and sorry obervation of the law, with the current confusion its unhappy result." (p140)
"Chris shoved his licence in a trouser pocket as if even its plastic were ashamed of what he had allowed it to do." (p143)
[Hmm, a pathetic fallacy!]
"Her splayed hands measured an amount of air no more than a crack's worth." (p148)
"At this moment, a childishly named African tribe was massacring another (he had the freshly scissored clipping in hand)." (p151)
"Joseph had a hatred of sports, based on his inadequacy, that he disguised as apathy." (p154)
"If he were writing in ink he would have made a blot;
If he were molding clay, it would resemble a turd;
If he were playing notes, cacophony would be heard;
If he were working with string, he would have made a knot." (p160)
[This is actually a pretty good self-assessment of the novel.
P.S. This quote is dedicated to Michael Silverblatt, whose dedication to Gass suggests he has taken (or been gifted) a (silver) leaf out of Gass' copybook!]
"We all have sides. I am at least hexagonal." (p174)
"Time, too, became real, and its paradoxes fascinating." (p180)
"Marjorie recommended to Joseph the novels of Dorothy Richardson...(p181)"
"Joey climbed the hill to his car, complaining to the slope as he strived to conquer it. (p197)"
"Joseph began to feel an unpleasant physical excitement such as the apprehension that customarily preceded his first descent on a playground slide." (p222)
"Joseph tried to chuckle and managed a rhetorical cough." (p247)
"The garden...was like a fascist state: ruled like an orchestra, ordered as an army, eugenically ruthless and hateful to the handicapped, relentless in the pursuit of its borders, favoring obedient masses in which every stem is inclined to appease its leader." (p271)
"Nobody has worked harder to get nowhere than I have." (p276)
"Mother! You have become coarse like one of your graters." (p331)
"He had made a mousetrap that had sprung for an ant." (p333)
PASTICCIO FOR DESSERT:
Velly Ang Lee Phat Phuck Emits Poisonous Gass from His Ivory Tower [In Profane Gassius Words and Mode]
"Fuck on, phat phuck, with your one leg limp, your severed tongue, your blind eye, fuck on, fuck 'em, in order to multiply, first to spread and then to gather, to wander, to wonder, to confer, to confirm, to decide, to invent, to ponder, to philosophise, to proclaim, to disclaim, to declaim, to list, to aggregate, to accumulate, to waste, to spoil, to arraign, to indict, to condemn, to contrive, to connive, to fake, to feign, to forge, to fool, to jest, to clown, and thence again to wonder, why this pretence, why this punnishment, why this pain? pity all of us who still sail in your good readership, why did we survive? how did we endure? what was accomplished that couldn't have been realised otherwise? what divine plan did this disaster further? thou shalt not be saved for a moment of magnificence! nor handed the trophy, nor awarded the prize, for shore leave, captain, this is not the good book that will win through, nor receive five incandescent stars. you're tired of your self and all of your creations. don't you come see me, King Jane. fuck on, fuck off, phat phuck!"
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 Fat Man (With a Falafel in His Hand)
"...and I laughed like I always do
and I cried like I cry for you
and balloon man blew up in my hand.
He spattered me with tomatoes, hummus,
chickpeas and some strips of skin,
So I made a right on 44th
and I washed my hands when I got in..."
Robyn Hitchcock - "Balloon Man"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ePjG...
ON BEING FAIR TO [THE] MIDDLING:
When I Paint My Masterpiece
William H. Gass forces readers to reassess preconceived notions of verbal, if not necessarily literary, merit.
He clearly has an ambivalent, if not outright antagonistic, relationship with literary conventions (apart from the ones he's invited to speak at).
Narrative and plot, in particular, can be a burden for a writer, especially when the social interaction inherent in story-telling isn't what turns the writer on.
Many writers avoid the burden by not taking it on in the first place. Gass is one such.
Fair enough. The page is both palette and canvas, and writers have a chance to paint their masterpiece, their own way, unbound by convention.
Decisions about how and what they write, how and what they paint, when they stop, when the work is finished, are personal. Yet, ultimately, these subjective decisions are the basis upon which we readers decide, equally subjectively, just how good a writer they are and whether their work is writing or, frankly, just typing.
Gass demonstrated early in his writing career that he could put sentences together, that he had the writing chops if he wanted to utilise them. Since then, he's turned his back on them and simply dined out on his malingering reputation.
Knotting Your Own Noose
Freed of narrative compulsion, then, the page is a noose with which writers can hang themselves.
Gass toys with the noose for the 400 pages of this so-called novel. I'm grateful it wasn't a vollumannous 1,400 pages. But 400 is more than enough to demonstrate that there is a worm in the apple, and that the worm is an incorrigible susceptibility to middling, muddling self-indulgence. Observe him in action for 50 pages or so. To paraphrase Bob Dylan, you'll notice this empty-handed painter sucking sweets is drawing crazy patterns on his sheets!
Do you really need so many words to tell (not show) us about your latest misanthropic preoccupations?
Backdroppings of a Nostalgic Vanguard
These are thinly disguised philosophical contemplations too lazy to be forged into something disciplined or robust in execution.
Identity, authenticity and recognition might be the stuff of 20th century literature, but here they're just a backdropping for a moan-a-thon of dubious wit.
Even then, the apparent perspective derives from the fifties, both in terms of the decade and the age.
Does the 21st century really need another pompous, barely-fictionalised diatribe about the poverty of language and contemporary music ("The beauty of music is offended by words") in contrast to the art and classical music of our own or our parents' youth?
Why does this supposed inventiveness with an old art form pour scorn on any new forms that might arise?
There is nothing so lonely and obsolete as an earlier generation's self-styled vanguard, especially when it is nostalgic for the days of its own self-importance.
Perchance to Ponder Upon the Ponderous
This is supposed to be the work of a renowned public intellectual. Yet, what ponderous pseudo-intellectualism abounds within! Gass' recent fiction reminds me of a baby making a mess in its own cot and then playing with it. Not even irony could increase its entertainment value. It's become a modus operandi that extends beyond one book to all that Gass writes, whether fiction or non-fiction (but who can tell them apart?). What a waste of his being, time and mind, and therefore of ours.
The Sustenance of Mediocrity
Remember the legend self-consciously built around Gass' sentence construction? Well, it's not evident here. This time, his statues are made of matchsticks.
Over time, Gass has made himself both irrelevant and irrevelant. His works, despite their length, are increasingly "puny as dwarfs among giants...[he impersonates a] middle-C mind [able] to sustain mediocrity," a weed in the garden of Eden.
His obsessive fondness for the territory of smirks, snickers, sniggers, vileness, scorn, smugness, vulgarity, greed, stupidity, strangles his creative urge beyond recognition as art. He aspires to a precious golden archness, but, honestly, reading this novel fast became a tiresome exercise in the tedium of the medium.
I waited in vain for just one sentence to occasionally poke its head through the canopy of mediocrity. Instead, time and again, I was plunged even deeper. As you would expect, I suppose, some of these sentences have to be read to be believed! (See the sampling below.)
The smell of his blue roses does not remain...
One of Gass' fictional factota proclaims, "I don't know if beauty is still possible in this world." Well, Gass himself makes no contribution to its store. To quote Bertrand Russell, as does the author, this is a "blot upon the fair face of this universe."
About 50 pages deal with any serious issues with sensitivity or sensibility. The 350 page remainder is a pasticcio of grumpy old piss-takes, skits and sketches that lecture and cajole without much art or fiction. Gass turns humble asides into haughty broadsides. Maybe the novel begs forgiveness. But mostly it just beggars belief. It would have been a worthy recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Mediocre Fiction (if that's not a Gassian redundancy).
Fake Recognitions
Notwithstanding Gass' musical caveat, there's no "life assertion" or affirmation evident in the novel. Where you would expect movements, Gass remains on his throne and goes through the motions. Gass is a God who despairs of the universe he has created. I mean, it's his creation. Why doesn't he just make one he and we can like more?
Like its subject matter, the characters are fake, the plot is fake, the fiction is fake. If only, like his peers John Barth and Robert Coover, there was a hint of playfulness or humour whose source wasn't such unrelenting jaundice:
"A fraud occurs when a fake is used to mislead...Your enthusiasms, your loyalties, are pretences."
A Glutton for Punnishment
The cover is the best part. Beneath the toffee coating, however, it's a delectebilitating smorgesbored array of wildly-confected literary desserts: a croquembouche of custard-filled undergraduate humour, a millephooey of juvenile pretension, a confederacy of sponges, a basket case of unholy Krapfen, a panna cotta of wibbly-wobbly gelatinous inconsistency, accompanied, as if all this wasn't enough, by a vacuous chorus of ready-made puffery from his flan base.
Inevitably and irresistibly for the author, this mousse is still a noose. Gass' half-baked, but trifling, slow food culinary concoction might be attractively presented and well-hanged for a painting, a sausage or a pudding, but ultimately it's neither particularly appetising nor well-hung, neither tasteful nor potent. Perhaps it needed another 30 minutes in the Dutch oven from whence it came? Or 30 minutes less? Or maybe it was just the recipe?
More Bile than Style
Anyway, what a disappointment! When I first scanned the book's cover and ran my fingers along its deckle edge, I was so hopeful and optimistic. I so wanted to say Yum! Instead, having made a meal of it, having got to the end, it's more Yuck! Blech! Belch! So, it's all over now, baby blue. Or is it? Maybe next time, he'll come to his senses, and neither of us will have anything to whinge about, assuming we both endure long enough.
C minus. Rounded down to two GR stars. Both book and author are wittingly overblown. Like a balloon man. With a falafel in his hand...
POST-SCRIPT:
The Jewish Dilemma
What is it about Gass and Jews, well, at least his perceived Jewish peers and rivals in the literary world?
"The Tunnel" was an envious, oft-times vicious, Bellovian pastiche.
In "Middle C", Gass conjures up an image of himself lying back in white Wolfian threads on his amply pillowed settee, his tongue firmly between his cheeks, peeling the grapes of Roth, in a vain quest for some sad-eyed malady of the lowlands that lies fermenting beneath the skin.
Like so many of his Post-Modernist peers who find comfort and tenure in the groves of academe, this is a literature of envy and prejudice whose highest aspiration seems to be to eviscerate and belittle a perceived rival in the public eye.
It can't be excused as a trait of just one fiction or character. It's pervaded Gass' work for over 50 years. It's as if he can write fiction about nothing else.
He leaves us with little choice: Give me Bellow or Roth, or give me nothingness.
LEFT-OVERS FROM THE FEAST:
A Modest Catalogue of Sententious Indulgences
[Hand-picked from Betwixt the Nondescription]
"He filled roles like a baker." (p7)
"Although his father could mimic British speech fairly well, his wife was unable to play the ape." (p14)
[Grammar query: whose wife do you think Gass is referring to? The father's or the son's?]
"The aforesaid president of the school was a jowl-shaking enthusiast and mother's boy whose specialty was the cultivation of a secularised piety more sugary than any breakfast bun." (p93)
"The faculty comprised old men whose privates were presumed to be long past erection..." (p98)
"Liberal feelings, a desire to help the unfortunate, led to sloppy record keeping, and sorry obervation of the law, with the current confusion its unhappy result." (p140)
"Chris shoved his licence in a trouser pocket as if even its plastic were ashamed of what he had allowed it to do." (p143)
[Hmm, a pathetic fallacy!]
"Her splayed hands measured an amount of air no more than a crack's worth." (p148)
"At this moment, a childishly named African tribe was massacring another (he had the freshly scissored clipping in hand)." (p151)
"Joseph had a hatred of sports, based on his inadequacy, that he disguised as apathy." (p154)
"If he were writing in ink he would have made a blot;
If he were molding clay, it would resemble a turd;
If he were playing notes, cacophony would be heard;
If he were working with string, he would have made a knot." (p160)
[This is actually a pretty good self-assessment of the novel.
P.S. This quote is dedicated to Michael Silverblatt, whose dedication to Gass suggests he has taken (or been gifted) a (silver) leaf out of Gass' copybook!]
"We all have sides. I am at least hexagonal." (p174)
"Time, too, became real, and its paradoxes fascinating." (p180)
"Marjorie recommended to Joseph the novels of Dorothy Richardson...(p181)"
"Joey climbed the hill to his car, complaining to the slope as he strived to conquer it. (p197)"
"Joseph began to feel an unpleasant physical excitement such as the apprehension that customarily preceded his first descent on a playground slide." (p222)
"Joseph tried to chuckle and managed a rhetorical cough." (p247)
"The garden...was like a fascist state: ruled like an orchestra, ordered as an army, eugenically ruthless and hateful to the handicapped, relentless in the pursuit of its borders, favoring obedient masses in which every stem is inclined to appease its leader." (p271)
"Nobody has worked harder to get nowhere than I have." (p276)
"Mother! You have become coarse like one of your graters." (p331)
"He had made a mousetrap that had sprung for an ant." (p333)
PASTICCIO FOR DESSERT:
Velly Ang Lee Phat Phuck Emits Poisonous Gass from His Ivory Tower [In Profane Gassius Words and Mode]
"Fuck on, phat phuck, with your one leg limp, your severed tongue, your blind eye, fuck on, fuck 'em, in order to multiply, first to spread and then to gather, to wander, to wonder, to confer, to confirm, to decide, to invent, to ponder, to philosophise, to proclaim, to disclaim, to declaim, to list, to aggregate, to accumulate, to waste, to spoil, to arraign, to indict, to condemn, to contrive, to connive, to fake, to feign, to forge, to fool, to jest, to clown, and thence again to wonder, why this pretence, why this punnishment, why this pain? pity all of us who still sail in your good readership, why did we survive? how did we endure? what was accomplished that couldn't have been realised otherwise? what divine plan did this disaster further? thou shalt not be saved for a moment of magnificence! nor handed the trophy, nor awarded the prize, for shore leave, captain, this is not the good book that will win through, nor receive five incandescent stars. you're tired of your self and all of your creations. don't you come see me, King Jane. fuck on, fuck off, phat phuck!"
March 22, 2013
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 small intricate tale of a man’s inner life, built brick by brick, thought by thought and sentence by sentence.
Middle C tells the story Joseph Skizzen (aka Yusssel Fixel, aka Joseph Scofield) a man who has been transported from war torn Europe as a child and planted in small town Ohio. While his sister easily assimilates into the US culture, marrying a man who “almost went to Yale”, Joseph seeks not to blend, but to fade into obscurity. . In terms of structure, Gass coyly presents bits of Joseph’s life in a nonlinear fashion, so that we seem him as child, adult and adolescent at different times throughout the book. We see glimpses of the man he has become before Gass really digs into the story of his developing persona(s). Identity looms large as a theme of the novel, with Gass presenting parallels between Joseph and his father throughout the book.
In terms of style, Gass does craft incredibly long sentences that could be off putting to a reader more accustomed to a choppy style, but each thought in the sentence pulls you along to the next in an easy flow. At one point, I began to think of the commas as connectors between boxcars on a train. I would read each thought between the commas before pausing to leap across to the next one. I also found myself noting on my electronic copy, “why does Gass never seem to capitalize the first letter of the next question in a series of questions?” Gass does not identify his speakers in most cases, but it is not difficult to figure out who is talking, since most of the conversations are rational. I found the book fairly easy to read, and looked forward to digging into it again, although it did occasionally take me a bit to get going from a cold start.
This was my first experience with Gass, and I did find it very enjoyable and pretty easy to tackle. I struggled a little with how I would rate this book. In my ratings, I typically take into account how I felt about the book at the time, and this one is definitely a gateway for me to the author’s other fiction work. Based on the lecture sequences I might have to squeeze in some nonfiction too. After wavering on whether to rate Middle C a 4.5 or a 5, I decided to award it a 5.
Middle C tells the story Joseph Skizzen (aka Yusssel Fixel, aka Joseph Scofield) a man who has been transported from war torn Europe as a child and planted in small town Ohio. While his sister easily assimilates into the US culture, marrying a man who “almost went to Yale”, Joseph seeks not to blend, but to fade into obscurity. . In terms of structure, Gass coyly presents bits of Joseph’s life in a nonlinear fashion, so that we seem him as child, adult and adolescent at different times throughout the book. We see glimpses of the man he has become before Gass really digs into the story of his developing persona(s). Identity looms large as a theme of the novel, with Gass presenting parallels between Joseph and his father throughout the book.
In terms of style, Gass does craft incredibly long sentences that could be off putting to a reader more accustomed to a choppy style, but each thought in the sentence pulls you along to the next in an easy flow. At one point, I began to think of the commas as connectors between boxcars on a train. I would read each thought between the commas before pausing to leap across to the next one. I also found myself noting on my electronic copy, “why does Gass never seem to capitalize the first letter of the next question in a series of questions?” Gass does not identify his speakers in most cases, but it is not difficult to figure out who is talking, since most of the conversations are rational. I found the book fairly easy to read, and looked forward to digging into it again, although it did occasionally take me a bit to get going from a cold start.
This was my first experience with Gass, and I did find it very enjoyable and pretty easy to tackle. I struggled a little with how I would rate this book. In my ratings, I typically take into account how I felt about the book at the time, and this one is definitely a gateway for me to the author’s other fiction work. Based on the lecture sequences I might have to squeeze in some nonfiction too. After wavering on whether to rate Middle C a 4.5 or a 5, I decided to award it a 5.
March 13, 2018
"This world is made of three kinds of stupid. The commonest stupid is so stupid it doesn't know it is stupid but is content to be stupid; the second sort is the stupid who denies it is stupid and claims to be wiser than whiskey; the third bunch is convinced it is stupid, too, but knows it knows that much and wisely fears the worst. Among the stupidest of stupids, not knowing any better, a few ill luck out because they won't have the wit to perish properly."
There is a "Japanese proverb" floating around on the world wide web stating that everyone has three faces: one you show the world (Professor Skizzen) second you show your close friends and family(Joey) and third you never show anyone; it is the truest reflection of who you are(Joseph). I am not sure this is a true proverb, but it does correlate with the main character(s) in this book.
This was a strange book. When reading it, my feelings for it changed with every page. I loved Gass' language, for sure, but it was missing something for me, and I am not smart enough to recognize what it was.
This is a book about a character, there is no plot, just a character story about one man being three different people, but all were true identities. Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen believed all of them were him, and convinced all the people he showed them to that they were true, but he was truest when he was working on his "Inhumanity Museum".
"The Inhumanity Museum" is weaved throughout the book, and was the most interesting to me. I loved seeing the development of the sentence that Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen molded early on in the read, and how it affected his character throughout, to its ultimate rewrite to "twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hour from twilight to dawn."
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
A giant plus for me reading this was the new music I was exposed to. From Schoenberg to Bartok. The music made this a very enjoyable read, even though my opinion changed throughout as often as Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen character(s) changed personas.
This is not a book for everyone. I probably should have read more of Gass before getting into this one. I loved Omensetter's Luck, and thought this would be comparable, but they are two different books, and that just shows the greatness that Gass had(RIP) with his writing.
The cover is pretty.
There is a "Japanese proverb" floating around on the world wide web stating that everyone has three faces: one you show the world (Professor Skizzen) second you show your close friends and family(Joey) and third you never show anyone; it is the truest reflection of who you are(Joseph). I am not sure this is a true proverb, but it does correlate with the main character(s) in this book.
This was a strange book. When reading it, my feelings for it changed with every page. I loved Gass' language, for sure, but it was missing something for me, and I am not smart enough to recognize what it was.
This is a book about a character, there is no plot, just a character story about one man being three different people, but all were true identities. Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen believed all of them were him, and convinced all the people he showed them to that they were true, but he was truest when he was working on his "Inhumanity Museum".
"The Inhumanity Museum" is weaved throughout the book, and was the most interesting to me. I loved seeing the development of the sentence that Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen molded early on in the read, and how it affected his character throughout, to its ultimate rewrite to "twelve tones, twelve words, twelve hour from twilight to dawn."
The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.
First Skizzen felt mankind must perish
then he feared it might survive
A giant plus for me reading this was the new music I was exposed to. From Schoenberg to Bartok. The music made this a very enjoyable read, even though my opinion changed throughout as often as Joey/Joseph/Professor Skizzen character(s) changed personas.
This is not a book for everyone. I probably should have read more of Gass before getting into this one. I loved Omensetter's Luck, and thought this would be comparable, but they are two different books, and that just shows the greatness that Gass had(RIP) with his writing.
The cover is pretty.
February 14, 2018
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 covers of Middle C and now set fingers to keyboard in an attempt to write why I enjoyed it, why you should read it, the usual.
Some have taken Mr. Gass to task for the misanthropy expressed in this novel, the hatred, the giddy lists of human atrocities, the seeming bitterness. They have entirely missed the point. This is not a misanthropic book, it does not, as the back cover proclaims, "Half wish humanity was wiped off the map." Only one character in the book - Joey, Joseph, Professor Skizzen (he has many selves) - wishes these things. In his small Ohio home he has almost childishly apocalyptic visions of destruction and war, maggots and starvation, fire and blood. The old professor is a monstrous figure of hatred, not the bold hatred of a warrior, but the petty, pathetic hatred of a shriveled man raging at a world he cannot control. Gass wants to know how a man becomes such a monster.
Perhaps in a way Gass's interrogation of the factors leading to the hatred-filled wreck known as "Professor Skizzen" is also an interrogation of himself. Gass proudly declared that he writes because he hates, and has penned such invective as, "Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated." All fiction is autobiographical in a way, and certainly Gass's struggles with misanthropy in this text most likely correspond to struggles in his own life.
Yet I never once felt during this book that Gass endorsed Skizzen's misanthropy. He wants to analyze it. He wants to understand it. In a way he wants to cure it, not just in Skizzen, but maybe even in himself.
Perhaps I'm just projecting my thoughts on the book, but there is a scene near the end of this novel (during the furiously inventive final 100 pages), during which Skizzen attempts to justify and understand the things that have happened to him, the misfortunes he has undergone, and this scene informs my argument that Gass is not interested in expressing misanthropy, he is interested in understanding how misanthropy develops.
Yet the narrator is not satisfied, and responds, "But you stole garden seeds from the school shed."
See, the reason I found Middle C such an enlightening, instructing, and in a way, terrifying book was that it is one of the few books that communicates so effectively how important in the long run our smallest decisions now might be. Again and again we see how the things that people do to Joey from childhood onward have massive repercussions later on. Skizzen has been hurt, little-by-little, by so many people, there are so many factors he cannot control. Yet the narration insists that nevertheless he still had a choice. That it was still small decisions that determined his fate.
And in this way, Middle C is a weirdly encouraging book. It tells us that regardless of all the people that will harm us, the things we will be falsely accused of, the people that will conspire to hurt us, we are still in control of our destiny, that it is our choices which inform our future.
Skizzen fails to realize that, and as a result, blaming others as he goes, he finds himself on the road to misery and despair.
Thus, like Gaddis's The Recognitions, this book might be read as a cautionary tale. That's not all this book has in common with Gaddis's 956 page juggernaut, however. Both books begin with a prologue detailing the story of the protagonist's father, both books deal extensively with forgery, and both books contain strong and well-realized themes about identity and the self.
Yet Middle C is, in my opinion, superior to The Recognitions. For one, it accomplishes at least the same amount of thematic depth in almost a third of the length, but it is also more hopeful, more human, and easier to relate to. Gaddis's pontificating artists are separated from us viewers, whereas Gass's cast of suburban librarians, gardeners, and professors are charming characters who I would not mind getting to know a bit better.
Not to mention that Gass's prose is better than Gaddis's as well. Gass has a certain melancholy cream behind his sentences that effortlessly surpasses Gaddis's overwrought religiosity and portentous allusions.
Now that I have broached the subject of prose, I realize how much I have yet to discuss in this review. For in addition to the weighty themes, this novel contains absolutely gorgeous writing. When the story flags (which it sometimes does), Gass's sparkling prose picks up the weight of carrying the reader forwards.
Yet it is not exactly the prose that made this such a magnificent novel so much as... how to put it... the music behind the prose. The strange, atonal energy of this book. Certain sections, such as Joey's time working at the library, Joey's piano lessons, are so richly detailed, so perfectly paced, so masterfully delicate, like something suspended perfectly above an abyss, balancing, that the novel achieved a kind of lyrical flow I've only experienced before in music. I felt carried by something beyond the pages through the intricate labyrinth of character and meaning.
But now I'm rambling.
Here we are. William H. Gass has died. But he has left behind this tome of exquisitely crafted beauty. I savored this book, stretched out the reading experience over almost two months, before devouring the finale in a single sitting. Now its over, just like a life is over. Melodramatic? Certainly, but this is a dramatic book. Highly, highly recommended. This is a tour-de-force, a masterpiece.
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 covers of Middle C and now set fingers to keyboard in an attempt to write why I enjoyed it, why you should read it, the usual.
Some have taken Mr. Gass to task for the misanthropy expressed in this novel, the hatred, the giddy lists of human atrocities, the seeming bitterness. They have entirely missed the point. This is not a misanthropic book, it does not, as the back cover proclaims, "Half wish humanity was wiped off the map." Only one character in the book - Joey, Joseph, Professor Skizzen (he has many selves) - wishes these things. In his small Ohio home he has almost childishly apocalyptic visions of destruction and war, maggots and starvation, fire and blood. The old professor is a monstrous figure of hatred, not the bold hatred of a warrior, but the petty, pathetic hatred of a shriveled man raging at a world he cannot control. Gass wants to know how a man becomes such a monster.
Perhaps in a way Gass's interrogation of the factors leading to the hatred-filled wreck known as "Professor Skizzen" is also an interrogation of himself. Gass proudly declared that he writes because he hates, and has penned such invective as, "Sports, politics, and religion are the three passions of the badly educated." All fiction is autobiographical in a way, and certainly Gass's struggles with misanthropy in this text most likely correspond to struggles in his own life.
Yet I never once felt during this book that Gass endorsed Skizzen's misanthropy. He wants to analyze it. He wants to understand it. In a way he wants to cure it, not just in Skizzen, but maybe even in himself.
Perhaps I'm just projecting my thoughts on the book, but there is a scene near the end of this novel (during the furiously inventive final 100 pages), during which Skizzen attempts to justify and understand the things that have happened to him, the misfortunes he has undergone, and this scene informs my argument that Gass is not interested in expressing misanthropy, he is interested in understanding how misanthropy develops.
Joey was innocent. He had not stolen the diamond-pointed needle from Mr. Kazan's store. He had not given Professor Ludens the least encouragement. He had not had evil intentions when he accepted Madame Mieux's invitation, or succumbed in any way to intoxicating smoke in Mieux's nest of cozy pillows. He had not made sinful overtures to the Major or taken advantage of Portho's poverty. He had not conspired to defame or overthrow the Lutheran church whatever Rector Gunter Luthardt might say. He had returned all his borrowed books to the library. He had persuaded the college to feed the school's emaciated collection of recordings until it was plump, if not fat.
Yet the narrator is not satisfied, and responds, "But you stole garden seeds from the school shed."
See, the reason I found Middle C such an enlightening, instructing, and in a way, terrifying book was that it is one of the few books that communicates so effectively how important in the long run our smallest decisions now might be. Again and again we see how the things that people do to Joey from childhood onward have massive repercussions later on. Skizzen has been hurt, little-by-little, by so many people, there are so many factors he cannot control. Yet the narration insists that nevertheless he still had a choice. That it was still small decisions that determined his fate.
And in this way, Middle C is a weirdly encouraging book. It tells us that regardless of all the people that will harm us, the things we will be falsely accused of, the people that will conspire to hurt us, we are still in control of our destiny, that it is our choices which inform our future.
Skizzen fails to realize that, and as a result, blaming others as he goes, he finds himself on the road to misery and despair.
Thus, like Gaddis's The Recognitions, this book might be read as a cautionary tale. That's not all this book has in common with Gaddis's 956 page juggernaut, however. Both books begin with a prologue detailing the story of the protagonist's father, both books deal extensively with forgery, and both books contain strong and well-realized themes about identity and the self.
Yet Middle C is, in my opinion, superior to The Recognitions. For one, it accomplishes at least the same amount of thematic depth in almost a third of the length, but it is also more hopeful, more human, and easier to relate to. Gaddis's pontificating artists are separated from us viewers, whereas Gass's cast of suburban librarians, gardeners, and professors are charming characters who I would not mind getting to know a bit better.
Not to mention that Gass's prose is better than Gaddis's as well. Gass has a certain melancholy cream behind his sentences that effortlessly surpasses Gaddis's overwrought religiosity and portentous allusions.
Now that I have broached the subject of prose, I realize how much I have yet to discuss in this review. For in addition to the weighty themes, this novel contains absolutely gorgeous writing. When the story flags (which it sometimes does), Gass's sparkling prose picks up the weight of carrying the reader forwards.
Yet it is not exactly the prose that made this such a magnificent novel so much as... how to put it... the music behind the prose. The strange, atonal energy of this book. Certain sections, such as Joey's time working at the library, Joey's piano lessons, are so richly detailed, so perfectly paced, so masterfully delicate, like something suspended perfectly above an abyss, balancing, that the novel achieved a kind of lyrical flow I've only experienced before in music. I felt carried by something beyond the pages through the intricate labyrinth of character and meaning.
But now I'm rambling.
Here we are. William H. Gass has died. But he has left behind this tome of exquisitely crafted beauty. I savored this book, stretched out the reading experience over almost two months, before devouring the finale in a single sitting. Now its over, just like a life is over. Melodramatic? Certainly, but this is a dramatic book. Highly, highly recommended. This is a tour-de-force, a masterpiece.
Read
March 13, 2013There are writers one respects and admires, but doesn’t necessarily enjoy reading. Gass—for me—falls into this category. Middle C is an impressive and ambitious novel, which—hard as I tried—I couldn’t finish. The protagonist, Joseph, is the son of an Austrian man who, in order to get his family away from the Nazis, took the identity of a Jewish man, then, when the war ended, disappeared. The family moved from England to America—where Joseph’s story begins.
Like his father, Joseph is a musician—and if you are a lover of classical music, Gass’s outstanding knowledge on the subject is certainly a plus. Joseph keeps reflecting on the fate of humanity by way of rephrasing a sentence, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Raymond Queneau did something similar in Exercises of Style—but Queneau is a very playful, funny writer, while Gass is a very serious one, and his numerous variations on the above sentence become tiresome. In fact, turning the pages of this book was the equivalent of a heavy lifting, in spite of Gass’s amazingly intricate-beautiful style.
As unenthusiastic as this review sounds, I want to thank Knopf for having published this “reader-unfriendly,” challenging novel. These days, it is a treat to feel, as a reader, that a publisher wants to lift you (up), rather than satisfy your lowest impulses.
Like his father, Joseph is a musician—and if you are a lover of classical music, Gass’s outstanding knowledge on the subject is certainly a plus. Joseph keeps reflecting on the fate of humanity by way of rephrasing a sentence, “The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure.” Raymond Queneau did something similar in Exercises of Style—but Queneau is a very playful, funny writer, while Gass is a very serious one, and his numerous variations on the above sentence become tiresome. In fact, turning the pages of this book was the equivalent of a heavy lifting, in spite of Gass’s amazingly intricate-beautiful style.
As unenthusiastic as this review sounds, I want to thank Knopf for having published this “reader-unfriendly,” challenging novel. These days, it is a treat to feel, as a reader, that a publisher wants to lift you (up), rather than satisfy your lowest impulses.
October 10, 2014
Another book that I should re-read after listening to the audiobook . . . And a really good complement to the new Joanna Scott book, both of which involve the idea of reinventing one's self.
Anyway, I was going to give this four stars, but then, in the final chapter, there is this poem:
"The Faculty Meeting"
This is the way we smirk and sigh, lurk and spy, favor buy
this is the way we smile and lie
to prepare for the faculty meeting.
This is the way we bluff our way, fluff our way, gruff our way,
this is the way we puff and bray
throughout the faculty meeting.
This is the way we cheat and bleat, bow and scrape, preen and prate,
this is the way we obfuscate
during the faculty meeting.
[. . .]
This is the way we hatch our plots, cast our lots, pick our spots,
this is the way we get our gots
by steering the faculty meeting.
This is the way we kiss an ass, lick a dick, turn a trick,
this is why we get quite sick
to learn what the dead is scheming.
So this is the way we'll buck the trends, fake amends, forget our ends,
this is the way we'll fuck our friends
by the end of the faculty meeting.
Bonus star!
Anyway, I was going to give this four stars, but then, in the final chapter, there is this poem:
"The Faculty Meeting"
This is the way we smirk and sigh, lurk and spy, favor buy
this is the way we smile and lie
to prepare for the faculty meeting.
This is the way we bluff our way, fluff our way, gruff our way,
this is the way we puff and bray
throughout the faculty meeting.
This is the way we cheat and bleat, bow and scrape, preen and prate,
this is the way we obfuscate
during the faculty meeting.
[. . .]
This is the way we hatch our plots, cast our lots, pick our spots,
this is the way we get our gots
by steering the faculty meeting.
This is the way we kiss an ass, lick a dick, turn a trick,
this is why we get quite sick
to learn what the dead is scheming.
So this is the way we'll buck the trends, fake amends, forget our ends,
this is the way we'll fuck our friends
by the end of the faculty meeting.
Bonus star!
June 13, 2024
The alternating narrative threads converge in a rather pleasing way.
Started reading this one very slow, read half of it in two nights and then dropped the pace to slower than my start so to draw it out. Glad I did. This book is an easy read but not for those who need S*U*S*P*E*N*S*E to turn a page.
Gass uses a light, wry humor to illumine some ugly human truths. Other reviewers here are investigating this text's Meaning. Here I will just make small comments on style.
Too many beautiful sentences to list but this one bit from the main character's music lecture really stands out:
Another of Eno's aphorisms on music/art is to "use less notes" — while the Middle C left me wanting more, a few bits could have been shaved off or sentences tightened. But I'm perfectly happy with it as it is.
Started reading this one very slow, read half of it in two nights and then dropped the pace to slower than my start so to draw it out. Glad I did. This book is an easy read but not for those who need S*U*S*P*E*N*S*E to turn a page.
Gass uses a light, wry humor to illumine some ugly human truths. Other reviewers here are investigating this text's Meaning. Here I will just make small comments on style.
Too many beautiful sentences to list but this one bit from the main character's music lecture really stands out:
Now cast your eyes upon the palette that modern circumstances have placed before the composer, all pertaining to the nature of any singled-out sound or insect's whir. There is the instrument that is its source, as the cricket's is of its, and any messages that may be traced to it, for instance, the call of a bullfrog or the whistle given girls; there is the placement of the instrument in the pit, on the platform of the concert hall, or for solo or ensemble performance in a historic chamber; there is the choice of size and shape the musician must give his note (fat or thin, loud or soft, crisp or slurred) and the qualities of sound that can be expected from each of a hundred sorts of instrument; moreover, to be accounted for, there are the relations this note has with other notes (those that precede, those that follow, those that suffer or enjoy polychords, clusters, skeins, runs, motifs, themes, as well as all the other groups of notes that are treated as an entity—clouds of notes, cascades, fistfuls, snivels of notes—and all those with whom it shares rhythmic relations; repeated notes, notes that have been given a dominant position, those who satisfy subordinate roles, compositions in keys and styles and size, that have historical associations, reflect common customs, or reveal well-known intentions. Cast eyes and cry: too many and too much; take away this hive of opportunity, this surfeit of choice, and let us retire to simpler times when such a plethora was not recognized, our eardrums were not African, and our serious intentions were pious.Later last night I read Rick Moody's essay on Brian Eno (in the anthology Cooking And Stealing though it also appears in the first issue of Tin House) and read that Eno once said that 90s electronica "needed more Africa" a critique which can be applied to nearly anything. While The Middle C could certainly be more polyrhythmatic, I'd say that it achieves a sufficient balance between unity and variation.
Another of Eno's aphorisms on music/art is to "use less notes" — while the Middle C left me wanting more, a few bits could have been shaved off or sentences tightened. But I'm perfectly happy with it as it is.
June 14, 2013
In music as well as education, "C" is synonymous with average, mediocre, boring, forgettable. Middle C is found near the exact center of a standard 88-key piano. C major, with no sharps or flats, is the most common and easiest key to play in. Although many musicians prefer more complicated keys, some view composing in C as a challenge: how to make an exciting, compelling piece of music in the most unexciting of keys.
That, apparently, was William Gass' self-imposed challenge. The main character in Middle C, Joseph, is primarily motivated by the desire to be so average and unattached as to become unnoticed by society at large. To try to spice the book up, Gass writes each chapter with varying literary styles, techniques, and tones, much as Aaron Copland wove numerous variations of a simple Shaker hymn into "Appalachian Spring."
But I found this book unsatisfying. First, not much actually happens plotwise, and there's almost zero character development. Some call this book a coming of age story, but to me it's the exact opposite. The middle aged Joseph at the end of the book is no different from the boy at the beginning. He hasn't learned anything. He hasn't bettered himself. He hasn't improved his own life or those around him. He hasn't even bothered to form meaningful relationships with ANYONE, including his family or any prospects for a wife. He's just one note, boring old middle C, and you need more than one note to make good music.
Which makes the book depressing, isolating, and nihilistic. Joseph rambles on and on about how awful society is and how humanity would be better off extinct. He compiles information for a "museum of inhumanity" to prove his point. And if Joseph is a typical specimen of humanity, the reader is forced to agree with him.
Kurt Vonnegut can write some really soul-sucking stuff that makes you question whether society deserves to keep living. But beneath it all, Vonnegut was a wry closet optimist masquerading as a cranky old man. His books contain enough dark humor and insight to ultimately lift your spirits. This book, on the other hand, is squarely stranded in a purgatory of middle C.
That, apparently, was William Gass' self-imposed challenge. The main character in Middle C, Joseph, is primarily motivated by the desire to be so average and unattached as to become unnoticed by society at large. To try to spice the book up, Gass writes each chapter with varying literary styles, techniques, and tones, much as Aaron Copland wove numerous variations of a simple Shaker hymn into "Appalachian Spring."
But I found this book unsatisfying. First, not much actually happens plotwise, and there's almost zero character development. Some call this book a coming of age story, but to me it's the exact opposite. The middle aged Joseph at the end of the book is no different from the boy at the beginning. He hasn't learned anything. He hasn't bettered himself. He hasn't improved his own life or those around him. He hasn't even bothered to form meaningful relationships with ANYONE, including his family or any prospects for a wife. He's just one note, boring old middle C, and you need more than one note to make good music.
Which makes the book depressing, isolating, and nihilistic. Joseph rambles on and on about how awful society is and how humanity would be better off extinct. He compiles information for a "museum of inhumanity" to prove his point. And if Joseph is a typical specimen of humanity, the reader is forced to agree with him.
Kurt Vonnegut can write some really soul-sucking stuff that makes you question whether society deserves to keep living. But beneath it all, Vonnegut was a wry closet optimist masquerading as a cranky old man. His books contain enough dark humor and insight to ultimately lift your spirits. This book, on the other hand, is squarely stranded in a purgatory of middle C.
Read
March 3, 2017While it couldn't match Gass' late masterpiece The Tunnel, a book that screamed at me and tried to hurt me (I say that in the best possible way), Middle C is nonetheless quite a force to be reckoned with. There is a seemingly straightforward plot about the series of lies that compose a single man's life -- something you can almost imagine Philip Roth spinning -- is undermined by all kinds of oddities, identity crises, and an overwhelming obsession with genocide. As will happen when you read a Gass book, you get an innate sense of the ickiness of things on the fringe regions that paradoxically lie at the geographic heart of America. As will happen when you read a Gass book, you come to distrust your environment and context as you read. I am the sort of person who is not only OK with this, but believes it is the sort of epistemic and aesthetic stress test a good reader should do from time to time. If you are not OK with this, you will not like it, and chances are, I don't have too much to say to you about books.
January 21, 2014
Caveat: to my shame, I have not read The Tunnel. But I will very soon. Anyway,
There is a lot of tired silliness in this novel: oh, the impermanence of identity! Ah, the Freudianisms of men's relationships at (*not* with) women! Gee, the constructedness of reality! It must be wonderful to live in the intellectual world of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when all these were live, burning issues (including the men at women business? I could be convinced).
And despite all this--seemingly calculated to bore me to tears and have me fling the book across the room with an anguished cry of "Read [e.g., Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Adorno, McDowell, Brandom, Habermas/ Horney, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and no doubt legions of other women I haven't heard of but who can point out how ridiculous said Freudianisms are]!"--despite all this, 'Middle C' moved me intellectually and even emotionally.
It did so with a simple question:
* is it possible to avoid guilt for the evils human beings do to each other and more or less everything else as well?
That question ramifies, as they say, into two more:
* whether it's possible or not, is it morally advisable to try? In other words, what evils would you be forced to commit as you tried to avoid guilt for other peoples' evils?
* whether it's possible or not, is it *ethically* advisable to try? I.e., what important features of a human life would you have to give up in your (probably Quixotic) quest for total innocence?
Joe Skizzen's father 'Yankel,' runs from Nazifying Austria to England, then runs from his own family, because, he thinks, "To the pure, to the stateless... anything is possible"; which echoes the famous "To the pure, all things are pure" of various mysticisms, as well as the modernist quest summed up in Stephen Daedalus's wish to fly free of the nets of language, state, family etc... (see, e.g., 321).
But the novel is about Joe, not Yankel: Joe wants to emulate his father, who supposedly avoided evil by 'becoming' a Jew during the second world war. But this isn't possible for Joe, who lives in a time when "victimhood was commoner than any common humanity." Instead, he tries to be completely normal, middling, as in the title's pun. But the normality he seeks is merely invisibility in the eyes of history; otherwise, he considers himself an aesthete, and compares himself to, among others, Karl Kraus and Robert Musil.
The most entertaining chapters detail Joe's attempt to craft an aesthetically perfect version of the sentence, "The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure." Our narrator lets loose with some fabulous, nihilistic rants. The final version, revealed on page 213, is modeled, badly, on twelve-tone musical techniques.
Joe also makes the Inhumanity Museum; here the muses are invoked that they might make it possible to sing of our evils, rather than, as in a traditional museum, our learning and abilities.
He's in a position to do so because he's created an identity for himself: roughly half way through the novel, a co-worker helps him make a convincing fake ID. She's a kindred spirit: "He who has lived and thought can never... look on mankind without dis-dain, Miss Moss said firmly, as if speaking about the photo she'd just taken." She loves language as he will come to do; "When the world ends the word will write on... wordulating." He takes some things from Miss Moss, makes up a bunch of other things, and lies his way into an associate professorship at a small midwestern college.
In other entertaining adventures,
* he discovers ideology critique, "even the most ordinary tunes could... make acceptable some of the cruelest and coarsest of human attitudes," (233), and confronts the idea that ideology critique is all well and good for some, but that for the majority of people, a little opium of the masses is a lot better than the alernative ("Sometimes you deserve to be down in the dumps./ Hey, I own a dump, I don't have to live there. She sang "I gotta right to sing the blues, I gotta right to feel low down."")
* he provides us with a postmodernist's history of modern music, curiously relevant to Gass's position in comparison to modern literature (chapter 25, p 236).
He occasionally realizes that his father didn't succeed in his quest to "escape the world's moral tarnish," because he'd treated his family so shabbily, (253). His own failings become obvious--he compares his mother's garden to a fascist state, then feel bad about his bad ideology critique and quote Voltaire on the necessity of tending one's garden. And his mother responds "So I do. But you, Professor, you do not. What do you do but... play the day through with paste and snippers. As in... the Kinder's Garten," (271). He goes back and forth on his own nihilism, glorying in the "legacy of the great Athenians" and the dream of Kant's kingdom of ends (285), but knows that such a thing is impossible--which, instead of suggesting the barrenness of mere individualism, leads him towards Ortega Y Gasset territory. He scolds himself for having "no real beliefs," 316. He struggles with the illogical nature of his belief that evil is inevitable and also immoral. But ultimately he holds on to his position: no matter what you say, at least I'm not guilty, (350). If I'm a fake, everyone is a fake (353).
The end of the novel is wonderful, and worth concealing, but the important intellectual point can be made without it: unlike Bartok, who took the roiling evil around him, put it in his music, but created nonetheless a triumphant work of beauty, Skizzen sits in his attic, a postmodern anti-Pangloss to his mother's Candide. His life answers the three questions:
* No.
* No.
* No.
Or does it? Because it's very hard to distinguish Skizzen's beliefs, his rants and his voice from those you'll find in any given book of Gass's essays--ultra-individualistic, knee-jerkily anti-clerical, gleefully nihilistic, craftsmanlike, concerned with language, concerned with the history of art. Everything, in short, except that Gass, as here, has obviously taken the horror of the world and made something in the face of it.
[Sadly, some slight missteps undermine the book in, I've concluded, an unintended way (i.e., I don't see how the following things can be rationalized as due to an unreliable narrator; nor, for that matter, do I see how the narrator of this book is unreliable). These are ridiculous quibbles, but they suggest that Vintage needs to check its editors: Joe sells people hip-hop and grunge albums in the 'sixties. The second movement of a symphony is described as a "candrizans" (cf, cancrizans).]
**********************
"It appeared to Professor Skizzen, now, that reason was no more than an instrument of human appetites, the way our teeth and tummies are, precisely as some philosophers had suggested (though he had at first resisted them)", 212.
There is a lot of tired silliness in this novel: oh, the impermanence of identity! Ah, the Freudianisms of men's relationships at (*not* with) women! Gee, the constructedness of reality! It must be wonderful to live in the intellectual world of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when all these were live, burning issues (including the men at women business? I could be convinced).
And despite all this--seemingly calculated to bore me to tears and have me fling the book across the room with an anguished cry of "Read [e.g., Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Adorno, McDowell, Brandom, Habermas/ Horney, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and no doubt legions of other women I haven't heard of but who can point out how ridiculous said Freudianisms are]!"--despite all this, 'Middle C' moved me intellectually and even emotionally.
It did so with a simple question:
* is it possible to avoid guilt for the evils human beings do to each other and more or less everything else as well?
That question ramifies, as they say, into two more:
* whether it's possible or not, is it morally advisable to try? In other words, what evils would you be forced to commit as you tried to avoid guilt for other peoples' evils?
* whether it's possible or not, is it *ethically* advisable to try? I.e., what important features of a human life would you have to give up in your (probably Quixotic) quest for total innocence?
Joe Skizzen's father 'Yankel,' runs from Nazifying Austria to England, then runs from his own family, because, he thinks, "To the pure, to the stateless... anything is possible"; which echoes the famous "To the pure, all things are pure" of various mysticisms, as well as the modernist quest summed up in Stephen Daedalus's wish to fly free of the nets of language, state, family etc... (see, e.g., 321).
But the novel is about Joe, not Yankel: Joe wants to emulate his father, who supposedly avoided evil by 'becoming' a Jew during the second world war. But this isn't possible for Joe, who lives in a time when "victimhood was commoner than any common humanity." Instead, he tries to be completely normal, middling, as in the title's pun. But the normality he seeks is merely invisibility in the eyes of history; otherwise, he considers himself an aesthete, and compares himself to, among others, Karl Kraus and Robert Musil.
The most entertaining chapters detail Joe's attempt to craft an aesthetically perfect version of the sentence, "The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure." Our narrator lets loose with some fabulous, nihilistic rants. The final version, revealed on page 213, is modeled, badly, on twelve-tone musical techniques.
Joe also makes the Inhumanity Museum; here the muses are invoked that they might make it possible to sing of our evils, rather than, as in a traditional museum, our learning and abilities.
He's in a position to do so because he's created an identity for himself: roughly half way through the novel, a co-worker helps him make a convincing fake ID. She's a kindred spirit: "He who has lived and thought can never... look on mankind without dis-dain, Miss Moss said firmly, as if speaking about the photo she'd just taken." She loves language as he will come to do; "When the world ends the word will write on... wordulating." He takes some things from Miss Moss, makes up a bunch of other things, and lies his way into an associate professorship at a small midwestern college.
In other entertaining adventures,
* he discovers ideology critique, "even the most ordinary tunes could... make acceptable some of the cruelest and coarsest of human attitudes," (233), and confronts the idea that ideology critique is all well and good for some, but that for the majority of people, a little opium of the masses is a lot better than the alernative ("Sometimes you deserve to be down in the dumps./ Hey, I own a dump, I don't have to live there. She sang "I gotta right to sing the blues, I gotta right to feel low down."")
* he provides us with a postmodernist's history of modern music, curiously relevant to Gass's position in comparison to modern literature (chapter 25, p 236).
He occasionally realizes that his father didn't succeed in his quest to "escape the world's moral tarnish," because he'd treated his family so shabbily, (253). His own failings become obvious--he compares his mother's garden to a fascist state, then feel bad about his bad ideology critique and quote Voltaire on the necessity of tending one's garden. And his mother responds "So I do. But you, Professor, you do not. What do you do but... play the day through with paste and snippers. As in... the Kinder's Garten," (271). He goes back and forth on his own nihilism, glorying in the "legacy of the great Athenians" and the dream of Kant's kingdom of ends (285), but knows that such a thing is impossible--which, instead of suggesting the barrenness of mere individualism, leads him towards Ortega Y Gasset territory. He scolds himself for having "no real beliefs," 316. He struggles with the illogical nature of his belief that evil is inevitable and also immoral. But ultimately he holds on to his position: no matter what you say, at least I'm not guilty, (350). If I'm a fake, everyone is a fake (353).
The end of the novel is wonderful, and worth concealing, but the important intellectual point can be made without it: unlike Bartok, who took the roiling evil around him, put it in his music, but created nonetheless a triumphant work of beauty, Skizzen sits in his attic, a postmodern anti-Pangloss to his mother's Candide. His life answers the three questions:
* No.
* No.
* No.
Or does it? Because it's very hard to distinguish Skizzen's beliefs, his rants and his voice from those you'll find in any given book of Gass's essays--ultra-individualistic, knee-jerkily anti-clerical, gleefully nihilistic, craftsmanlike, concerned with language, concerned with the history of art. Everything, in short, except that Gass, as here, has obviously taken the horror of the world and made something in the face of it.
[Sadly, some slight missteps undermine the book in, I've concluded, an unintended way (i.e., I don't see how the following things can be rationalized as due to an unreliable narrator; nor, for that matter, do I see how the narrator of this book is unreliable). These are ridiculous quibbles, but they suggest that Vintage needs to check its editors: Joe sells people hip-hop and grunge albums in the 'sixties. The second movement of a symphony is described as a "candrizans" (cf, cancrizans).]
**********************
"It appeared to Professor Skizzen, now, that reason was no more than an instrument of human appetites, the way our teeth and tummies are, precisely as some philosophers had suggested (though he had at first resisted them)", 212.
February 13, 2015
This book was beautiful. I'm not sure that I've ever seen anything so good at the sentence level. A new favorite for the end of 2014.
November 7, 2013
Middle C is a paradox. The idea of the bright ring of the note is both as an accolade, praise, or an award. But it's also a reference to mediocrity. The novel is the story of Professor Joseph Skizzen, who teaches music at a small Ohio college. Because he has no teaching credentials, not even a degree, and because he emigrated to America without documentation of any kind and is necessarily forced to live a documentless life, it's important that he live that life without drawing attention to himself. He has arrived at middle age content and secure in his middling mediocrity. Another paradox is that Middle C is a language novel. William H. Gass has written a novel about mediocrity in language that springs with energy. Gass's prose is rich in metaphor, allusion, and puns. Each paragraph is loaded with idea. Each sentence takes the reader through meandering verbal currents or else rockets him down dense tricky cataracts of language. Either way will get you to a pool of wonder and appreciation, and to greater understanding of human truths filtered through the bland Joseph Skizzen and those around him. Though its subject is deliberate insignificance, paradoxically this novel is a blend of the diluted ambition of Joseph Skizzen with the nimble mind of William H. Gass.
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