Happy 90th Birthday to William H. Gass! I discovered In the Heart of the Heart of the Country just as I was going off to college. I read it and read it and read it again. As much as any book it led me to be an English major. Then a couple of years later I wrote my undergraduate thesis on his novel Omensetters Luck (and Malcolm Lowrys Under the Volcano). Grace Paley said he had the greatest gift given an American fiction writer since Melville. Here is the opening section of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: So I have sailed the seas and come …to B …a small town fastened to a field in Indiana. Twice there have been twelve hundred people here to answer to the census. The town is outstandingly neat and shady, and always puts its best side to the highway. On one lawn there’s even a wood or plastic iron deer. You can reach us by crossing a creek. In the spring the lawns are green, the forsythia is singing, and even the railroad that guts the town has straight bright rails which hum when the train is coming, and the train itself has a welcome horning sound. Down the back streets the asphalt crumbles into gravel. There’s Westbrook’s, with the geraniums, Horsefall’s, Mott’s. The sidewalk shatters. Gravel dust rises like breath behind the wagons. And I am in retirement from love.
Posted on: Wed, 30 Jul 2014 12:27:12 +0000