I pulled an old paperback of William Gass’s first novel, Omensetter’s Luck, off the shelf at the bookstore one afternoon when I was done shelving and needed a break. It starts with an estate sale and an old man hanging around, talking at whoever will listen. I took the book home.

I’ve been avoiding Gass a long time. I’m all in with William Gaddis, whose name is so similar that they were often mistaken for one another. Both wrote long, difficult books throughout the second half of the 20th century. I might have tried The Tunnel once and given up pretty quickly. If I did, it was certainly before I tried to write myself. Since then, beautiful sentences have become a lot more important than narrative coherence or logical comprehension. The things I get the most out of now are often things I hardly even understand. It’s the sound of the phrases, the rhythms, that grab me.

Having recently worked on Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury helped prime me for the amorphous, abstract atmosphere of this book. Faulkner is often cited as a big influence on Gass.

A plot summary of Omensetter wouldn’t do much to give a sense of what it’s like to read. There are passages that are so non sequitur that I forgot what I was even reading. It’s very much a stream of consciousness thing and that stream is an ugly, poisoned body of water indeed. The insides of the head of a corrupt pastor in a small Ohio town at the end of the 19th century is not a cosy place to be. And yet I read on.

…I remember there were rings in the pools of water by the road, and I thought how exciting for the boy to live by the river, to catch fish and keep frogs, you know; grow up with good excitement. Now he’s sick, Curtis, in this low place, and there’s no honest snow to cover it or cold to hold it coldly even, and the hill we came by is still a slippery yellow. The boy is going to die, Curtis. I just feel—I’m scared he’s going to die.

Occasionally, I put the book down and searched the availability of Gass’s other books online. I learned that Dalkey is publishing a new edition of The Tunnel on the occasion of its 40th anniversary. Maybe I’ll work up to that one eventually. In the meantime, I checked Middle C out from the downtown library.

The preorder for The Sound and the Fury is up. Tell all your friends and relations.