Name: In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
ISBN: 9781590177648

William H. Gass

In the Heart of the Heart of the Countryis vintage William H. Gass- two novellas and three short stories, set in the Midwest, exhibiting Gass's characteristic and wildly original verbal brilliance and philosophical acuity. The volume includes The Pedersen Kid,a story originally published a few years before the 1965 publication of Gass's first novel Omensetter's Luck. Words populate these stories, as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, neuroses, and properties they describe. No matter how strange or estranged the human consciousness directing each symphony of words, his or her fear, delight, and disgust is uncanny and familiar.

And Other Stories

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country

As my reading tastes have changed I’ve gained an appreciation towards writers who treat prose like poetry. That is, those writers who have very little regard for a ‘plot’ (for what does a plot matter, anyway) or ‘character development’ (a kind of nebulous term), ‘moral instruction’ (which is for children’s stories, in my opinion) and, at its most extreme conceptualisation ‘purpose’, as in, to oppose to my pet peeve criticism of a lot of experimental authors of ‘this doesn’t add anything.’ What I learned to appreciate was an author whose aesthetic value is elucidated solely from the words and sentences themselves. An author who just respects the essence of words on the page, and covets and recognises this kind of inherent power in writing. William H Gass is that kind of author, and I’m very glad to have read him for the first time.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (I’m just going to shorten it to In the Heart, which is, now that I think about it, a fitting abbreviation and conducive to the overarching theme of the collection) contains 5 stories, with the titular story being the final one in the collection. I won’t go into full synopsis mode (one never can, really, in unconventional literature) but these stories are the following: Mrs Mean, a first person account of a misanthropic man’s observations of his suburban neighbours, including the dreadfully abusive mother his house opposes; Icicles, a funny, almost satirical account of a real estate agent’s descent into madness after icicles grow on his house; Order of Insects, where an obsessive housewife reflects on cleanliness and ugliness after discovering unknown insect carcasses in her rug; the title story In the Heart…, which details the almost sociological observations of a narrator in a small town in Indiana, giving subtitled rundowns of all aspects of the locale, as if writing a report.

And there’s the opening story until here, The Pedersen Kid, which I’ll give special attention because I think it is definitely my favourite story in the collection, and, to be honest, for me stands to be one of the greatest short stories/novellas I’ve read in my life (though, I’m afraid maybe I’ve been filtered, because it is the most conventional story in the collection in terms of storytelling and structure). Told in three parts from a child narrator’s perspective, The Pedersen Kid tells the story of a boy found frozen unconscious in a snowdrift in a farmers’ estate; Jorge (the narrator), his father, and a farmhand look to investigate the man the boy may or may not have been running from, who may or may not have held his family hostage. An odyssey is embarked upon, but ever present and enveloping the trio is this biblical blizzard covering everything and forcing characters into an icy, cruel delirium.

The limited vocabulary of the rural American child narrator reminded me a lot of Faulkner, but here it’s even more confusing. Lines bleed into lines, there’s odd whitespace abound, no speech marks or conventional line breaks or italics are offered, so it takes effort to figure out what’s speech and what’s a thought, who’s speaking, what’s hallucinatory and what’s real, what’s a memory and what’s happening instantly. It’s a step beyond the stream-of-consciousness traditional to modernism to something more avant garde. And when it kicks into the third act, it is genuinely such an invigorating and terrifying story that had me gripped and confused and in awe of how well executed the concept was. These same techniques were employed in every other story in the collection, but nothing matched the sheer intensity and scope of the opening for me, unfortunately. 

Gass’s postmodern (though he may have rejected the term), experimental style makes for difficult but rewarding reading. The author I was most reminded of was Clarice Lispector, with her piercing interiority and disregard for storytelling and comprehensive norms. But opposed to Lispector’s winking beauty, heat and delicacy, Gass is hateful, focussed on pain and rage, cold, the horrors of the body and flesh, and the repetitious nature of paranoia, loneliness and anxiety. In an interview given to The Paris Review, Gass answers ‘I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.’ In his preface he writes that he writes to nurse a toothache. This hatred is so present in these stories it almost becomes overwhelming. For example, in Mrs Mean, the narrator gaslights a man about his portentous skin conditions just to invoke his fear of death, for fun, it seems! But this hatred isn’t mean-spirited, in fact it’s almost the most extreme form of empathy—why pretend life is all beautiful in art, and not present ourselves at our worst, which is also our most real?

Each short story is also about habitation, and place, and one’s connection from the internal to the external world. Gass, being itinerant from middle America to academic suburbia, beautifully places the loneliness that is common to everywhere, but with a special emphasis on the solitude of Nowhere—where people live secret, internal, depressing, and largely unobserved lives. Gass’s narrators provide this observation, and it is as touching and melancholic as it is acerbic.

Every story in this collection is so dense with themes and allusions I feel like I could read this collection a thousand times and keep picking new things up. Though the style sometimes came to infuriating points for a simpleton like me, I am still really glad I checked this out and will definitely read more of Gass’s work in the future. 

shain

As my reading tastes have changed I’ve gained an appreciation towards writers who treat prose like poetry. That is, those writers who have very little regard for a ‘plot’ (for what does a plot matter, anyway) or ‘character development’ (a kind of nebulous term), ‘moral instruction’ (which is for children’s stories, in my opinion) and, at its most extreme conceptualisation ‘purpose’, as in, to oppose to my pet peeve criticism of a lot of experimental authors of ‘this doesn’t add anything.’ What I learned to appreciate was an author whose aesthetic value is elucidated solely from the words and sentences themselves. An author who just respects the essence of words on the page, and covets and recognises this kind of inherent power in writing. William H Gass is that kind of author, and I’m very glad to have read him for the first time.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country (I’m just going to shorten it to In the Heart, which is, now that I think about it, a fitting abbreviation and conducive to the overarching theme of the collection) contains 5 stories, with the titular story being the final one in the collection. I won’t go into full synopsis mode (one never can, really, in unconventional literature) but these stories are the following: Mrs Mean, a first person account of a misanthropic man’s observations of his suburban neighbours, including the dreadfully abusive mother his house opposes; Icicles, a funny, almost satirical account of a real estate agent’s descent into madness after icicles grow on his house; Order of Insects, where an obsessive housewife reflects on cleanliness and ugliness after discovering unknown insect carcasses in her rug; the title story In the Heart…, which details the almost sociological observations of a narrator in a small town in Indiana, giving subtitled rundowns of all aspects of the locale, as if writing a report.

And there’s the opening story until here, The Pedersen Kid, which I’ll give special attention because I think it is definitely my favourite story in the collection, and, to be honest, for me stands to be one of the greatest short stories/novellas I’ve read in my life (though, I’m afraid maybe I’ve been filtered, because it is the most conventional story in the collection in terms of storytelling and structure). Told in three parts from a child narrator’s perspective, The Pedersen Kid tells the story of a boy found frozen unconscious in a snowdrift in a farmers’ estate; Jorge (the narrator), his father, and a farmhand look to investigate the man the boy may or may not have been running from, who may or may not have held his family hostage. An odyssey is embarked upon, but ever present and enveloping the trio is this biblical blizzard covering everything and forcing characters into an icy, cruel delirium.

The limited vocabulary of the rural American child narrator reminded me a lot of Faulkner, but here it’s even more confusing. Lines bleed into lines, there’s odd whitespace abound, no speech marks or conventional line breaks or italics are offered, so it takes effort to figure out what’s speech and what’s a thought, who’s speaking, what’s hallucinatory and what’s real, what’s a memory and what’s happening instantly. It’s a step beyond the stream-of-consciousness traditional to modernism to something more avant garde. And when it kicks into the third act, it is genuinely such an invigorating and terrifying story that had me gripped and confused and in awe of how well executed the concept was. These same techniques were employed in every other story in the collection, but nothing matched the sheer intensity and scope of the opening for me, unfortunately. 

Gass’s postmodern (though he may have rejected the term), experimental style makes for difficult but rewarding reading. The author I was most reminded of was Clarice Lispector, with her piercing interiority and disregard for storytelling and comprehensive norms. But opposed to Lispector’s winking beauty, heat and delicacy, Gass is hateful, focussed on pain and rage, cold, the horrors of the body and flesh, and the repetitious nature of paranoia, loneliness and anxiety. In an interview given to The Paris Review, Gass answers ‘I write because I hate. A lot. Hard.’ In his preface he writes that he writes to nurse a toothache. This hatred is so present in these stories it almost becomes overwhelming. For example, in Mrs Mean, the narrator gaslights a man about his portentous skin conditions just to invoke his fear of death, for fun, it seems! But this hatred isn’t mean-spirited, in fact it’s almost the most extreme form of empathy—why pretend life is all beautiful in art, and not present ourselves at our worst, which is also our most real?

Each short story is also about habitation, and place, and one’s connection from the internal to the external world. Gass, being itinerant from middle America to academic suburbia, beautifully places the loneliness that is common to everywhere, but with a special emphasis on the solitude of Nowhere—where people live secret, internal, depressing, and largely unobserved lives. Gass’s narrators provide this observation, and it is as touching and melancholic as it is acerbic.

Every story in this collection is so dense with themes and allusions I feel like I could read this collection a thousand times and keep picking new things up. Though the style sometimes came to infuriating points for a simpleton like me, I am still really glad I checked this out and will definitely read more of Gass’s work in the future. 

Trevor Berrett

My review at The Mookse and the Gripes here.

Gary Homewood

Mostly plotless short stories absolutely packed with artful language, imagery and turn of phrase. "Icicles" is the stand-out for me, fascinatingly detailed, poetic study of real-estate salesmen. This edition includes a preface by the author giving a really interesting context to the writing of the stories.

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country And Other Stories