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Willie Masters' Lonesome WifeAuthor: William H. Gass American Literature Series December 1989 64 pages, 5.5 x 8.5 Dimensions: Paperback, 1-56478-212-3 Retail Paperback Price: Our Paperback Price: $9.56—20% OFF! 
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Book Description
In this paean to the pleasures of language, Gass equates his text with the body of Babs Masters, the lonesome wife of the title, to advance the conceit that a parallel should exist between a woman and her lover and a book and its reader. Disappointed by her inattentive husband/reader, Babs engages in an exuberant display of the physical charms of language to entice an illicit new lover: a man named Gelvin in one sense, but more importantly, the reader of this "essay-novella" which, in the years since its first appearance in 1968 as a supplement to TriQuarterly, has attained the status of a postmodernist classic.
Like Laurence Sterne and Lewis Carroll before him, Gass uses a variety of visual devices: photographs, comic-strip balloons, different typefaces, parallel story lines (sometimes three or four to the page), even coffee stains. As Larry McCaffery has pointed out, "the lonesome lady of the book's title, who is gradually revealed to be lady language herself, creates an elaborate series of devices which she hopes will draw attention to her slighted charms [and] force the reader to confront what she literally is: a physically exciting literary text."
About the Author
| William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critic Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in St. Louis. |  |
Praise
"What we have, after finishing the book, is a retrospective sense of having witnessed—assisted at—a ventriloquial showpiece of literary style in which Gass, by juxtaposing the humdrum with the histrionic, has worked compassion into a just rhetoric that runs the gamut of human commotion from spit to spirit . . . To my mind, Gass here proves that straight, rectilinear prose is no longer sufficient for the writer who wants to discuss the spirit of the age with the people most aware of it. How right and fitting it is that one of the evoked ghosts in Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is "Sam" (not Johnson or Beckett, but Samuel Taylor Coleridge, high priest of imagination, the 'esemplastic' or unifying power). For Gass here raises that power to its highest and, in so doing sets an alternative standard for American narrative prose."—Paul West, Washington Post Book World"Gass's text takes us into the heart of the heart of the desolations of our corporeal existence, but it also takes us into 'the sweet country of the word'—writer and reader talking and dying alike, the lonesome self losing and recreating itself in language, the prison house turning itself into the playhouse before our very eyes."—Tony Tanner, Salmagundi
"Mr. Gass's experiment in prose fiction offers innovations in form, imagination in concept, and complete originality in execution . . . Plain fun aside, the book is lyrical and above all poignant, ending in impeccable symbolic fashion with the picture of an umbilicus stained by the ring of a coffee cup."—Virginia Quarterly Review
"As the women's movement began to shape itself, Gass responded, and helped to shape its literature, with plaints from a lonesome wife. Willie Masters' wife has no name and is 'owned,' but she does not fit readily into any of Betty Friedan's categories. Nevertheless, she is part of that 'feminine mystique,' a woman whose passivity and desire to please veil a multileveled sensitivity . . . Without page numbers or name, she is obliged to wander through the narrative without any focal point, a voice among voices, an unclear identity amidst several roles she has played, as younger woman, wife, subservient female figure. Her self has been dismembered or eradicated, the archetypal female situation. This conception of the wife—a voice, unnamed, unpaged, unidentified—is Gass's triumph in the novella."—Frederick R. Karl, American Fictions 1940-1980
"Shattering conventional expectations about how we read or how a work of fiction should be organized, Willie Masters' is an especially clear and ambitious representation of a metafictional work—and a virtual casebook of literary experimentalism as well."—Larry McCaffery, The Metafictional Muse
"William Gass has found new ways of expressing his sense of the human condition . . . [Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife] make[s] its contribution by displaying new resources of language . . . [Gass] is forging a new style to serve a new purpose."—Granville Hicks, Saturday Review
More Information
Also by William H. Gass:A Temple of Texts
Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas
The Tunnel
The Tunnel read by William H. Gass