The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas by William H. Gass
Arthur Saltzman

William H. Gass. Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas. Knopf, 1998. 274 pp. $24.00.

William Gass regularly demonstrates how the artist’s devotion is best measured by his concern for the language he cultivates; his scruple and injunction is that beauty, vision, and morality require the precision and ingenuity of sentences lovingly constructed. Indeed, the dry prairie solitudes that dominate these four novellas prove to be rich soil for linguistic enterprises. Disappointments and hatreds still sparkle with imagery and inspire alliterative runs that belie the conditions of the characters, whose funks and futilities recall those of Gass’s previous Midwestern populations in Omensetter’s Luck and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.

The title novella features a poisonous marriage reminiscent of the Kohlers in The Tunnel. It pits airy, clairvoyant Ella Bend Hess against her abusive Caliban of a husband, Edgar—mind and matter, recoiling from one another, yet inevitably knotted together in mutual complaint. Gass again makes exquisite rhetorical capital out of such unsentimental motives as blame, anger, misogyny, guilt, and disaffection. Thus, even as “Cartesian Sonata” steeps the human spirit in a muddle of primal urges, it strives to redeem our creatureliness through style.

While “Cartesian Sonata” reworks writings going back over thirty years, the other three novellas are of recent vintage. Gass’s consistency of theme and method over that period suggests that his fictions elaborate the artistic philosophy of his renowned essays. Walt Riff, an itinerant accountant and cooker of books, finds religion in the abundant, meticulously cared-for kitsch at a rural “Bed and Breakfast.” Pinched, despairing, arid Emma Bishop beats a retreat into an obsession with poetry in “Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop’s.” And Luther Penner, “The Master of Secret Revenges,” refines an aesthetic of retribution in the fevered tradition of Jethro Furber, to name another of Gass’s prominent fascists of the heart.

A lavish imagination is all that is lovely about any of Gass’s isolated minds. In each novella, meanness or poverty sets us up for ambushes by lines too marvelous to miss. [Arthur Saltzman]