A literary event--the long-awaited novel, almost two decades in work, by
the acclaimed author of The Tunnel ("The most beautiful, most complex,
most disturbing novel to be published in my lifetime."--Michael
Silverblatt, Los Angeles Times; "An extraordinary
achievement."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post); Omensetter's
Luck ("The most important work of fiction by an American in this
literary generation"--Richard Gilman, The New Republic); Willie
Masters' Lonesome Wife; and In the Heart of the Heart of the Country
("These stories scrape the nerve and pierce the heart. They also
replenish the language."--Eliot Fremont-Smith, The New York Times).
Gass' new novel moves from World War II Europe to a small town in
postwar Ohio. In a series of variations, Gass gives us a mosaic of a
life--futile, comic, anarchic--arranged in an array of vocabularies,
altered rhythms, forms and tones, and broken pieces with music as both
theme and structure, set in the key of middle C.
It begins in Graz, Austria, 1938. Joseph Skizzen's father, pretending to
be Jewish, leaves his country for England with his wife and two children
to avoid any connection with the Nazis, who he foresees will soon take
over his homeland. In London with his family for the duration of the
war, he disappears under mysterious circumstances. The family is
relocated to a small town in Ohio, where Joseph Skizzen grows up,
becomes a decent amateur piano player, in part to cope with the
abandonment of his father, and creates as well a fantasy self--a
professor with a fantasy goal: to establish the Inhumanity Museum...as
Skizzen alternately feels wrongly accused (of what?) and is transported
by his music. Skizzen is able to accept guilt for crimes against
humanity and is protected by a secret self that remains sinless.
Middle C tells the story of this journey, an investigation into the
nature of human identity and the ways in which each of us is several
selves, and whether any one self is more genuine than another.
William Gass set out to write a novel that breaks traditional rules and
denies itself easy solutions, cliff-edge suspense, and conventional
surprises...Middle C is that book; a masterpiece by a beloved master.
