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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’s 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.
- Sales Rank: #183044 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-03-12
- Released on: 2013-03-12
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Booklist
*Starred Review* This picaresque tale of a hapless poseur, music professor Joseph Skizzen, is a mischievous variation on the moral dilemmas raised in Gass’ The Tunnel (1995), in which a historian grapples with his life’s work, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler’s Germany. Skittish Joseph’s secret obsession with genocidal horrors is manifest in his “Inhumanity Museum,” a motley collection of documents about human atrocities that fills the attic in his decaying Victorian house in a small Ohio college town. Fearfully virginal Joseph lives with his Austrian refugee mother, a ferocious gardener. They fled WWII Europe when he was a boy after his father, a master of false identities, disappeared. Looking back on his anxiously improvised American life, Joseph recalls incidents ludicrous, painful, and hilarious involving characters of delectably cartoonish particulars connected to his misbegotten jobs at a record store and a library. Joseph also remembers his lonely old piano teacher, who extolled middle C and the major third as a chord on which “all that is good and warm and wholesome and joyful in nature is built.” Can a human life achieve such uplifting unity and resonance? In this exuberantly learned bildungsroman—this torrent of curious facts and arch commentary, puns and allusions—internationally lauded virtuoso Gass reflects on humanity’s crimes and marvels, creating his funniest and most life-embracing book yet. --Donna Seaman
From Bookforum
The formidability of language and the drive for narrative complexity, which have long put Gass squarely in the neither-nor camp where high-modernist experimentation overlaps with postmodern gamesmanship, are both on ample display, as is the demanding erudition that the author injects in all his work. In tone, in its black humor and formal self-consciousness, Middle C is, well, classic Gass, and as such the novel's arrival is a signal event. When Middle C works most effectively as a novel, the reading experience is exhilarating. The effect is like listening to an uncared-for LP—here the needle gets stuck in the scratches, repeating a snippet over and over, there it suddenly glides forward over the dusty surface. I wish I could summon an image that doesn't immediately come off as negative (or Make Middle C sound like a broken record), for Gass's strategies in constructing his novel are at times brilliant as they are taxing. Elaboration without triumph, finality without completion: In the end, we're back at the beginning. It's not a novel departure, but in Gass's Trojan horse of a book, it is an always adventuresome trip. —Eric Banks
Review
“A fat, ripe read… A final statement of Gass’s belief in the sound of literary language… rhythmic and sonic…”
—Brian Dillon, The Times Literary Supplement
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“A realistic story… a religious allegory and a philosophical meditation… extraordinary.”
—David Thoreen, The Boston Globe
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“Exhilarating… dazzling…”
—Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
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“[Middle C] offers tactile pleasure… generous… comic…”
—Michael Gorra, The New York Review
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“Of all living literary figures, William Gass may count as the most daringly scathing and most assertively fecund: in language, in ideas, in intricacy of form; above all in relentless fury… From its opening notes until its coda, this unquiet bildungsroman is designed to detonate its mild, middling title… Exhilaratingly ingenious… unexpected and dizzying…”
—Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review (cover)
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“Middle C takes its place in that great line of modern novels about inauthenticity… However, there is nothing sham to William Gass’s art: It’s not just dazzling, it’s the real thing.”
—Michael Dirda, The Washington Post�
“Gass orchestrates his fiction with thematic elements as a composer might a symphony.”
—Dan Lopez, Timeout New York
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“Entertaining and enlightening… emotionally gouging as well as amusing… I rank the novel first among Gass’s six books of fiction.”
—Tom LeClair, The Barnes and Noble Review
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“A masterly work of language and imagery from one of America’s most celebrated authors.”
—Joshua Finnell, Library Journal (starred)
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“A mischievous variation on the moral dilemmas raised in Gass’ The Tunnel . . . In this exuberantly learned bildungsroman—this torrent of curious facts and arch commentary, puns and allusions—internationally lauded virtuoso Gass reflects on humanity’s crimes and marvels, creating his funniest and most life-embracing book yet.”
—Booklist (starred)
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“Epic . . . crazily rich with thought . . . remarkably detailed . . . Gass beautifully coaxes the unheard music from a seemingly muted life . . . the unprecedented work of a master.”
—Publishers Weekly�(boxed)
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“Engaging, melancholy . . . Gass remains a master of apt metaphors, graceful sentences and a flinty, unforgiving brand of humor; it may be the most entertaining novel you’ll read that half wishes humanity was wiped off the map. . . . Gass, now 88, clearly has endings on his mind, which he addresses with fearsome brio and wit.”
—Kirkus
Most helpful customer reviews
45 of 48 people found the following review helpful.
"Humans were the untrustworthiest and the meanest."
By Amelia Gremelspacher
At the start of the book, Rudi Skizzen decides to move his from Austria to England to escape the Nazis. He feels that any contact with them would degrade his family, so he fakes being Jewish and is transported as a refugee. He doesn't fool the Jewish community, but he confuses his son Joseph and enrages his wife and makes no real impression on his daughter Deborah. After Rudi disappears, the family ends up in Ohio.
Joseph shares the same gloomy outlook on humanity as his father. He fears humanity will not disappear. He experiences people as a blight. But he regards himself as a fake, a questionable teacher of music and a quixotic music critic. Here he lives in Ohio, in the middle of the country, with a population that are all unequal. He is haunted by crimes against humanity, founding an Inhumanity Museum. Joseph lives in his mother's garden, amongst the rules of nature, and even here he can feel the fraud.
The book revolves around riffs of philosophy, musicology, perhaps the quest for the middle. The language is playful, then devastating, then prosaic. This book has been reviewed as difficult to read, post modern, and uneven. These reviews scared me off for a while, but I was intrigued with the Austrian pretending to be a Jew. I found the writing accessible, mesmerizing, and fantastic in the true meaning of the word. I like Joseph and his quest for the middle that even in music, never sounds alone. I urge you to make the jump, disregarding the warnings. Not much is new in the literary sun, but this book has much that is novel, in the true meaning of the word.
36 of 40 people found the following review helpful.
Middle C
By Leslie N. Patino
Erudite, accomplished and a successful writer capable of penning this complex novel full of beautiful writing, 88-year-old William Gass is a man to admire. In an age when traditional publishing houses and Hollywood are often interested only in reliable blockbusters, this "Middle C," is a note rarely heard. It makes for unusual reading in that it breaks so many of the bestseller rules. The novel is long, the story winding and the tangents numerous. At times, it's hard to know where Gass or protagonist Yussel-Joey-Joseph-Professor Skizzen and the unconventional punctuation are headed with their riffs. The third chapter is ten pages of Skizzen's obsession with writing a single sentence correctly--an obsession that goes on until the next-to-last page of the novel.
The writing is often dense which, for me, definitely detracted from the pleasure of reading, but Gass is so knowledgeable and intellectual that he kept me going. His humor ("At first Joey appreciated her apparently genuine vulgarity in such a crowd of stodges."), his odd characters (the unforgettable Miss Spiky who Skizzen and I couldn't help but like) and an unusual story with plenty of deep thoughts to ponder carried me through to the end. I don't expect to see "Middle C" at the top of "The New York Times" Best Sellers list, but a big bravo to Gass and Knopf for publishing it.
21 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
... and words are all I have...
By Patrican
Middle C is primarily a display of Gass's love of thinking and writing. Put more crudely, it's a dump of his accumulated musings. So, even more than with most books, any evaluation of Middle C is dependent on the tastes of the reader. If you like intellectual mind-games, interweaving word-play, this book is for you. It's compiled around a man whose aim in life is "to pass through life still reasonably clean of complicity in human affairs, affairs that are always and inevitably ... envious, mean, murderous, jealous, greedy, treacherous, miserly, self-serving, vengeful, pitiless, stupid, and otherwise pointless." He's to remain at "Middle C," although the metaphor doesn't seem to me to be a good one. A life journey unnoticed at the center of the pack doesn't lend itself to dramatic excitement as easily as, say, Ulysses' journey home does, but Gass makes of it what he can.
In some of the early chapters (3, 6), Gass relates, with considerable relish, a great many details of horrific murders of people by other people. Not since William Burroughs (Naked Lunch, but especially Thanksgiving Day Prayer) have I seen inhumanity related with such deadpan glee. I don't pick up any sense of outrage, or even disgust, from Gass. He seems almost bored with it. This is the way it is, the way it always has been. The bewildering thing is that somehow people in general continue on, civilization walking around in an incredible, indelible, fantasy of its goodness and mercy. But if Gass thinks he's the first with that news, he's sadly mistaken.
At one point our hero, in his quest to avoid human affairs, mentions: "I am lonely." But it's very late in the book, and that thought is not explored or developed. He's got more than a whiff of misogyny to him; in several passages he's deploring the ways in which women are always trying to entangle him in 'human affairs;' e.g., his sister gives birth and he resents that he's expected to notice or care.
But mostly, this is writing for the joy of expression. In the late chapters there is far too much repetition, especially about our hero's academic life and his home life with his mother. Even though it's all so clever, and written with such intricate weave, I found myself skip-reading through the late chapters. (Gass, describing a house: "The front windows were... faintly bayed like a distant dog.") The biggest rapture in life occurs when, after you've been expecting the sky to fall on you, it lands on your neighbor instead. This peculiar twist on Aristotle's characterization of sidestepped tragedy may be Gass's most perverse original offering here.
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