William H. Gass wrote fiction and essays distinguished by elaborate sentences, philosophical argument and intense attention to the sound and texture of language. Omensetter's Luck places a mysterious, seemingly fortunate outsider within a small Ohio community whose minister becomes obsessed with him, while Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife turns typography, page design and direct address into part of the fiction itself. The Tunnel is a much larger and darker novel about a historian writing a study of Nazi Germany who instead produces a sprawling account of his own resentments, failures and intellectual evasions. Gass's essays, collected in books such as Fiction and the Figures of Life, defend literary style as a central form of thinking. His work fits American postmodernism, experimental fiction and literary criticism, especially for readers of William Gaddis, John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. Read more Less
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