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.
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
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