Middle C

By William H. Gass

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 12, 2013
• ISBN: 9780307962263

Reviews for Middle C

[colligan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

William H. Gass was an incredibly talented writer. And, "Middle C" presents ample evidence of his skill. His prose is smart and his style is as good as it gets. My beef with "Middle C" has nothing to do with these obvious skills. My disappointment is with the novel's concept. What is the book actually about? One reviewer described it as a portrait of mediocrity. Really? Did we need that? I guess we're presented with a masterful (albeit lengthy) paean to mediocrity! Wonderful!I think there are a small group of authors who have incredible talent but are at a loss as to what to do with it. Enormous talent unmatched by equivalent inspiration. But thats my uninspired and likely equally untalented opinion.

[stillatim · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Caveat: to my shame, I have not read The Tunnel. But I will very soon. Anyway,

There is a lot of tired silliness in this novel: oh, the impermanence of identity! Ah, the Freudianisms of men's relationships at (*not* with) women! Gee, the constructedness of reality! It must be wonderful to live in the intellectual world of the sixteenth or seventeenth centuries, when all these were live, burning issues (including the men at women business? I could be convinced).

And despite all this--seemingly calculated to bore me to tears and have me fling the book across the room with an anguished cry of "Read [e.g., Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Adorno, McDowell, Brandom, Habermas/ Horney, Cixous, Irigaray, Kristeva and no doubt legions of other women I haven't heard of but who can point out how ridiculous said Freudianisms are]!"--despite all this, 'Middle C' moved me intellectually and even emotionally.

It did so with a simple question:

* is it possible to avoid guilt for the evils human beings do to each other and more or less everything else as well?

That question ramifies, as they say, into two more:

* whether it's possible or not, is it morally advisable to try? In other words, what evils would you be forced to commit as you tried to avoid guilt for other peoples' evils?
* whether it's possible or not, is it *ethically* advisable to try? I.e., what important features of a human life would you have to give up in your (probably Quixotic) quest for total innocence?

Joe Skizzen's father 'Yankel,' runs from Nazifying Austria to England, then runs from his own family, because, he thinks, "To the pure, to the stateless... anything is possible"; which echoes the famous "To the pure, all things are pure" of various mysticisms, as well as the modernist quest summed up in Stephen Daedalus's wish to fly free of the nets of language, state, family etc... (see, e.g., 321).

But the novel is about Joe, not Yankel: Joe wants to emulate his father, who supposedly avoided evil by 'becoming' a Jew during the second world war. But this isn't possible for Joe, who lives in a time when "victimhood was commoner than any common humanity." Instead, he tries to be completely normal, middling, as in the title's pun. But the normality he seeks is merely invisibility in the eyes of history; otherwise, he considers himself an aesthete, and compares himself to, among others, Karl Kraus and Robert Musil.

The most entertaining chapters detail Joe's attempt to craft an aesthetically perfect version of the sentence, "The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure." Our narrator lets loose with some fabulous, nihilistic rants. The final version, revealed on page 213, is modeled, badly, on twelve-tone musical techniques.

Joe also makes the Inhumanity Museum; here the muses are invoked that they might make it possible to sing of our evils, rather than, as in a traditional museum, our learning and abilities.

He's in a position to do so because he's created an identity for himself: roughly half way through the novel, a co-worker helps him make a convincing fake ID. She's a kindred spirit: "He who has lived and thought can never... look on mankind without dis-dain, Miss Moss said firmly, as if speaking about the photo she'd just taken." She loves language as he will come to do; "When the world ends the word will write on... wordulating." He takes some things from Miss Moss, makes up a bunch of other things, and lies his way into an associate professorship at a small midwestern college.

In other entertaining adventures,

* he discovers ideology critique, "even the most ordinary tunes could... make acceptable some of the cruelest and coarsest of human attitudes," (233), and confronts the idea that ideology critique is all well and good for some, but that for the majority of people, a little opium of the masses is a lot better than the alernative ("Sometimes you deserve to be down in the dumps./ Hey, I own a dump, I don't have to live there. She sang "I gotta right to sing the blues, I gotta right to feel low down."")
* he provides us with a postmodernist's history of modern music, curiously relevant to Gass's position in comparison to modern literature (chapter 25, p 236).

He occasionally realizes that his father didn't succeed in his quest to "escape the world's moral tarnish," because he'd treated his family so shabbily, (253). His own failings become obvious--he compares his mother's garden to a fascist state, then feel bad about his bad ideology critique and quote Voltaire on the necessity of tending one's garden. And his mother responds "So I do. But you, Professor, you do not. What do you do but... play the day through with paste and snippers. As in... the Kinder's Garten," (271). He goes back and forth on his own nihilism, glorying in the "legacy of the great Athenians" and the dream of Kant's kingdom of ends (285), but knows that such a thing is impossible--which, instead of suggesting the barrenness of mere individualism, leads him towards Ortega Y Gasset territory. He scolds himself for having "no real beliefs," 316. He struggles with the illogical nature of his belief that evil is inevitable and also immoral. But ultimately he holds on to his position: no matter what you say, at least I'm not guilty, (350). If I'm a fake, everyone is a fake (353).

The end of the novel is wonderful, and worth concealing, but the important intellectual point can be made without it: unlike Bartok, who took the roiling evil around him, put it in his music, but created nonetheless a triumphant work of beauty, Skizzen sits in his attic, a postmodern anti-Pangloss to his mother's Candide. His life answers the three questions:

* No.
* No.
* No.

Or does it? Because it's very hard to distinguish Skizzen's beliefs, his rants and his voice from those you'll find in any given book of Gass's essays--ultra-individualistic, knee-jerkily anti-clerical, gleefully nihilistic, craftsmanlike, concerned with language, concerned with the history of art. Everything, in short, except that Gass, as here, has obviously taken the horror of the world and made something in the face of it.

[Sadly, some slight missteps undermine the book in, I've concluded, an unintended way (i.e., I don't see how the following things can be rationalized as due to an unreliable narrator; nor, for that matter, do I see how the narrator of this book is unreliable). These are ridiculous quibbles, but they suggest that Vintage needs to check its editors: Joe sells people hip-hop and grunge albums in the 'sixties. The second movement of a symphony is described as a "candrizans" (cf, cancrizans).]

**********************

"It appeared to Professor Skizzen, now, that reason was no more than an instrument of human appetites, the way our teeth and tummies are, precisely as some philosophers had suggested (though he had at first resisted them)", 212.

[hearthewindsing · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

"If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard." - William H. Gass

So everyone knows that Gass will be turning 89 soon. Instead of spending his 80s sitting in a rocking chair on his porch and yelling "Get off my lawn." at the neighborhood kids, he was writing. This. He was writing this beautiful, complex and nuanced work for last several years, diligently honing and perfecting each sentence. No middling C's for this man, he will settle for nothing less than an A . Is he really writing using the same words and following the same grammar as so many other authors do? That's hard to believe. His sentences don't merely convey one thing or the other. They perform a whole choreographed sequence and deliver a best-on-the-broadway level performance. If you are reading Gass, please be sure to read, pause and re-read and feel the pulse and the rhythm of his prose.

As great as he is at crafting these well-manicured sentences, he is just as adept at creating a character. Skizzen is going to stay on my mind for a while. Gass really puts "multi" into a multi-dimensional character. Skizzen's character is built up in such an intriguing style - one sentence at a time, one thought at a time. His relationships with his mother and his sister while they all deal with displacement in their own ways, his interactions with each of those unique and memorable characters he meets at different stages of his life, all contribute pieces to the puzzle. Even the absentee father is a big part of the person Joey is.
Gass has structured this work intricately, interleaving vignettes from different parts of Joey's life. What formed the main thrust of the narrative for me was the dichotomy (or what turned out be trichotomy) between Joey/Joseph Skizzen's selves. I kept looking for clues that will help me reconcile his different identities , and figure out how the younger Joey morphed into the adult Prof. Skizzen. Does our past need to be a part of who we are? Is any one of his identities more real than the others? Or is everything we get to see on the outside a mere representative sketch (meaning of word 'Skizzen') of a person? In creating the character of Skizzen, Gass provides a wonderful mediation on the notion of self and identity.
While Joey's ambition of being invisible and inconsequential may not seem like a lofty one, it certainly isn't the worst thing a person has ever aimed for. Sure he is not helping a blind person cross the road, but he is not hurting anyone either. He may not be working towards making the world a better place, but he is trying to keep his hands clean of the moral tarnish of the world. A world whose wrongs he finds too much for him to accept and forgive. He is someone who finds his sanctuary in a library or at a piano, how harmful could he be!

In addition to some of these main themes, there are several little moments that will leave a mark on the readers. There is a lot of depth to this work, some of which I am sure of having missed. Nick's review talks a bit about the relationship of Middle C with music. I am hoping there will be more reviews expounding how music informs the structure and the ideas in the novel.

I did briefly consider awarding 4 stars to Middle C . As impressive and near-perfect this book is, I can't help thinking that Gass might be holding back here. I noticed some very bright sparks in places, mostly during Joey's monologues. But those were rather short lived. I would love to see those sparks leap into big flames and engulf the entire book. I would love to see Gass's manic energy and passion being unleashed with full force. The reviews over here establish beyond doubt that The Tunnel is where I want to be. I am sure I will totally dig The Tunnel. Till then it is 4.987654321 stars.