Middle C

. . . it repented Jehovah that he had made man . . .

Chapter 1

Miriam, whom Joey Skizzen thought of as his mother, Nita, began to speak about the family s past, but only after she decided that her husband was safely in his grave. His frowns could silence her in midsentence; even his smiles were curved in condescension, though at this time in his absence, her beloved husband s virtues, once admitted to be many, were written in lemon juice. He had a glare to bubble paint, she said. Her recollection of that look caused hesitations still. She would appear alarmed, wave as if she saw something gnatting near her face, and stutter to a stop. Joey was helped to remember how, at suppertime, for only then was the family gathered as a group, the spoon would become still in his father s soup, his father s head would rise to face the direction of the offending remark, his normally placid look would stiffen, and fires light in his eyes. His stare seemed unwilling to cease, although it probably was never held beyond the lifetime of a minute. But a minute . . . a minute is so long. Certainly it continued until his daughter s or his wife s uneasy expression sank into the bottom of her bowl, and the guilty head was bowed in an attitude of apology and submission.
 
When the soup was a clear broth, as it often impecuniously was, Joey could occasionally see his face floating in a brown dream, and he thought of his mother s real self submerged in a brown dream too, beyond the reach of life. His father sent his spoon to the bottom, and they could hear it scrape as he ladled, faster and faster as the level dropped. He was a noisy eater because he felt noise signified relish and appreciation. Whenever a meal was especially skimpy, Yankel, as he insisted he was, slurped his soup, he sucked his teeth, and he exclaimed Aaah! after a set of swallows. When they had bread, he would strenuously rend it just above the surface of the soup so that flecks of crust would fall as snow

William H. Gass essayist, novelist, literary critic was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He is the author of seven works of fiction and nine books of essays, including Life Sentences, A Temple of Texts, and Tests of Time, and was a professor of philosophy at Washington University. He died in 2017. 

Middle C takes its place in that great line of modern novels about inauthenticity. . . . However, there is nothing sham to Gass s art: It s not just dazzling, it s the real thing. The Washington Post

A world-devouring novel. . . . 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. . . . This unquiet bildungsroman is designed to detonate its mild, middling title. . . . Exhilaratingly ingenious . . . unexpected and dizzying. Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review

Rhythmic and sonic. . . . A final statement of Gass s belief in the sound of literary language. The Times Literary Supplement (London)
 
Gass is a magician of the word, the writer of a prose so rich that it makes Vladimir Nabokov s seem impoverished. . . . Metaphors leap through hoops, similes elicit oohs and ahs, and daredevil paragraphs bring down the house. There s never any fat or slack to his sentences, though sometimes they unfold quietly, almost slyly, until blossoming into little stories all their own. The Washington Post

Middle C is driven by plot, by a largely comic chain of cause and consequence. . . . Skizzen proves as befuddled an academic wanderer as anyone this country has seen since Nabokov s Timofey Pnin. The New York Review of Books

A mischievous variation on the moral dilemmas raised in Gass s 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)

Extraordinary. . . . A religious allegory and a philosophical meditation on language and consciousness as the source of evil. The Boston Globe

Gass orchestrates his fiction with thematic elements as a composer might a symphony. Timeout