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. ( )

Once again, Gass proves too erudite for me. I did find this book more palatable than either of the other of his novels I've read (Omsetter's Luck and The Tunnel). He is a master of the rant. I liked a lot of the prose and found much of the story worth following. On the whole, I just don't know quite what to make of it, though, or what, besides being carried along on the trip and enjoying a lot of the humor and some of the humanity of it, I ought to take from the book. I suspect the defect lies in me more than in the book. I'm glad I read it, in any case, but I wish I knew enough more about the sort of world Gass knows about to make more of the book. ( )

0.5 for reading after Stravinsky's autobiography. ( )

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).]

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"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. ( )

Le livre est une variation infinie sur le thème : "La crainte que la race humaine ne survive pas a été remplacée par la crainte qu'elle perdure". Crainte que la race humaine ne survive pas à la seconde guerre mondiale devenue guerre nucléaire, alors que depuis lors, le nombre de massacres, de génocides, de tueries pour des causes religieuses, racistes ou simplement économiques font à ce point florès que l'on ne peut que regretter que la race humaine survive. Car pour autant de victimes, il y a toujours d'autres humains pour accomplir ces atrocités.

Idée grandiose de départ et qui donne lieu à certains passages virtuoses.

Mais tout cela est mêlé au thème de l'imposture, d'une part, celle du père du protagoniste, qui Autrichien, se fait passer pour juif peu avant l'Anschluss pour s'enfuir en Angleterre et de là, il partira aux Etats-Unis abandonnant sa famille et, d'autre part, l'imposture du fils, qui, parti avec sa mère et sa soeur à la poursuite du père, se crée une histoire, un vécu inventé de toutes pièces et devient professeur de musique classique contemporaine dans une faculté de l'Ohio.

Et aux quelques passages virtuoses, il y a en contrepoint pas mal de dissonances ou de passages vides, tels des soupirs sans fin. ( )