William H. Gass often draws comparisons to literary polymath David Foster Wallace and to uncanny master George Saunders. In "Eyes," Gass has delivered a new work that is digestible and provocative, yet thoughtful and subtle. His latest offering (and nearly his 20th book) collects six novellas and stories of refreshing complexity and imaginative zeal.
For such a prolific composer of sentences, "Eyes" revels in wordless communication, emotional perception and artistic sensation.
"Music does not acknowledge the barriers of tongues," quoth the talking upright piano whose complaints Gass indulges in one story.
In another called "In Camera," two idiosyncratic art dealers debate the merits of photography when color enters the frame. ("Color is oratory in the service of the wrong religion," one of them exclaims.)
Like a genie from an unpolished lamp, "The Man Who Spoke With His Hands (An Exercise)" tickles out potent nuances of body language from the unremarkable personality of a professor.
Don't assume, however, that text has gone by the wayside. The book is loaded with enthralling and inventive language. Whether describing emotional states ("Gloom began descending like a jacket hood") or physical attributes ("He bobbed about as though fish were biting, nibbling at bait hung deeply beneath whatever he was walking on — a sidewalk, lawn, shop floor, cindered ground"), Gass delights with devious wordplay, rhetorical gymnastics and luscious description.
Clearly, "Eyes" doesn't shy from unconventional writing. One of the novellas is a 70-page-long paragraph, a darkly comic sketch of a man burdened by very particular shame. Another selection, "Soliloquy for an Empty Chair," is exactly what it sounds like: a monologue told by a chair in a barbershop.
Highlighting the seriousness hidden behind such gimmicky-sounding premises, Gass hints in one story that "at true play there are no consequences, although I hardly knew what the two words meant." His hijinks aren't "true play"; they're tools to tinker with life's thornier, more serious concerns.
Gass best displays his craftsmanship in the aforementioned "Soliloquy for an Empty Chair." What at first seems like the ramblings of a garrulous piece of furniture morphs into a Marx-lite treatise on how life is (or, often, is not) valued. "We die through use," laments the chair, like "buttons into buttonholes." After a bomb detonates in the barbershop, the chair explains how the tools in the shop, seeking justice, "were about to complain to an insurance company instead of the cops but found both were impossible because the complainers were just things."
In the voice of explosion-mangled objects, Gass teases out how legal mechanisms protect and institutionalize social violence. On a final, depressing note, the chair backpedals from its indignation: "The way we are misused is no worse than any other."
Again and again, by slipping the bounds of reality, Gass shows us many of life's Catch-22s.
Will Wlizlo is a writer in Minneapolis.
