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William H. Gass, our lightning-bolt brandishing Zeus of syntax, Grand Grand Poobah up on ol' Mount O. Right? You know it be the case. Unless you new here. Haven't read any Gass? He is the finest writer of sentences the English language ever produced and there is no surer hand when it comes to the niceties and not-so-niceties of rhetoric. Deals the contrapuntal like house you will never beat. He wrote fiction. He wrote essays. I have traditionally recommended to newbies that they start with the essays. There is no mistaking in the essays that the main treasure in Gass is wisdom and guidance dispatched in the context of an arousal. My introduction to Gass came in my late teens in the form of the then-still-fresh decades-in-the-rendering tome THE TUNNEL, one of the most ambitious and perspicacious American novels ever written, as well as a harrowing moral nightmare. It slayed me. Convert for life. But I don't tend to recommend it for beginners, especially if they aren't as fucked-up as I am (or was). It would be like telling somebody to go and politely request to have frightful violence done to them. THE TUNNEL completely changed my life. As much as GRAVITY'S RAINBOW did. Maybe even more. Thirty years in the making. Something like thirty. And, Christ, you can tell! Gass published little if any fiction during that monster's incubation and medicining. Interestingly, CARTESIAN SONATA would arrive quite soon after THE TUNNEL. Four fleet novellas on the tail of a sprawl of inferno. I am only getting to them now. Many, many years later. So sue me. It almost isn't even my fault, actually. CARTESIAN SONATA was not exactly rapturously received. Resounding thud? Something like that. Why? Because people, bless them, are disappointing. Finishing it, I can now say I have read all of Gass's various books of fictions save his debut, OMENSETTER'S LUCK, which I actually owned (Penguin edition), but never read, and appear to have lost in my dereliction and at-times-too-too-dissolute waywardness. Sue me. I am here to tell you that CARTESIAN SONATA contains some of Gass's very finest fiction. Especially the completely stupefying masterpieces that are the two bookends. Another Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ reviewer of SONATA has decided to run with stalwart super-critic James Woods' criticism of Gass: apparently everybody in a Gass story talks and thinks like Gass and that is, hmm, er, I suppose...uncouth (?). Because literally nobody is up to talking and thinking like Gass (oh, we sort of are). You know what, realists? You can't win 'em all. Sometimes using fiction as a means to doing essays by other means (see especially here "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's"), Gass almost always writes about American life from the standpoint of an occupying force. He puts his hand up people and puppets them. So sue him. It made perfect sense when in his final book, EYES, he started getting inside inanimate objects and telling their stories. I, of the promiscuous brainstem, am all for it. Hip hop hooray! The opening eponymous story of CARTESIAN SONATA is itself broken into three sections, and the introductory section inaugurates the book by sanctifying the digressive. The dexterity is balletic and the élan is Bergsonian. Find a margin's margin and deterritorialize, then pop your head up like a magic trick, Act 1, Scene 1. This book begins so magnificently I had to go find a cap to doff. We intuit that some much of what this book contains was probably crafted as a means to respite during the prolonged campaign that was the writing of THE TUNNEL. Adorably (or I guess, also, you know, chillingly) the resolutely vile narrator-antagonist of THE TUNNEL gets a shout-out early on in the opening piece (as does Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife). This one's for the lifers! Thanks for keeping the faith! The two middle pieces are superlative and worthy of serious meditation (from the writer, from the lay person). "Bed and Breakfast" demonstrates a quality of superhuman attentiveness (born of what I imagine to be hard-won humility) to American spaces and bric-à-brac, finding the ecstatic where the crumudgeon might well habitually locate nothing but impertinent visual noise. You can occupy American life like a looting army and still be very fond of it, still maintain holy reverence. I have already said that "Emma Enters a Sentence of Elizabeth Bishop's" is the most-essay-by-other-means piece here (they all have a little of that going on). I am going to get fancy and call it "Gass on Hermeneutics." A story about the horizon of she who goes about her encounters, especially her encounters with poetry. We know Gass the essayist. We know he can parse and unpack with peerless art. But in "Emma" he reminds us that each reader brings herself to each encounter with each line of verse; each encounter is spectacularly individual and properly holy. Now a few words on "The Master of Secret Revenges." So. "The Master of Secret Revenges" is the piece where Gass really gets in there, sleeves rolled up, and does Swift. Do you remember that epic, legendary PARIS REVIEW interview where Gass said that he writes for purposes of revenge? He was certainly being slightly disingenuous, but not exactly trafficking falsehood across state lines, and I am guessing not especially proud. This is one of my favourite pieces of writing ever about the coextension of the petty and the high-minded. It is very funny, sly and wise, while also being sort of TUNNEL-level bleak in its way (though Lucifer does dispense his light). I read CARTESIAN SONATA late-October/early-November 2018, shortly before American midterm elections, and encountered the following sentence in "The Master of Secret Revenges": "But the liar who lies long enough, the liar who wants his lie to be the truth, the liar who sees belief in other people's faces, for whom his lie is honey to their ears, is eventually a believer too, sincere as sunshine, clean as stream, faithful, too, as old clubfoot was, to his hope-filled falsehoods, and to Adolph Hitler." I have spoken of William H. Gass: Sentence Guy, correct? That one oughtta warrant a "goddamn." How about this one from the same piece: “Here sexual problems rose—they always do—because the breast with its tempting suckle center was not to be eyed and prized as a source of solace or stimulation, but for its curvature, its design, its iconographic history, and this was a dish more easily ordered than eaten.â€� Double damn. You're still with me? Who wouldn't be pleased positively pink to sit in a pasture and read such things indefinitely whether the cows ever deign to come home or not?