WILLIAM GASS: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of the writer William Gass is online at the Guardian; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon.

Gass' was an unusual one to write, mostly because I felt I had to explain what it was that defined his writing, and why a writer of such immense reputation was so little known among the wider public. I could not escape the sense that much of his writing was in a sense academic; written by a professor, though I really should have mentioned that he taught philosophy, not English or creative writing (he did offer seminars at various points), and it's important to note also how crucial his essays were considered.

Perhaps the fact that his major novel, The Tunnel, one of those big Great American Novels, was so difficult is part of the reason why he is so cherished among some critics, and some writers in the post-modern, meta-fictional spheres, while being dismissed by other critics (I really would have liked to include extracts of some reviews, but space did not allow) and passed-over by much of the general public.

He's often linked with John Barth, whom I both studied and read for pleasure in my college days. I have to confess I liked the 'post-modern' Barth, of The Sot Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy more than the increasingly dense 'metafictions' that followed them. Perhaps the deconstruction of language and the demands of narration are more exclusive than theorists suggest, perhaps the novel wants to extend beyond itself. Gass' special talent was in being able to do that while bringing his story out, so that the work became a metaphor of the story. "Form is never more than an extension of content", Robert Creeley said. Where many would reverse the aphorism for Gass, I think it rings true as it is.

THOMAS BERGER: THE GUARDIAN OBITUARY

My obituary of Thomas Berger is up at the Guardian online; you can link to it here. It should appear in the paper paper soon. It is pretty much as I wrote it, except that my final line was omitted, which I thought was a shame, since it was a quote from Berger: 'real life is unbearable for me unless I can escape into fiction.'

I may have been a little harsh in calling him a 'recluse'. He appears to have been, like JD Salinger, not trying to avoid the world, not a hermit, but merely fed up with the business of the literary world, and trying to avoid its distraction. Like Salinger, he appears to have been very much a part of his small-town community. And unlike Salinger, he produced his fiction steadily.

That fiction was something he, and the reader, could escape into. You often got the sense in his novels that he was following not the plot, or the character, but the way the prose sounded, what he might call 'the tone', and that if you were not in tune with that you might be missing a great deal. He was a playful novelist (though that term would probably make him bristle, as he was deadly serious about it) in the post-modern sense.

A number of writers have claimed that Little Big Man is not his best book, which is fair game. But a few years ago in the Guardian someone named Tom Cox outsmarted us all by saying it was 'far from Berger's best novel'. On the contrary, what the picaresque epic style does is allow Berger to mix his tones, and the changes fit so well with each of Crabb's tales it keeps the reader involved.

Sometimes I got the sense, as in Teddy Villanova that Berger was trying to say something about the hard-boiled genre itself that I wasn't getting, or that wasn't particularly new. But it is that need to comment on, if not deconstruct, with his fiction, that reminded me of the Coens, and made me think they would be well-matched with a novel like The Feud.

I read somewhere that Berger was one of the last major novelists who served in World War II. James Salter springs to mind as one who is still with us, but I am hard-pressed to think of another. I tend to link Berger with slightly younger writers who dove into what the critics began calling meta-fictions, like Barth or Pynchon.But it's not a strong parallel because truly he was one of a kind.