Mel Schroeder: A Favorite Book
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The narrator is in a sort of exile, fallen out of love, and living in a small Midwestern town. On one level, the story says a lot about American small towns and about America at large. There are character sketches of some of the townspeople. There is an explanatory quality to the narrator’s thinking: love, change, morality, lust, decay, literature, art, the weather, sports, politics, religion and education are among his concerns. His perspective is often skeptical, if not cynical. He declares that “Sports, politics and religion are the three passions of the badly educated.” He notes that the citizens’ “surly Christian views’ never hold them back from endorsing the “smithereening” of the countries seen as enemies. The penultimate paragraph is entitled “The Church,” but turns out to be about the Friday night high school basketball game, which is given the qualities of a religious revival meeting with sexual overtones.
The forms of presentation vary from exploratory, suggestive, interior monologues to catalogues, as when he lists all of the town’s clubs and organizations. Even the list, which is basically objective, has its own satiric flavor. The other stories offer little that is solid – there is a constant sense of probing for what might be true, real, and thematically significant. In “The Pederson Kid,” it is difficult to determine what really happened or what is only in the mind of the narrator. In that story, the narrator, his farmer father, and Hans, the hired hand, search in deep cold snow for a lost bottle of whiskey. Some years ago, I heard Gass speak at U.B. during the question period, I said that the search for the bottle seemed like the challenge Gass offers his readers. He agreed with me.
“Order of Insects” seems rather ahead of its time as a “feminist” story. A housewife is at first disgusted and then more and more fascinated by the insects she finds scattered on her carpets. She become a philosophically attentive person, and says: “I don’t know which is more surprising: to find such order in a roach, or such ideas in a woman.” Clearly she transcends what it traditionally means to be a woman as housewife.
In “Icicles,” we wonder why a rather feckless and unsuccessful real estate salesman obsesses about the ice hanging outside the house. “Mrs. Mean” is an amazing character sketch, vivid and unforgettable: yet we are left wondering how much is Mrs. Mean and how much is the creation of the narrator, and what that tells us about the narrator.
Gass’s writing is beautiful and original, and I often read him just to enjoy that. But the really exciting experience is to search for the bottle of whiskey in the snow – to look for the real, the true, the significant, that lurks within the details of ordinary life – persons, objects, and the physical landscape itself. The 1985 paperback edition of In the Heart of the Heart of the Country includes an introduction by Gass himself. It would be a good place to sample his brilliance as an essayist. There, as in the short stories, you can witness the beauty of his writing, the incredible variety of ideas – and you join him in searching for that bottle. Probing the cold snow with Gass is exhilarating, but often chilling, too. That I expect of great writing: show me the surfaces, and invite me to look within: into the heart of the heart of life.