In the Heart of the Heart of the Country: And Other Stories (NYRB Classics)
William H. Gass
Language: English
Pages: 272
ISBN: 1590177649
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.
of orange light and blackened shadows, moving. The wind whooped and the house creaked like steps do. I was alone with all that could happen. I began to wonder if the Pedersens had a dog, if the Pedersen kid had a dog or cat maybe and where it was if they did and if I’d known its name and whether it’d come if I called. I tried to think of its name as if it was something I’d forgot. I knew I was all muddled up and scared and crazy and I tried to think god damn over and over or what the hell or
people’s fellowships too, the children’s even (the Future Farmers, for example, the Sunshine Girls, Boy Scouts, Brownies, Rainbows, Hi-Ys and 4-H), also he greedily received the news of the sporting leagues (kittyball, softball, hardball, basketball, bowling, dartball, handball, tennis, ping-pong, volleyball, golf), as well as those dreary items from the clubs of the lonely (fish, stamps, chess, photography, birds) for which his memory was complete, just as it seemed to be for everything . . .
a soft thin blouse of greenish Celanese, and through its yielding threads he had compressed her. His protests were useless. Guess, she always said. And finally when he had with sufficient and extraordinary bitterness complained how hard her teasing was on him, she’d firmly ordered his phallus from its trousers as you might order a dog from a tree. Dear thing, she said; I’ll free you of me. Ultimately, this became their love, like shaking hands, and he had eventually accepted the procedure
in that ugly late September heat we often have in Indiana, my problem was upon me. My childhood came in the country. I remember, now, the flies on our snowy luncheon table. As we cleared away they would settle, fastidiously scrub themselves and stroll to the crumbs to feed where I would kill them in crowds with a swatter. It was quite a game to catch them taking off. I struck heavily since I didn’t mind a few stains; they’d wash. The swatter was a square of screen bound down in red cloth. It
guess I hoped so. Hours of insanity and escape . . . hours inventing expressions like ‘kiss my teeth,’ and then wondering what they meant . . . hours of insanity and escape . . . hours spent looking at objects as if they were women, sketching ashtrays, for instance, and noting of a crystal one . . . the eyes, the lines of light, the living luster of the glass—the patterns, the ebb and flow—shadows, streaks—the flowing like water in the quiet streams with the sun on it—the foam and bubble of the