Books: The Physicality of Words

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IN THE HEART OF THE HEART OF THE COUNTRY by William Gass. 206 pages. Harper & Row. $4.95.

There is little doubt that William Gass is speaking for himself when one of the characters in this collection of short stories says: "I can't tolerate any more of my sophistries about spirit, mind, and breath. Body equals being, and if your weight goes down, you are the less." Coming from a man who makes his living teaching philosophy at Purdue University, such a flat-out assertion seems a little unusual. But then William James pledged in his diary to "care little for speculation; much for the form of my action."

Gass published his fine first novel, Omensetter's Luck, two years ago, when he was 41. He shares James's pragmatism, his commitment to form and to the senses, his cheerless affirmation willed out of an all too obvious despair. The despair seems to rise from the conclusion that ultimate answers are beyond reach; Gass puts his faith in the structure of his prose and the intense physicality of his words. Death imagery crackles through these pages like winter wind through a cornfield, yet the characters have exceptional vitality. A youth watches with unblinking fascination as a farmhand tries to knead life back into a child who is "froze like a pump." A housewife sees beauty in the configurations of dead roaches. In the title story, an intricate prose poem about a small Midwestern town, windows are graves, asphalt crumbles, maples are decapitated to make way for electric wires ("voices in thin strips"), and the narrator sifts the ashes of a cooled love.

If things are less than swinging in Gass's grey heartland, the big cities are worse: immobile with rigor mortis, "swollen and poisonous with people." Gass pulls a long face at contemporary literary fashions. "It's not surprising," he writes, "that the novelists of the slums, the cities, and the crowds, should find that sex is but a scratch to ease a tickle, that we're most human when we're sitting on the John, and that the justest image of our life is in full passage through the plumbing."

It is Gass's precision with words as physical objects that gives these somber stories a weight out of proportion to their size. In more than one sense, they have a rare specific gravity.