[In the following review, O'Brien offers praise for Finding a Form.]

Gass is a writer who has always believed in public discourse, that the act of the critic and scholar is to engage as wide an audience as possible in matters of serious intent (that is, that these things matter or at least have consequences for the body politic) and that, therefore, the form of the discourse must itself be engaging, resonate, enlivening, and at times, vituperative. The present collection hits the mark in every way, though one may mourn that there are not more critics who see their function as this, as opposed to the academic specialist who, if he speaks to anyone more than himself, speaks only to other, specialists in deadening prose. One might especially wish that other novelists might so speak more often, though of course one knows that many of them have little critical ability and can speak, quite poorly and unintelligently, only about themselves. Gass is this rare figure whose critical abilities go hand-in-hand with his fictional ones.

Appropriately enough, this volume opens with a biting attack on award giving, starting with the Pulitzer for fiction, which has a remarkable history of recognizing the bad and the forgettable, and moving on to many others that champion the mediocre and fashionable in the name of literary quality. This essay is followed by one given to the subject of the use of the present tense in fiction, a practice Gass generally abhors but one which is perfectly suited to readers raised on television and those writers who have their fingers on the pulse of their generation (the minimalists, of course, come in for the most severe tongue lashings here).

In another essay, one that begins with rather painful descriptions of his childhood and therefore partial explanation for his having become a writer rather than a car salesman or a contented businessman, Gass lays down his aesthetic, which has always been his aesthetic, old-fashioned (Aristotle, Aquinas, Gilson) and therefore radical for our times: “I believe that the artist's fundamental loyalty must be to form, and his energy employed in the activity of making. … The poet, every artist, is a maker whose aim is to make something supremely worthwhile, to make something inherently valuable in itself.” All of this is opposed to such perennially acclaimed aims as understanding the world, understanding ourselves or those near and dear to us, reflecting or mirroring one thing or another, making the world a better place, societal improvement, the betterment of one group or another (women, blacks, gays, the aristocracy, whatever), or the ever-favorite replication of reality in a kind of condensed version that makes reality even more real.

Other chapters are given to Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Robert Walser, Gass's beloved Spanish (well, at least one, Juan Goytisolo) and Latin Americans (Fuentes, Lezama Lema, Cabrera Infante, Cortazar, Vargas Llosa, though one glaring omission here is Fernando del Paso, an omission I am sure Mr. Gass will rectify in any future edition), Danilo Kis, Ford Madox Ford, and of course Gertrude Stein roams the pages freely. And there is, towards the end, a particularly interesting chapter entitled “The Music of Prose.” The temptation here, which I will resist, is to quote endlessly from Gass. Better just to go read the book, but rather than reading it cover to cover, one should more profitably read a chapter a day—there is too much in each of them to move swiftly on. Or one may be better advised to stop and reread the works he has reference to (I do not remember my Walser the way that Gass remembers his).

The book is an utter pleasure and is itself a working demonstration of the author's recurring theme: the celebration of language and the power of prose to create and re-create the world. I will not bother to say that it should be the winner of one of those prizes that Gass scorns, nor do I think he need worry about this happening; his politics, aesthetics, and intelligence are wrong for the committees.