Following close on the heels of John Gardner's On Moral Fiction, William Gass's second collection of essays seems almost a counter-attack. To Gardner's call for fiction of moral concern, Gass replies that “Poetry [which for Gass usually includes fiction and essays] is not a kind of communication, but a construction in consciousness.” On the thread of this premise, Gass strings essays about an impressively eclectic range of topics, including suicide, psychology, philosophy, mathematics, and linguistics as well as literature.

Gass begins by stripping the reader of two widespread misconceptions about what “poetry” is. In several essays on death and suicide, Gass reminds us that literature is not the cathartic escape from life, either for the writer or the reader, that most readers take it to be. Using Hart Crane, Malcolm Lowry, and his own mother as examples, he insists that although suicide may be an escape from life, literature certainly is not. Though an artist may refuse to face the challenge of his own life, he cannot refuse the challenge of his art's form: “Poetry is cathartic only for the unserious, for in front of the rush of expressive need stands the barrier of form.” Writing is harder than living: “Writing. Not writing. Twin terrors. Putting one's mother into words. … It may have been easier to put her in her grave.” The second misconception Gass attempts to destroy is that literature imitates life. For him life and art are irreconcilably separate. In discussions of Faulkner, Stein, Colette, Proust, Valéry, Sartre, Nabokov, Freud, and Henry Miller, he emphasizes that all of these writers forged in their writing the order they failed to find in their lives. “Faulkner's life,” for instance, “was nothing until it found its way into Faulkner's language. Faulkner's language was largely unintrigued by Faulkner's life.” Such writers write not to communicate ideas to their readers but to create themselves and their worlds through language.

Having attacked at length these misconceptions about the writer and his art, Gass concludes with three essays which explain his own concept of the function of language in literature. In the best of the three, “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses,” he theorizes about language while making a case for short fiction as the most significant genre in contemporary literature. Novelists, he complains, no longer recognize “the vast difference between the literary use of language and any other,” and our poets “have embraced carelessness like a cocotte.” He likes essayists who, like him, “experiment with the interplay of genres,” but he admires most such writers of short fiction as Nabokov, Borges, Beckett, and Barth for “their esthetic exploitation of language, … their depth of commitment, to their medium, … their range of conceptual understanding, … [and] the purity of their closed forms.” For these writers, as for Gass himself, a word is like the carrot we use to make a snowman's nose: “the carrot does not simply stand for or resemble a nose, it literally is a nose now” (Gass's emphases). Words are things in themselves, not merely imitations of things. They create a world which need not be related to the moral systems of our own world.

Poetry is not communication? Art is harder than life? Words create their own worlds? Though not new, these continue to be difficult ideas to swallow for those who view literature as a moral vehicle. Of course, probably neither Gardner's moral view nor Gass's formalist view of literature is wholly right. Just as Gardner's fiction reveals his love for the texture of words, Gass's own beautifully crafted sentences in his essays and fiction are often filled with deep moral concern about the unfulfilled potential of our lives. Gass's ideas are becoming increasingly convincing and increasingly important, however, in light of our society's increasing carelessness about language. Whether or not we agree with his premises, we must thank him for patiently insisting that we re-examine the potential of language and literature in the hope of reducing “the number of dunderheads reading Balzac the way they would skim Business Week.”