William Gass is one of the foremost theoreticians, champions, and practitioners of postmodern literature, and has also earned considerable eminence as an essayist and as a writer of fiction. Often grouped with such contemporary American authors as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, William Gaddis, John Hawkes, Thomas Pynchon, and Paul West, Gass shares with them a fundamental concern with the self-evident, self-sufficient status of language itself--in short, with the metafictional imperative. His fiction and his nonfiction conspire in an obsession with the primacy of words, glamorized by Gass's inimitable stylistic flourishes. According to Gass, words do not principally serve as vehicles conveying the reader to some external reality they imitate; they also constitute a reality--a "world within the word"--and, hence, are foregrounded as a destination unto themselves. In this sense, language is viewed as being more opaque, more centripetal, than naive notions of literary...