Gass's essays are often eerily good. At his best, he can inhabit a subject in a way that no other critic now writing can do (see, in particular, his commentaries on Gertrude Stein). (p. 108)

Like many good books, Omensetter's Luck is not easy to describe. What one comes away with is the agreeable memory of a flow of language that ranges from demotic Midwest … to incantatory…. (p. 109)

The stories in In the Heart of the Heart of the Country seem to me to be more adventurous and often more successful than the novel. "The Pedersen Kid" is beautiful work. In a curious way the look of those short sentences on pages uncluttered with quotation marks gives the text a visual purity and coldness that perfectly complements the subject of the story, and compels the reader to know the icy winter at the country's heart. In most of these...