[Gass's] brow is high, his taste learned and eclectic; his responses to books and their authors are both delicate and earthy, and sometimes orchestrated in their own right as complex fugues of unapologetic, wry inventiveness. This professor of philosophy and novelist (Omensetter's Luck) is as far from your run-of-the-mill reviewer as Cockaigne from Kalamazoo….

Who … is Gass? And what? The Phantom of the Opus? The Satrap of Succulence? He is the poetic essayist doubling as critic, but also, through some agile feats of mnemonic possession, being Proust, Valery, Colette, Malcolm Lowry and Gertrude Stein (as all of whom he is superb), and Freud, Sartre, Henry Miller and Faulkner (as all of whom he is very good). As if hypnotized. As if ravished. As if, thanks to a book-review editor who gives him lots of space, driven to disgorge an ectoplasm that, while being superprose, is also one form...