[Employing in The World Within the Word] a prose style equivalent to the Slinky toy, Gass lands always on this: that writers have only language, language has them—and though the domestic relation may at times chafe and bite, it remains irrefutably monogamous. To slight the sentence—launched with a capital letter, tied off at the end with a period's pip—is to commit a basic error. Sentences make reality, not vice versa….

As readers, we're conned, is Gass's basic and delighted message; and the illusion, the misunderstanding, is the very crux of the game….

Gass has remarkable metamorphic talents when dealing with a writer he likes—Malcolm Lowry, Colette, Valéry: he seems to wrap his own very much alive grip around their ghostly pencils—but no one more engages his brilliance, and to greater effect, than Stein. Succumbing happily to her famous opacity—"intricacy no objection...