The times are full of contradictions…. Such contradictions, which slip in among the products of our work, have become the subject and the fact of our best fiction—making it complicated, ambivalent, and too often inaccessible. Some of this fiction is written by William H. Gass….

[Today] the novelist is both more cut off from society and more involved in its contradictions. We shouldn't be surprised, therefore, to find in Gass's work a major discrepancy between the theory of his essays and the practice of his fiction—a discrepancy that also makes for difficulty, disturbance, and beauty within the fiction itself. (p. 96)

Anyone familiar with Gass's essays will have been struck by certain of their shining and upsetting sentences:

There are no descriptions in fiction, there are only constructions, and the principles which govern these constructions are persistently philosophical….

It seems a country-headed thing to say: that literature...