SOURCE: “In the Heart of the Heart of the Text,” in New York Times Book Review, March 9, 1997, p. 6.

In the following review, Howard offers positive evaluation of Finding a Form.

William H. Gass is embattled. It's awful out there where the stale sweets of commerce are served up as art, laced with dope for the dopes, violence injected for the numb. As a gentleman trained in philosophy, a writer of distinguished fiction, an honored academic, Mr. Gass has his rights, if not every right, to remain sore. And in Finding a Form he confronts the conundrum of the writer that he has faced in previous essays: the word is sacred, though there are no longer sacred texts; “writing puts the writer in illusory command of the world, empowers someone otherwise powerless, but with a power no more pointed than a pencil.”

Yes, the old genetics: in the beginning...