SOURCE: “Fleshing Out Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife,” in Silverless Mirrors: Book, Self, and Postmodern American Fiction, Tallahassee, FL: University Presses of Florida, 1983, pp. 97-111.

In the following essay, Caramello examines Gass's postmodern ambivalence toward authority, textuality, and the deconstruction of reality in Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife.

If dreams are made of imagination, I'm not afraid of my own creation.

Rodgers and Hart, “Isn't It Romantic?”

But though he had breathed heavily, groaned as if ecstatic, what he'd really felt throughout was an odd detachment, as though someone else were Master.

John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse”

William H. Gass calls a brief encounter with Wittgenstein “the most important intellectual experience of my life”;¹ he is acidic on the topic of Sartrean engagement in literature;² he describes himself as “very much a Valérian”;³ and he consistently argues that art “teaches nothing. It simply shows us what beauty, perfection...