SOURCE: “The Winter Wasteland of William Gass's ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,’” in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXX, No. 1, Fall, 1988, pp. 49-58.

In the following essay, Hadella examines Gass's theoretical perspective, literary allusion, and narrative authority in “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country.” According to Hadella, the narrator's “attempt to control his world through language fails because he lacks love, the vital ingredient needed to transform language into art.”

“Models interfere with the imagination,” William Gass insists in response to a question about how or where he gets the material for his fiction.¹ In this same interview, however, Gass confesses: “The only time I ever used a ‘model’ in writing was when, as a formal device, and to amuse myself, I chose to get the facts about ‘B’ in ‘In the Heart of the Heart of the Country’ exactly...