Finding a Form: Essays [Hardcover]

William H. Gass (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1996

From the author of The Tunnel comes a new collection of essays, his first in eight years, on art, writing, nature and culture. This book is by one of the most important and briliant thinkers at work today.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In his first gathering of essays in several years, novelist and critic Gass's commitment to ideas, concentrated energy and originality shine through on every page. The title essay, an exploration of how writers navigate complex, refractory reality, discloses how his childhood with an abusive father and alcoholic mother influenced his escape into writing and shaped his fictional characters, symbols and preoccupations. "Nature, Culture, and Cosmos" pessimistically gauges the "immense indifference" of the universe to our moral values and our deaths. Other pieces deal with Ezra Pound as a failed modernist; the lives of Nietzsche and Wittgenstein in relation to their thought; various species of the avant-garde from Pierre de Ronsard to Degas, Beckett and the Bauhaus; the exacting demands of autobiography; the Pulitzer Prize Committee's "banal and hokey" choices in fiction; and the abyss between the moral viewpoints expressed in works of art and the lives of their creators. Gass's deeply felt essays, reprinted from the New York Times Book Review, Antaeus, etc., are quotable, flecked with fertile insights and a pleasure to read. On stoicism: "If we have to accept what we get, why not imagine that it's just what we want?" On Impressionism: "It allows subversion to go on with the approval of the subverted."
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Gass (The Tunnel, LJ 1/95), the head of the International Writers Center at Washington University, is "as obdurate as nails" when it comes to the best possible use of the written word. Each essay in this wide-ranging book (be it titled "Ezra Pound," "Nietzche: The Polemical Philosopher," "Robert Walser," "Nature, Culture, and Cosmos," "Pulitzer, The People Prize," or "The Music of Prose") offers evidence for such a conclusion. Gass is concerned with how best to use a phrase or word and believes we should be tough-minded when it comes to reading. He reveals a sardonic sense of humor as well, for example, in discussing the winners of the Pulitzer prize, and he dislikes the fact that anyone would enjoy his/her own writing. His compound sentences?"little shimmied stretches of human awareness"?are utterly unique and perfectly difficult. This collection succeeds in his aim to arrest and inform persuasively. For literature collections.?Robert Kelly, Fort Wayne Community Schs., Ind.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 354 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; 1st edition (August 27, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679446621
• ISBN-13: 978-0679446620
• Product Dimensions: 8.7 x 5.9 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #598,054 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Music of Gass, July 7, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (San Francisco) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Finding a Form: Essays (Hardcover)

For anyone tired with the last fifteen years of "hip" postmodernism, this is an inspiring collection of darkly comic and seriously focussed essays ranging from the dillema of language and meaning to the innanity of literary prizes (which is especially juicy and hostile due to the fact that Gass, in the ranks of Pynchon, Gaddis, Reed, Coover and Ashberry, has never won one). Gass's prose cranks up the brain with lightening quickness, exercising synapses that haven't seen this much attention since German romantic criticism. He explores the epiphanies of recognition much differntly than the contemporary semioticians and psychanalysers because he expands his own inquiries in a playful use of language that demonstrates rather than deconstructs. Gass may not be our Walter Benjamin, but in an American literary landscape reluctant to relax and break wind he is our flatulator par excellence.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliance can be hard to look at..., June 4, 2009

By 

Mark Nadja "Literary Outlaw, author *Hardcore... (New York City) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

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This review is from: Finding a Form: Essays (Paperback)

--difficult to see, and not always comfortable to read. But make no mistake about it, Wm Gass is a brilliant writer and *Finding a Form* a book of essays that give off light with the profligacy of a sun on steroids.

--How many times in how many reviews must I feel it incumbent upon me to warn prospective readers: this book isn't for everyone.

--Sadly, quite a lot. And this is indeed one of those books.

--Where Gass might say something in a sentence of eight words he'll say it in eighty; where he might get his meaning across concretely, he prefers instead a suggestive metaphor. These are not faults, as far as he's concerned, but the play of an intellect that loves language, that caresses words and sentences until they waken, breathe, and sing.

--And this is not a fault as far as I'm concerned either.

--Gass is an unabashed sensualist when it comes to words. He believes passionately that the sentence, properly fashioned, lives the way Adam lived when created by God. He believes that a sentence is a living piece of the author's very consciousness--joyful, mournful, pensive, playful, intense and intent upon discovery and expression.

--Many of these essays are about the act of writing and the complimentary act of reading themselves; two are semi-biographical musings on the philosophers Nietzsche and Wittgenstein. Trained as a philosopher, Gass has a philosophically-inclined mind himself and a particularly interesting and cogent insight on the subject. Other essays take as their starting point a review of a particular book or author Gass has read. But as you can't judge a book by its cover, it's not easy to deduce what a Gass essay is by its title.

--Part of the thrill of reading these essays is in how beautifully they're written, but also in being treated to the breadth of Gass's eclectic and astounding intellect. There are always detours, segues, surprises, and even non-sequiturs...often the sidetrips and dead-ends prove more rewarding than the scheduled destination. So it is that an essay that examines the abuse of the present tense in contemporary literature, for instance, roams far afield into areas of philosophy and psychology and the politics of self-identity. Personal anecdotes pop up, fresh interpretations of mythology, musings on near and ancient history...basically anything can turn the essay enroute towards a new direction.

--As Gass proposes in the final essay of this collection, the best sort of writing encourages a communion between author and reader, in which the former extends an invitation into his mind and the latter finds the invitation enticing enough to accept. Together, they set off on a shared journey of discovery that lasts until interest flags, the writing sags, or the pages run out.

--I cracked this book open to the essay on Wittgenstein and before I'd even finished it I got online and bought the other available collections of Gass's essays, as well as his novel *The Tunnel.* I had a feeling I wouldn't regret it; and so far, I was right.

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, September 17, 2010

By 

Mr. Steiner (New York) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Finding a Form: Essays (Paperback)

A supremely enjoyable and intelligent collection of essays by the novelist, philosopher, and man of letters, William Gass. `Finding a Form' proceeds as its sounds-it is a journey through the aesthetic imagination and complex itinerary that is the mind of the author. I particularly enjoyed the essays on Ford, Pound and the Book, but there is more on literature in this text than in most college English courses. Gass has the gift of delivering us creative brilliance with clarity-he hates obscurantism but blithely critiques some of Nietzsche's most astonishing commentators. There are plenty of old fashioned philosophical questions in here as well, the divide between aesthetics and ethics, the role of truth in fiction, the nature of knowledge and poetic creation, etc. Yet there is no denying the work that has gone into Gass' formidable intellect. He has indeed read everything and this collection is a testament to his remarkable commitment to the text.