Customer Reviews

Omensetter's Luck (Classic, 20th-Century, Penguin)

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Even with its antiquated setting, "Omensetter's Luck" is so avant-garde and eccentric that it's a challenge to write a review that doesn't seem like a shameful oversimplification. Imagine a story about perceptions of good and evil, envy, and suspicion narrated in an impressionistic, stream-of-consciousness style that rivals Faulkner at his most experimental, combining uniquely poetic prose, Joycean wordplay, an ominous mood, and multiple focuses, voices, and perspectives, and you'll begin to get the idea.

The time is evidently the late nineteenth century, the place a small town called Gilean located on the Ohio River. A "wide and happy" man named Brackett Omensetter recently has moved into town with his pregnant wife, two daughters, dog, and a mountain of furniture and belongings on a horse-drawn cart. He rents a house from a man named Henry Pimber and gets a job as a tanner with Mat Watson, the town blacksmith.

Omensetter quickly becomes an object of curiosity in Gilean for his unbelievable, almost supernatural, luck. In the middle of the rainy season, the rain stops for his moving day; his house manages to avoid an otherwise damage-guaranteeing flood; he seems impervious to injury. He's an expert stone skipper and an effective naturalistic healer. Nobody will bet against him. He is not only aware of his own incredible luck; he depends on it so strongly that it replaces religion, and he feels no need to attend Gilean's only church, ministered by the Reverend Jethro Furber.

Furber is a fascinating character who avoids the flatness of most fictional preachers. His parents sheltered him insufferably as a child, depriving him of anything they considered a bad moral influence and prohibiting him from playing with other kids; now he walks around reciting dirty songs to himself and talks to the grave of Pike, a previous pastor. He resents Omensetter's neglect of the church yet is intrigued by his ostensible luck; unsurprisingly, he accuses Omensetter of being "of the dark ways" and "beyond the reach of God." He tries gently to persuade Watson to fire Omensetter, which would force him to leave town...P>Approaching "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" in complexity of both narration and characterization, "Omensetter's Luck" is an odd book in both style and substance, the product of an independent literary thinker who demonstrates that a truly good story transcends even the strangest packaging.

This is an unusual novel -- difficult to read, yet fascinating at the same time. It's also a work of brilliance with lapidary sentences of poetic stature and a brilliant exposition of character. All in all, I was dumb-founded to stumble across "Omensetter's Luck" and grateful that I did.

The novel takes place in the 1890s in a small town in Ohio just north of the Ohio River. The title character, Brackett Omensetter, is a happy-go-lucky craftsman who wanders into town one day with his wife and daughters. The Omensetters settle into a rented house down by the river and are gradually accepted by the community. Accepted, that is, by all save the town's puritanical Protestant minister, the Rev. Jethro Furber. Furber is a monster forged by religious convention untempered by religious conviction. He resents being banished to Gilean from Cleveland (his fire and brimstone sermons do not go over any better with his congregation there) and spends much of his time brooding bitterly about his downfall, much like Satan in Milton's poetry. He is also sexually frustrated and edging toward a nervous breakdown barely cloaked in the form of religious mania.

Furber's wrath is ultimately focused on Brackett Omensetter, if for no other reason than the man seems to enjoy an incredible grace without exhibiting the first ounce of good Christian behavior. Omensetter's luck changes many lives, some for good and some for bad. But his unintended redemption of Rev. Furber may be Omensetter's greatest piece of luck during his time in Gilean. In the end, Omensetter's catalytic luck brings Furber to the faith he has long espoused, but never really lived in his heart.

"Omensetter's Luck" is about chance, human choice and the struggle all of us face when we try to live as our honest, open, decent selves. The novel is a difficult read because it uses the stream-of-consciousness technique throughout and two-thirds of it is narrated by the splintering mind of Jethro Furber. I recommend that you take it at a leisurely pace, savor the prose and pay attention to Rev. Furber's miraculous change of heart. This is Nobel Prize-level writing and certainly deserves a place of honor in late 20th Century American fiction.

I wouldn't recommend "Omensetter's Luck" for any student below graduate school level. They won't get it. Ironically, I think many older readers who don't even have college degrees will find that the novel resonates powerfully with them. Gass' work here rewards the reader who comes to it with years of experience in the "real" world. For them, the power of its prose is matched by the power of its truth.

I am very glad that I decided to read _Omensetter's Luck_ all the way through. Hidden in a plethora of incoherent sentences, incomprehensible metaphors and silly rhymes, is a very worthwhile story of two men: Brackett Omensetter, who migrates to Gilean, Ohio with his wife and small children, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, who is the town's minister. Furber suffers from deeply repressed guilt, fear, and resentment; his behavior occasionally borders on the psychotic. In his section of the book, Furber gives (or does he imagine giving?) a lengthy church sermon. Although the sermon is fascinatingly self-revealing, I continuously found myself getting lost in Furber's incoherent word salad. I decided, however, to stay with the book, despite the repeated temptation to put it down. As I continued to read, and to my very pleasant surprise, I discovered Omensetter to be a man of great decency and selflessness. He stands head and shoulders above a town full of petty people, many of whom were jealous and resentful of Omensetter's legendary "luck." Gilean's denizens even attributed luck to Omensetter's ability to save miraculously the life of a man dying of lockjaw, contracted from a serious accident. Practically none of the townspeople stand by Omensetter when, later, he is unjustly accused of being responsible for the hanging death of this same man.

Everything comes together nicely in the last one hundred pages of the book. I credit William Gass' well-paced, extremely realistic dialogue for helping to accomplish this feat, which I would have otherwise considered impossible had I mistakenly decided not to stick with this flawed, but must-read book.

The title concerns me some. The book was less about Omensetter and more about Reverend Jethro Furber.

There's quite a mix of linguistic tricks in this difficult novel. Grab a glossary of literary terms and go looking - you'll probably find at least one example of each in here.

Frankly, I'm not as impressed as I thought I would be. I was expecting to have to work at this (it is Gass after all), but I just didn't really enjoy it. There were many funny, moving passages that made the read worthwhile, but I never felt truly drawn to any of the characters.

Would I recommend this? Yes, but only if you have enjoyed other difficult "literary" experimental works. Certainly, it is not for anyone wanting a light read.

A difficult but extremely worthwhile book. It seems to me that authentic stream of consciousness writing should actually be easy to read since all of us spend our entire waking lives bathing in our own stream of consciousness. I would argue that the fact that this style of writing is generally considered difficult and abstract points to its inauthenticity. I wonder if Gass himself suspects this - Furber, after all, proclaims life to be a long "stream of piss" near book's end. Overall, a very touching and insightful story; the second half of the book is especially well constructed.

Totally unrelated to the book itself - the afterword by Gass is bizarre! I assume this is true - if so, the story of how the novel actually got written and published is quite amazing itself.

I can't believe anyone will ever describe this book as a "fun read". I felt as I was reading it that it was as densely written as poetry in many places and could never be grasped by reading it as a progression of plot. It is full of allusions, metaphors, and suggestions and the reader will have to fend for himself. Only by looking back on the novel as a whole do I begin to see what I think might be the meaning. It seems that the point may be that inner, or psychological success in life depends on how we are able to represent the world to ourselves through our inner dialogues. Those gifted with higher levels of perception are more or less cursed with the need to be more articulate with themselves. There are several different degrees of consciousness represented by characters in this story. The conclusion of the book seems to be the author's summing up, metaphorically of these ideas. A novel of inner, psychological landscapes, it should appeal to those who quest for books that broaden our perspectives,

Omensetter's Luck has been a treasured, special book for me since I first read it many years ago.My copy is battered from several readings and dippings over time and the fact it once was drenched by an incoming tide and covered in sand as I lay on a beach in Mexico but I will never part with it. Reading this beautiful novel you become swamped and overwhelmed by a magical language world. I'd like to quote a sample of Jethro Furber's musings: (About death) "Why was it sorrowful, The Great Alternative? No hell afterward, but blessedness. What could be more blessed than to rest in a core of silence - not to be? He'd meant to preach to that. His whole life, he'd meant to preach, to preach... Where was his preaching and his preachment now? Would Henry's body, hanging in its tree, be dreaming?"

I saw somewhere, in some journal review, mention made of this novel in a select group of experimental works, with Dhalgren and Pale Fire as the other two "masterpieces." I quit on Dhalgren before pg. 80 (the novel was just pointless though I'm an sf reader) and Pale Fire was boring and experimental in the worst way. I quit on that too. But Omensetter's Luck was different; it had flow and was easy on the eyes. It had vibrant descriptions AND intense emotion AND storytelling momentum (three almost impossible things to bring together in a novel). And it was experimental in its SOC, so I felt proud I could "get" at least one of the three. So why did I like it (other than that I could finish it)? Primarily because the central antagonism was juicy, like a boxing match but with intangible forces from above (or below), between the perverted preacher and the jolly dough-boy Brackett Omensetter. The novel keeps it simple: man against man without any confusing secondary plotting or intrusive supporting cast. And the words, a lot of hateful words that recall Celine's "Death on the Installment Plan." The effect of reading this book is stranger though with its long but vibrant sentence rhythms making up the book's crazed metronome, which gets inside your skull. Only Garcia-Marquez's "One Hundred Years of Solitude" does it more pulsatingly maddening, threatening to overspill your skull, another book this novel recalls. I don't know: maybe Gass's work should be grouped with these two giants. But the Frenchman and Columbian have him beat for hate-humor and wisdom, and Gass's book would come in a distant third, which isn't bad for an American novel. For once, an experimental writer who's not a headache to read! English-language novelists with oversized vocabularies and ambitions should take note, or else brush up on Celine and Garcia-Marquez.

An unbelievable journey through differing perspectives of human lonliness. Those familiar with Gass's work will notice the philosophical undertonings beneath his at-times meandering but beautiful prose. Writing like this is simply underappreciated. It belongs among the great works of this century, yet it has been hardly recognized. The highest recommendations.

If you imagine a combination of Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" without the letter, Faulkner, but in the Midwest of the 1890s, the Mellvillean examination of the tragic fate of innocence sans ocean, whale, and Ahab, and passages of stentorian rhetoric of Biblical and Shakespearean proportions--that's sort of what you have here. You have to be in the mood. If you can't tune into the rhythm of Gass's prose, this novel will be a hundred miles of rough uphill sledding.

Omensetter is a big happy oaf who rides into Gilean with a wagon full of junk, and his little family. He does everything seemingly without a care in the world for how it will turn out, but everything he does seems to work out just fine anyway, in spite of the odds. This bugs the bejeezus out of the local preacher, which is quite a thing to see...and hear. Who does this Omensetter think he is, anyway, being all happy, having everything work out, enjoying life, and not showing up at church to listen to the good preacher's frothing-at-the-mouth sermons about how lousy life is on top of it? Is he the devil, perchance?

Well things start to sour in Gilean for Omensetter and the preacher couldn't feel more justified; he's been talking the guy down from the start. Now just about everyone starts thinking that maybe Omensetter really is a little "too" lucky...

And that's about the size of it without giving too much away. I'm a fan of Gass so I probably have more patience for his style than a lot of readers might have for unpacking the density of his prose. But if you've the stomach for it, this is richly satisfying fare. I don't think it's quite so towering a literary landmark as the hyperbolic reviews on the book proclaim, but "Omensetter's Luck" is a powerful book, no doubt about it.