Volume 19, Number 10 · December 14, 1972
Great American Fragments
By Michael Wood
Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife
by William H. Gass
Knopf, unpaginated pp., $3.95
The Last Fair Deal Going Down
by David Rhodes
Little, Brown, 308 pp., $6.95
Museums and Women and Other Stories
by John Updike
Knopf, 282 pp., $6.95
Sadness
by Donald Barthelme
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 183 pp., $5.95
'My god, I said, this is my country, but must my country go so far as Terre Haute or Whiting, go so far as Gary?' The names suggest both distances on a map and moral divergences too extreme for the speaker to comprehend. The Midwest, both here in William H. Gass's story 'In the Heart of the Heart of the Country' and in David Rhodes's novel The Last Fair Deal Going Down, becomes a metaphor for loneliness, for a sense of the self as stranded in a symbolic geography, almost before the writer has done anything to make this happen. Lives are 'vacant and barren and loveless,' Gass writes, 'here in the heart of the country.' 'Who cares,' he asks later, 'to live in any season but his own?'
Review, 3993 words
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