Book Banishing, September 2011

How time speeds along. Let's banish another book from the Lavolette Library, shall we?

This month's banishing targets William H. Gass' Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife. Gass' slender tome made its way into my library as part of the syllabus for a class on contemporary conceptual fiction, a class whose readings I generally enjoyed. Willie Masters', however, was one I quite actively disliked (despite my writing a paper on it), largely because the 'plight' of the titular Babs Masters, an ignored-housewife-cum-ignored-text, failed to engage me as I was reading it.

In thinking about why I want this book out of my library, I'm reminded of a recent conversation about dating (and specifically first dates) with a friend of mine. Looking back on a number of the post-college first dates I went on before I met my wife, I realized that a common reason I was uninterested in pursuing second dates with these women was that they seemed far more interesting in their emails or over the phone than they did in person. Willie Masters' suffers from a similar lack of immediate engagement; it's a book whose explanation/discussion/interpretation is far more interesting than the book itself (which is saying a lot considering the nude photography and typographical gymnastics Gass included in the text).

Babs, I'm sorry, it's not me, it's you. The absence of your stick-thin figure won't free up much space on the shelves, but Khalil Gibran's The Prophet was getting tired of having your tits pressed up against him. Begone!

On a related note, here's a tidbit from Gass' 1977 interview in The Paris Review:

If someone asks me, “Why do you write?” I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, “Why do you write the way you do?” I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste. There isn’t very much satisfaction in getting the world to accept and praise you for things that the world is prepared to praise. The world is prepared to praise only shit. One wants to make sure that the complete self, with all its qualities, is not just accepted but approved... not just approved—whoopeed.

I see what he's getting at, but it just seems off.