William H. Gass. Tests of Time.

Gross, David S.

New York. Knopf. 2002. 319 pages. $25. ISBN 0-37541257-3

TESTS OF TIME is a wonderful collection of essays on more or less all things literary, and many things social, pop-cultural, political, even spiritual and philosophical. In the book's longest essay, "Quotations from Chairman Flaubert," Gass even gives us something like a story. The main character, an American who is a failed professor of comparative literature, has attempted to jump-start his career by fleeing into East Germany in 1989, and there passing himself off as a German named Henrich Zeitung MullerMuller--though, since he didn't speak the language, he had to have "his Ozark-smoked American prose put into not very convincing Plattdeutsch by an old school chum, TrevorGroper." The essay/story is filled with long quotations from Gustave Flaubert's letters and extended reflections on them, plus ideas about the nature of narrative and the writer's role in the world sparked by Flaubert's.

Like the book as a whole, Gass's own narrative style here runs the gamut from a hip, wisecracking contemporary American media influenced slang, with ample use of the vulgar, even, quite often, the "F" word, to an extremely sophisticated intellectual style. Even his most abstract or theoretical observations are refreshingly free from jargon, as in this amazingly long sentence glossing a famous passage from Flaubert on design and order in narrative prose.

 A perfect passage has a perfect pulse, and the
 final resolution, when it comes, consists not
 only of the ultimate order and concluding significance
 which its nervously strung-out
 words have realized, but also of the rate of dissolution
 and recombination the text has passed
 through like another rhythm; consequently,
 one has to understand the initial positioning of
 the words as provisional, for they are everywhere
 at once, though making their modification
 sometimes only in combinations and acting,
 through the reader's obedient eye, mostly
 at a distance, simultaneously with others, creating
 an incredible vibration in the work as it
 rests serenely on its page, with the result that
 the sound of the text, when its signs are properly
 recited, will seem made by the very shivering
 of the sense inside the line.

The protean quality ascribed to good prose in that remarkable sentence is a constant theme in these essays, and it aptly describes a key aspect of Gass's own prose.

Skepticism and irony predominate here. Anger is sometimes present, especially in the more political essays, several of which are on censorship and the persecution of artists and writers in the past and the present--the example of the fatwah against Salman Rushdie is cited in several different essays. And, for all the irony and wisecracking, love--and even passion--are not absent, usually love of what a writer has done, some lines from Rilke, from Hopkins, a passage from Walden.

Gass's insistence on combining the most ordinary colloquial language ("Hopkins was down in the dumps") with abstract and even philosophical discussion ("The Nature of Narrative and Its Philosophical Implications," which is about what it says it is) is one of the more interesting aspects of this most fascinating, rewarding, and important book.

David S. Gross

University of Oklahoma