Both Flesh and Not: Essays

Omensetter’s Luck by William H. Gass (1966)

Gass’s first novel, and his least avant-gardeish, and his best. Basically a religious book. Very sad. Contains the immortal line “The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.” Bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice.

Steps by Jerzy Kosinski (1968)

This won some big prize or other when it first came out, but today nobody seems to remember it. Steps gets called a novel but it is really a collection of unbelievably creepy little allegorical tableaux done in a terse elegant voice that’s like nothing else anywhere ever. Only Kafka’s fragments get anywhere close to where Kosinski goes in this book, which is better than everything else he ever did combined.

Angels by Denis Johnson (1983)

This was Johnson’s first fiction after the horripilative lyric poetry of The Incognito Lounge. Even cult fans of Jesus’ Son often haven’t heard of Angels. It’s sort of Jesus’ Son’s counterpoint, a novel-length odyssey of mopes and scrotes and their brutal redemptions. A totally American book, it’s also got great prose, truly great, some of the ’80s’ best; e.g., lines like “All around them men drank alone, staring out of their faces.”

Blood Meridian: Or the Evening Redness in the West by Cormac McCarthy (1985)

Don’t even ask.

Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson (1988)

W’s M is a dramatic rendering of what it would be like to live in the sort of universe described by logical atomism. A monologue, formally very odd, mostly one-sentence ¶s. Tied with Omensetter’s Luck for the all-time best U.S. book about human loneliness. These wouldn’t constitute ringing endorsements if they didn’t happen all to be simultaneously true — i.e., that a novel this abstract and erudite and avant-garde could also be so moving makes Wittgenstein’s Mistress pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.

— 1999