the opening essays on the absurdities and mediocrity of literary culture, the tics and tenses regnant in creative writing workshops, the criteria on which prizes such as the Nobel, the Pulitzer and National Book Award are doled out are really, really sharp and very entertaining; Gass' hatred is pure and there's no better advocate for what he regards as good writing

after that there are a number of extended considerations of the careers of specific individuals, Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Ezra Pound (I was interested to see that Gass' take on him was that he was a bluffer, and not in a good way) and then 4 or 5 trips through the western intellectual tradition from the Garden of Eden to TV sets. these move along at a great clip but they're pretty surface level and, insofar as they have an argument, are unfortunately given over to how hard it is to be an aesthete in the contemporary United States, where one is beset by moralists of both the left and the right, who demand incessantly that one's writing speaks to concerns beyond their formal architecture.

to make it clear: I'm not sympathetic to the idea of the autonomous artwork. every writer or critic that I've yet come across who does hold with it has disarmed themselves fatally to the most central aspects of their work, especially on the level of form, and betrays a supreme incuriosity about how the ideas or images they traffic in are applied.

in comparison to heads like Nabokov or Leavis, who will tend to summarise the plot, read a few paragraphs and say 'isn't that a supreme appeal to one's sensibility?' Gass makes the broad and up to a point correct assertion that, against his notion of a naive realist, life is complex, fragmented, uneven and literary modes that are similarly refracted are more honest. this is of course the ideological wedge of 'make it new!' as Gass will on the one hand say Ulysses shows the vitality of everyday life as it is truly lived and on the other than literature should embrace the fact that popular culture has rendered it irrelevant by crafting baroque paragraphs in the dark.

ultimately there's too big a gap from the truism that Gass brandishes around about how life is complex to the repudiation of all totalities or structure. Hegel solved this problem when he said the two should check in with each other every once in a while and go from there