BOOK REVIEW
Middle C
By William H. Gass
Knopf Reviewed by Madeleine Maccar
Joseph Skizzen is a fraud. Or maybe just a chameleon. Or is he a forgery beget by a phoney? It could be that he’s just an isolated man who’s so far removed from the rest of humanity that he has no idea that his own shortcomings are not a damnation waiting to be unveiled but rather the nifty revisions and coping mechanisms and all-around mainstays of any given human being. William Gass’s Middle C is a lot of things without being any one thing, just like its protagonist, Professor Joseph Skizzen. It’s a novel written like a song, what with its refrains, themes (and variations on such), shifting tempos, divided segments and a triumphant resolution that practically breaks into a swelling crescendo of a happiness it spends its entire duration trying to reach. It’s a coming-of-age tale but also a story of self-discovery and second chances. It’s a fictional tale of a man who creates his own image from delicately calculated fictions, and a celebration of mediocrity most prodigiously cultivated. Skizzen himself is an aggressively unremarkable individual: a professor with a half-true resume; a meddling musician; a self-taught bibliophile; an isolated soul with no real frame of reference for the universal elements of the human condition that should give him a sense of community but drive him to endless self-doubt; a man with a $35 car he barely knows how to drive, but that’s okay because his license is a forgery he probably put more effort into fabricating than he would have actually trying to obtain a legal one (to be fair, Skizzen was a child immigrant with nary an official paper to any of his names, leaving him to forge documents to prove that he’s a man with an identity). His interests and musical tastes are obscure, mostly so no one else will find him out as the fraud he insists he is. Thing is, had he spent more time cultivating kinships with anyone other than his mother and the women who clumsily try to seduce him, Skizzen wouldn’t have to spend so much time fiercely guarding what are the inconsequential lies everyone tells themselves-voraciously devouring music we’re not even sure we like but feel obligated to pretend that we do, which Skizzen 4 | The CCLaP Journal