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Rating: 
Summary: Contradictory meanings of blue, erotic, electric, heavenly..
Review: A witty essay on the different shades of blue in our language, from blue jacket, blue bells, blue nose, blue laws, my blue heaven, and lady sings the blues.It's an enjoyable 91 pages, buzzing with rhetorical questions to inspire thought, frank discussions of formerly bad words (well, they may have yet been obscene when this was first published), pleasantly deconstructing erotic excerpts from Barth and a few other novelists. A breezy book.
Rating: 
Summary: Dazzling
Review: Gass is a dazzling writer, vastly too dazzling sometimes. Buy Omensetter's Luck, if you have not read it, plus click on In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & plead for reprinting. The first book of Gass litcrit, Fiction and the Figures of Life, in which Gass wonders about the wisdom of writing like Gass would soon be writing himself, is also awfully interesting. Have a ball, if you just must buy this book, but know that you are contributing to general academic diddling.
Rating:
Summary: Dazzling
Review: Gass is a dazzling writer, vastly too dazzling sometimes. Buy Omensetter's Luck, if you have not read it, plus click on In the Heart of the Heart of the Country & plead for reprinting. The first book of Gass litcrit, Fiction and the Figures of Life, in which Gass wonders about the wisdom of writing like Gass would soon be writing himself, is also awfully interesting. Have a ball, if you just must buy this book, but know that you are contributing to general academic diddling.
Rating: 
Summary: Keep At It
Review: If I am any sort of example, you will not be sure what this book is about, until you're through. Keep at it. On the way, it's one of the most wondrous pieces of writing I've encountered. When you're there, if I am any sort of example, you will weep (for the joy of affirmation, mostly) and start again.
Rating:
Summary: Women Readers Beware
Review: Linguistic creme brulee. Rich, ornate, evocative; more than a philosophical inquiry, a an almost stream-of-consciousness meditation on the ways in which the word blue has been used by literature and culture in the twentieth century. A mood piece.
Be forewarned: Gass's standards are utterly bizarre, and his "blue period" is misogynistic in the extreme. He relishes the tumescent meanings of blueness, but the only good "blue" scenes, in his view, are those that describe violent rape or abuse. Only if a woman is black and blue and bleeding does the blueness of the language succeed.
Not for the faint-hearted, and far more Sade than sexy. Expect no wisdom, but read it for what it is: a peculiar man's lyrical virtuosity.
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