Omensetter's Luck Book

Israbestis Tott is like a well, full to the brim with stories.
He draws up stories daily, hourly, first lines spilling from his lips by the minute:
In the mornings, Matt was like a bell...
Omensetter was a wide and happy man...
Furber never listened. He declaimed...
Henry Pimber lay with lockjaw in his bed...

There is the story of Kick's cat, the story of the man who went to pieces, the story of the high and iron fence.
There is the story of the Hen Woods burning, the story of the hunt for Hog Bellman, the story of the cut-rate tonsillectomy.
But no one wants to hear Tott's stories, they are an odd lot, he can't even auction them off.

So Tott tells them to himself as he rambles about his old haunts or while lying on his bed when he is too tired to ramble.
And depending on how he tells them, the stories are different, because Tott knows, and we know, that there are almost as many ways to tell a story as there are stories told, and that every time it gets a telling, the story becomes a new and different story while always remaining more or less the same story.
Take the story of Henry Pimber and Jethro Furber, for example:
tell the story from Henry's side, it is the story of the fox, the well and the great white oak;
tell it from Jethro's point of view, it is the story of the stalking stiff-legged jackdaw, clacking futilely;
tell it through the bulk of Omensetter, it becomes another story, a bitter story, an ancient story.

There could have been ten, a hundred, stories in this book. We know they are waiting to be drawn from the well; we see them glint and shimmer at the bottom.
But Tott decides to give us only three: Henry's story; Furber's story; and wrapping itself around them both, the story of Omensetter.
So the three become one: the end of innocence story, the leave-taking story, the very first story.


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I like the pale geometry of the windows in the dark church-like space William Gass has created in this book. I like the quality of the light that pours in, sometimes clear and bright, sometimes hazy and murky. I follow the dust motes as they float erratically, erotically, making shapes and breaking apart, ditties and couplets, Shakespeare and the Old Testament, all caught up in a very unmerry but mirthful dance while Joyce, underneath, the blood about its business, looks on from the side aisle.

William Gass, I am happy to have met you at last.