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On Being Blue is a book about everything blue—sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things—and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do. Gass writes: Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in the flower, overhead and inside caves, covering fruit and oozing out of clay. Although green enlivens the earth and mixes in the ocean, and we find it, copperish, in fire; green air, green skies, are rare. Gray and brown are widely distributed, but there are no joyful swatches of either, or any of exuberant black, sullen pink, or acquiescent orange. Blue is therefore most suitable as the color of interior life. Whether slick light sharp high bright thin quick sour new and cool or low deep sweet dark soft slow smooth heavy old and warm: blue moves easily among them all, and all profoundly qualify our states of feeling.
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The strangest thing happened while I was reading this book. It was chosen by my book club and I had not googled anything about it nor about its author ahead of reading. And yet as I read it I couldn't help but picture the author a certain very particular way and lo and behold! he happens to look exactly like what I imagined: a frumpy uncle type whom you wouldn't want to be in any way lewd in your presence. The kind of guy who finds Henry James' cunnilingus metaphors titillating and who uses phrases like “go fuck a duck” (gasp!).
Boy, did this book age badly. The prose is mostly quite wonderful (though I did find myself shockingly thinking “wow I'm so bored with alliteration” towards the end of it [!!]) but its references feel extremely dated (it was written in the 70s, it turns out).
Also, I can't help but think that all of Gass'es somewhat incoherent struggles with sex writing will have been voided with the discovery of Nicholson Baker.