In the Heart of the Heart of the Country by William Gass

How hard is In the Heart of the Heart of the Country to read?

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country scores 87 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it very challenging. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 88 out of 100

Gass deploys one of the most demanding lexicons in American short fiction: precise Latin botanical nomenclature (Periplaneta orientalis, Helichrysum monstrosum, Statice sinuata, Gypsophila, Briza maxima), philosophical and critical terminology (grotesquerie, preternatural, scatological, hypotaxis), and neologisms coined within the text itself ("enwooden," "enflumed"). Even the vernacular sections of "The Pedersen Kid" maintain an unusual precision of sensory vocabulary, while the narrator of "Mrs. Mean" moves fluidly between demotic observation and high-register theoretical digression. The lexical range across the collection is wider than Gravity's Rainbow and consistent throughout rather than isolated in passages.

Sentence structure: 85 out of 100

Gass orchestrates sentence structure as a semantic instrument: in "Mrs. Mean" and "Icicles," single sentences unspool across multiple lines of dense subordination and appositive interruption, mimicking the restless accumulation of an obsessive mind. "The Pedersen Kid" alternates these long periodic constructions with staccato fragments and dialogue stripped of attribution tags, demanding that the reader reconstruct speaker, sequence, and significance. The title story's notebook-section prose achieves a paratactic isolation that paradoxically requires more interpretive effort than continuous syntax because each entry refuses to connect to the next.

Abstraction: 88 out of 100

Gass is unusual in American fiction for treating philosophical abstraction as the primary material of narrative rather than its ornament. The narrator of "Mrs. Mean" converts neighborhood observation into a sustained meditation on idleness, power, and the epistemology of watching; Fender's icicle obsession in "Icicles" becomes a philosophical argument about property, identity, and transience; "Order of Insects" is explicitly structured as an inquiry into how knowledge transforms the knower. The title story advances a theory of Midwestern consciousness through a set of discrete phenomenological investigations. The stories do not use ideas to illuminate action — they use action to embody ideas.

Information density: 87 out of 100

Each paragraph of Gass carries a weight of observation, implication, and philosophical argument that requires a reader's full attention to unpack. The Glick-Isabelle-Fender dialogue in "Icicles" is simultaneously parody, elegy, real-estate satire, and meditation on mortality compressed into a few pages of overlapping voice. "Order of Insects" layers entomological precision, French quotation, theological language, and domestic anxiety within a single housewife's interior monologue. There is almost no decorative or transitional prose — every sentence is doing multiple work simultaneously, more demanding than 2666's encyclopedic accumulation because the density is argumentative rather than archival.

Narrative indirection: 88 out of 100

Events in Gass's stories are almost never stated directly: the yellow-gloved man's crime in "The Pedersen Kid" is never confirmed, and Jorge's final "burning up with joy" may be delusional, murderous, or both. The narrator of "Mrs. Mean" explicitly refuses to distinguish fantasy (Mrs. Mean collapsing from a blood pressure episode) from observation. Fender's inner monologue in "Icicles" collapses past, present, and imagined future without warning. The title story, structured as notebook entries rather than scenes, withholds event entirely — its "story" is a static portrait of consciousness in a landscape, with no plot to follow at all.

Symbolic density: 90 out of 100

Snow in these stories functions simultaneously as beauty, menace, isolation, burial, and the unconscious; icicles are identity, property, the body, and mortality; insects carry divinity, the order of the universe, and erotic transformation. These symbols are not decorative — they are the structural arguments of the stories. The title story's Midwestern field is a philosophical landscape of American deracination. Gass pursues his central images obsessively until they have been turned, and turned again, into something that cannot be reduced to a single meaning. The density surpasses Moby-Dick in consistency if not in scope, because in Gass every object in every story is doing this work.

Ironic distance: 84 out of 100

The narrators of these stories observe from positions of ironic superiority that the stories consistently undermine. The "scientific coldness" claimed by the narrator of "Mrs. Mean" is revealed as a form of voyeuristic obsession no different from his subjects'. Fender's Pearson-worship is undercut by his own venal history; his final self-inventory collapses the distinction between house and person with savage comic precision. The title story's narrator, in "retirement from love," is not detached but destroyed. Gass's irony is less the controlling wit of Nabokov than a structural honesty about the gap between the pretensions of his narrators and their actual states.

Resolution withholding: 88 out of 100

None of the five stories in this collection offers narrative resolution. "The Pedersen Kid" ends with Jorge's ecstatic but potentially delusional monologue, leaving the fate of every character genuinely unknown. "Mrs. Mean" ends mid-observation, the narrator's power over his subject still unresolved. "Icicles" closes on Fender paralyzed in his chair while children descend like an avalanche — an image without sequel. "Order of Insects" closes with the housewife lying beside her husband, transformed but unable to act on transformation. The title story simply stops, its sections having circled rather than progressed. Ambiguity is the formal principle, not a byproduct.

Structural complexity: 86 out of 100

The collection deploys five formally distinct structures: the unattributed-dialogue vernacular stream-of-consciousness of "The Pedersen Kid"; the genteel-observer essay form of "Mrs. Mean"; the collapsing third-person free-indirect hallucination of "Icicles"; the confessional interior monologue of "Order of Insects"; and the notebook-entry lyric essay of the title story. No two stories share a structural approach. Within stories, Gass shifts register mid-paragraph, embeds parody within realism, and uses typographic spacing as a semantic instrument. The collection is a deliberate demonstration of formal range comparable to Borges's Ficciones in its variety but committed to psychological depth rather than intellectual games.

How In the Heart of the Heart of the Country is regarded

In the Heart of the Heart of the Country holds a literary regard score of 85 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

About the author

William Gass