My experience with Gass is fairly predictable: tremendous excitement, astonishment, the feeling that nobody else should try to write at all... then eyebrow raising, questioning why he would choose to do something so dull when he's capable of so much... then skimming... then the book ends.

This is less so with a book of short stories, but it says something that even here I had much the same feeling. The first novella, 'In Camera,' is an almost perfect work in the tradition of James's long stories about art; I'm both happy and sad to say that it could form an ideal capstone to Gass's career. Happy, because it's so good and sheds so much light on the rest of his work; sad, because we can't expect too many more writings from him.

As always with Gass, we have a situation rather than a story: a young man and an old man run a photography store. There is much talk about what a photograph (read: any work of art) should do. And then a concluding image (obviously the origin of the tale) so striking and so perfect in its relationship to what preceded it that I hesitate to spoil it. Please, go read it. I have ideas about it, but I want you to read it first.

The ideas are fairly clear, of course: the two men sit, watching the street outside their shop via a camera obscura that they have built out of what they have left of their lives. The imagine is in color, against the elder gent's preference, but he admits color is okay in this case. The image is also upside down.

They are in Plato's cave, but they have *built* the cave intentionally, to appreciate what is outside the cave more fully. The artwork is like Stendhal's mirror, but inverted, even perverted; there is no sense of direct reflection here. What is being depicted is change by the depiction.

After that, the rest of the book is a bit of a disappointment. 'Charity' is a good idea (investigate the varieties of 'charity,' from love through sex to giving away money) that isn't any fun to read. 'Soliloquy for a Chair' and 'Don't even try, Sam' are fine, but I have no knowledge of or interest in Casablanca, and I'm not particularly nostalgic for ye goode olde days when barbers were barbers and chairs were chairs (though I suspect I'm missing something in the chair soliloquy; the conclusion is rather portentous). The concluding 'The Toy Chest' is almost unreadable and probably could have been consigned to an 'Uncollected Stories' volume in a few decades.

On the other hand, 'The Man Who Spoke With His Hands' is a lovely reminder of how good Gass can be; it takes place in the world of 'Middle C,' and replicates that book's many excellences: sensitivity, humor, clarity, and style. ( )