Dirty Old Man

OMENSETTER'S LUCK by William H. Gass. 304 pages. New American Library. $5.95.

"Pale, pinch-faced little Jethro Furber, the nail-eyed reverend, was nothing but bones, and even those you could have wrapped in a hankie. His twisted figure was like a knotted string, and he hated his parishioners. With fierce Puritan intensity he preached burning, his whole inside crying die, shouting die. He worked in his garden obsessively, like a madman picking imaginary lint from his sleeve. He wanted women, imagined them in every posture. He wrote dirty doggerel and lied--his single skill. He lived in a thousand careening pieces, like a shattered army."

In Jethro Furber, the outrageously vivid villain of this orgiastically original first novel, William Gass presents a hilarious portrait of the Puritan as a dirty old man. In Brackett Omensetter, the "wide and happy" hero of the book, he offers an archetypal antithesis: "Like the clouds, he was natural and beautiful, like a piece of weather in the room. Life eased from him like a smooth broad crayon line. He knew the secret--how to be."

Hero meets villain in the small Mid-western town where Furber holds forth as the local yack-in-the-pulpit. "Both of Omensetter's hands reached for his hand, enclosing it like a worm in a fruit." Obsessed with envy, Furber spreads lies about Omensetter and even tries to persuade the townspeople that he has committed murder. In the end the reverend repents his persecution, but too late to preserve his reason, which drowns in a loud orange effluvium of emotion.

Effluvium is the least amiable excess of which Author Gass is guilty. At his worst he spates obscurities like a jejune Joyce; at his best he generates images like the navel of the demiurge itself. And the images reflect ideas. Gass is a trained thinker, a professor of philosophy at Purdue University, and in this fable he enlivens the weary old war between good and evil with curt communiques and rakingly comic crossfire.

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