About “In the Heart of the Heart of the Country”

“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country” is a short story that comes from a collection, published in 1968, of the same name. In a New York Times review published that same year, journalist Frederic Morton hails Gass as a talented emerging writer with a strong and aptly pessimistic voice. He writes:

“Gass is, in fact, a virtuoso with homely textures. They are the perfect foil for the nightmare leaps of his language. You are about to relax in those hick locales, even to feel comfortably bored, when the ambush of metaphors starts together with the shock of jagged elisions. A relentlessly right contradiction develops between style and subject; a tension intertwisting thing and mood, the innocuous with the obsessive, the incidental with the inevitable, and always–always–life with death. It’s a tension that keeps the reader revealingly off-balance. The habits of our mind suffer a subtle disarrangement. The verities grow bizarre. And inside trivia simmers Armageddon. In brief, Gass engenders brand-new abrupt vulnerabilities. We read about the becalmed Midwest, about farmers mired in their dailiness, and realize too late that we’ve been exposed to a deadly poetry. It says that America is lost.”