Middle C (novel)

rdf:langString Middle C (novel)

rdf:langString Middle C

rdf:langString Middle C

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rdf:langString Middle C is a 2013 novel by William H. Gass. Gass started writing it sometime after 1998, with a first excerpt appearing in 2001. The novel tells the story and concerns of Joseph Skizzen, whose father got the family out of Austria in 1938, pretending to be Jewish, then disappeared in London. Relocated with his mother and sister to the fictional Woodbine, Ohio, Skizzen grows up to be a thoroughly middling nobody, a low-skilled amateur piano player who finds his niche as a professor of music at a small Bible college, by passing himself off as just the right kind of exotic, specializing in Arnold Schoenberg and atonal music, and successfully lying about his training and credentials. Isolated, he lives with his mother, his only hobby a fantasy life as the curator of his Inhumanity Museum. He obsesses over revising a single sentence, "The fear that the human race might not survive has been replaced by the fear that it will endure." One review described the novel as being written in a style imitative of Schoenberg, with no scene having more dramatic significance than any other. Another review compared the novel to a concerto, with parts for Joey, Joseph, and Professor Skizzen. It won the William Dean Howells Medal in 2015.