Omensetter's Luck (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) [Paperback]

The time is evidently the late nineteenth century, the place a small town called Gilean located on the Ohio River. A "wide and happy" man named Brackett Omensetter recently has moved into town with his pregnant wife, two daughters, dog, and a mountain of furniture and belongings on a horse-drawn cart. He rents a house from a man named Henry Pimber and gets a job as a tanner with Mat Watson, the town blacksmith.

Omensetter quickly becomes an object of curiosity in Gilean for his unbelievable, almost supernatural, luck. In the middle of the rainy season, the rain stops for his moving day; his house manages to avoid an otherwise damage-guaranteeing flood; he seems impervious to injury. He's an expert stone skipper and an effective naturalistic healer. Nobody will bet against him. He is not only aware of his own incredible luck; he depends on it so strongly that it replaces religion, and he feels no need to attend Gilean's only church, ministered by the Reverend Jethro Furber.

Furber is a fascinating character who avoids the flatness of most fictional preachers. His parents sheltered him insufferably as a child, depriving him of anything they considered a bad moral influence and prohibiting him from playing with other kids; now he walks around reciting dirty songs to himself and talks to the grave of Pike, a previous pastor. He resents Omensetter's neglect of the church yet is intrigued by his ostensible luck; unsurprisingly, he accuses Omensetter of being "of the dark ways" and "beyond the reach of God." He tries gently to persuade Watson to fire Omensetter, which would force him to leave town...P>Approaching "The Sound and the Fury" and "As I Lay Dying" in complexity of both narration and characterization, "Omensetter's Luck" is an odd book in both style and substance, the product of an independent literary thinker who demonstrates that a truly good story transcends even the strangest packaging.

The novel takes place in the 1890s in a small town in Ohio just north of the Ohio River. The title character, Brackett Omensetter, is a happy-go-lucky craftsman who wanders into town one day with his wife and daughters. The Omensetters settle into a rented house down by the river and are gradually accepted by the community. Accepted, that is, by all save the town's puritanical Protestant minister, the Rev. Jethro Furber. Furber is a monster forged by religious convention untempered by religious conviction. He resents being banished to Gilean from Cleveland (his fire and brimstone sermons do not go over any better with his congregation there) and spends much of his time brooding bitterly about his downfall, much like Satan in Milton's poetry. He is also sexually frustrated and edging toward a nervous breakdown barely cloaked in the form of religious mania.

Furber's wrath is ultimately focused on Brackett Omensetter, if for no other reason than the man seems to enjoy an incredible grace without exhibiting the first ounce of good Christian behavior. Omensetter's luck changes many lives, some for good and some for bad. But his unintended redemption of Rev. Furber may be Omensetter's greatest piece of luck during his time in Gilean. In the end, Omensetter's catalytic luck brings Furber to the faith he has long espoused, but never really lived in his heart.

"Omensetter's Luck" is about chance, human choice and the struggle all of us face when we try to live as our honest, open, decent selves. The novel is a difficult read because it uses the stream-of-consciousness technique throughout and two-thirds of it is narrated by the splintering mind of Jethro Furber. I recommend that you take it at a leisurely pace, savor the prose and pay attention to Rev. Furber's miraculous change of heart. This is Nobel Prize-level writing and certainly deserves a place of honor in late 20th Century American fiction.

I wouldn't recommend "Omensetter's Luck" for any student below graduate school level. They won't get it. Ironically, I think many older readers who don't even have college degrees will find that the novel resonates powerfully with them. Gass' work here rewards the reader who comes to it with years of experience in the "real" world. For them, the power of its prose is matched by the power of its truth.

Everything comes together nicely in the last one hundred pages of the book. I credit William Gass' well-paced, extremely realistic dialogue for helping to accomplish this feat, which I would have otherwise considered impossible had I mistakenly decided not to stick with this flawed, but must-read book.