Randolph "Dilda" Carter

William H. Gass is a two-bit William Faulkner, that's it.  The fact that David Foster Wallace's favorite book was Omensetter's Luck should tell you something already.  

Omensetter is an innocent sod who decides one day to pack the family up and move to Gilean, Ohio.  He's a babe in the woods but everything seems to work out for him which makes his new neighbors envious since he's such a simp.  When his landlord disappears and then later is found hanging high in a tree, the town-folk take it as a useful opportunity to run him out of town.  His good luck continues as his infant son miraculously recovers from diphtheria.  That's it, as I said.  

Not really.  See Omensetter is the pre-Eve (pre-knowledge) Adam and his life is contrasted to the nasty sinful Reverend Jethro Furber.  Furber, his neighbor, is Omensetter's biggest enemy in town, especially since Omensetter is not a church goer.  Furber is as wicked and sinful as Omensetter is innocent.  There's the gist of something good here, if somebody would just write it. 

How did we get this post-modernist stream-of-consciousness trifle?  Well, the first copy Gass wrote was stolen by a jealous colleague, so he had to think it up again (Much to our detriment.  Why couldn't it just stay lost?).  Such are the ways of petty university politics.  When Gass rewrote it the thing sort of got away from him and the Furber section became the bulk of the book.   But when you're trying to be clever, you leave the title alone.

The idea of the novel is really quite good, but you would have to turn it over to somebody who could actually write a coherent novel to get anything out of it.  Here we have the output of a writer with a poor idea of grammar and punctuation, but a jolly good idea.  Some might call it a difficult read but I didn't find that.

If I didn't know better, I'd pass it off as a literary practical joke.

I think it is in the sf novel Hyperion where Dan Simmons has the Poet say that William Gass is the only prose author still read from the 20th century.  Now that's a literary practical joke.