Rick Moody is a sly one. His Hotels of North America comprises a series of fictitious hotel reviews by a one Reginald Morse, and in its depiction of Mr. Morse’s tendency to talk more about himself than the subject of his “criticism,” it’s conceivably part-intended as a preemptive strike against any book reviewer who would denounce the American writer’s sixth novel. It has Mr. Morse reducing the motels and inns he complains about for RateYourLodging.com to mere reflections of his own troubled life and self, and in so doing it insinuates that this is what all criticism fundamentally entails. Hence, the task of appraising Hotels of North America becomes one fraught with difficulties and pitfalls, since the novel itself suggests that the person who belittles questionable furnishings or, in this case, questionable prose is very often simply giving vent to a frustrated career, a comatose love life, or a stubbed toe.

However, this is already to render a disservice unto the novel, since its anthology of online hatchet-jobs encompasses much more than the egotism and solipsism inherent to criticism. To begin with, its premise — as witnessed by the book’s “preface” — is that the North American Society of Hoteliers and Innkeepers (NASHI) have latched onto Reginald Morse’s quirky reviews and assembled them into a compilation. The purpose of this collection is not only to encourage the reader “to book another room,” but also to aid NASHI in their “ambitious plan to improve hotel service in this country.” The thing is, from the very first entry in Morse’s series, we realize that this enterprise is fatally flawed, since no matter how much the Hotels of North America improve their services and listen to (the rationalizations of) such customers as Morse, these customers are always going to bring their “baggage” to their otherwise spotless rooms.

For example, in this first entry, Morse gripes that the “[t]oo much mustard and brown” in his bedroom provides an unwanted reminder of his “alcoholic grandmother back in Westport.” Accordingly, he awards the Dupont Embassy Row hotel two stars out of five, and from there he commences an achronological tour through America and beyond, which as could be imagined, winds up being more an achronological tour through his past and present. As such, he inadvertently refutes NASHI’s belief that the quality of a hotel alone is sufficient to ensure the quality of its reviews, because every hotel, B&B and IKEA parking lot (yes) he evaluates becomes little more than opportunity to dimly yet acerbically take stock of his failings, failures and uncertain future.

Luckily, Morse proves an amusing and articulate guide to his own life, even if the format in which he chooses to write his autobiography exposes him as self-important, if not downright egomaniacal. His various exploits are chock with dry observations and witty self-deprecations, Moody’s crisp stylings bringing him to life as an embittered yet resiliently spirited individual. During one stay in an abandoned hardware store — just after he separates with his wife — the “top-ten online hotel reviewer” exhibits his arch drollness when he rhetorically asks his readers, “what was keeping me from running loose across state lines with a one-legged prostitute and some open containers, plotting embezzlement and get-rich-quick schemes, insider trading and arms dealing?” In an earlier ‘review’ he recounts an episode involving an exposed “portion of the intimate area of my own person”, while in another he admits to being excited by the presence of a Pet Shop Boy in his London hotel despite the fact that he “understood only vaguely what a Pet Shop Boy was.”

For all his ornery charm, there’s nonetheless something indelibly pompous and self-absorbed about Morse’s need to frame all of these picaresque anecdotes and biographical vignettes within the format of criticism. When he praises the Equinox hotel in Vermont and prizes the establishment with four stars, it’s clear that this adulation is less for the “extremely white sheets” that were “probably labored over at great length by a crew of teenagers,” and more for his successful “illicit liason,” in which he “assumed some highly combative positions” on these same sheets. Accordingly, it soon emerges that almost every “bad” hotel in the novel is attached to a bad experience, and that almost every “good” hotel is attached to a good one. Therefore, when he lauds the Davenport Hotel and Tower in Spokane with a maximum of five stars, the accompanying tale of romance makes it hard to shake the suspicion that he’s merely lauding his own life and personage with five stars, egocentrically brandishing both before his modest readership in order that they join in with and validate his narcissism.

In other words, the setup of Hotels of North America militates against liking or caring for its protagonist to any significant degree. That said, it’s precisely this setup that lends the novel its wider significance and relevance, that qualifies Morse as a representative of the kind of consumerist individual who scapegoats “the dismal Presidents’ City Hotel” so as to save himself from taking responsibility for the dissatisfaction and misery that is his own life. He focuses his unhappiness on inns that serve “only cheese grits” and expects life-satisfaction from such “amenities” as “towel warmers” and “onsite e-book readers,” hoping that such distractions will spare him the need to do anything to confront his past or improve his present.

To take another example, in a Tuscaloosa joint called La Quinta, he unhappily and needlessly swallows down some Ambien, a drug that may cause “profound personality change.” However, when “attempting to isolate possible causes of [the] profound personality change” he later experiences, he unbelievably asserts that La Quinta’s “earth tones, at least for me, certainly brought about profound personality change.” As unsavory and borderline shocking as this denial and self-delusion is, it’s with such a passage that the book transforms itself into a critique of consumerist society, of a society which believes that the consumption of hotel rooms, hats and handbags is enough to compensate for the alienation, estrangement and unhappiness this consumption helps to perpetuate.

As for this unhappiness, the medium of the hotel review conveniently permits Morse to retreat from himself just enough to evade its sources, even though he’s at least marginally aware of this evasion. At one point he addresses his fellow users of the RateYourLodging website, posting that some of these users “will imagine that the great number of hotel reviews I write are due to some desire to avoid the child.” Here, “the child” refers to his only daughter, the daughter he can no longer see frequently due to his divorce, and the daughter whose absence represents an absent future he vainly tries to fill with consumption and consumer reviews. He has other grievances as well — a stalled career as a motivational speaker, a father who abandoned him when he was a child — but these are touched upon only in passing, only as devices for underscoring how his present, itinerant lifestyle is just an excuse not to be alone with himself and his problems for too long.

As essential as it is to the main concerns of Hotels of North America, this habit of mentioning his backstory only in momentary fragments can be something of an irk at times. Unsurprisingly, Morse acknowledges his own ‘oversights in the only way he can: by criticizing someone else for the same fault. During one appraisal he derides another reviewer for publishing such incomplete haiku as “Hotel room not clean services bad,” carping that it barely “conveys the specifics of your dissatisfaction.” This is somewhat rich coming from him, insofar as he spends the entire novel disguising existential wounds and frustrations as issues with “moldy curtains” and workers “yelling in Spanish”, and insofar as, when he does fleetingly broach such wounds and frustrations, he does so chiefly to underline his unwillingness to broach them in any depth. On the one hand, this is a slight annoyance that proves to be the novel’s main weakness. On the other, it galvanizes one of its main strengths, which is that it encapsulates a society, which, somewhat ironically, is increasingly participating in a simulacrum of “communication” (e.g. hotel reviews, social media) so as to prevent itself from having to communicate with any intimacy, consciousness or depth.

In the end, this withholding of information also helps Moody to bolster the overarching theme of Hotels of North America in another way. Specifically, omissions like his girlfriend’s name (known only as “K.”), the underlying reasons for his marital infidelities, and why he suddenly “vanished not long after posting a final review” compel the reader to project her own narrative, ideas and self onto the novel, in much the same way that Morse projects his self onto the numerous lodgings in which he stays. Because of this compulsion, the book accedes to the level of meta-literature, self-consciously questioning the extent to which a writer can provide anything beyond a ‘novel’ way for the reader to experience herself again and again, through the prism of the language which has been arranged on the page before her.

This accession and this self-consciousness are both cemented by an “afterword” written by Rick Moody himself, who goes off in search of the character he himself has purportedly given birth to and defined. It’s as if he’s tacitly confessing that he has no idea who this “Reginald Morse” person is, that the latter is more the creation of his audience than of his own ‘pen’. If we take such a confession to its logical conclusion, it’s also as if he’s tacitly confessing that Hotels of North America is about whatever his audience thinks it’s about, and is only as good as this same audience thinks it is. Put differently, he once again strikes preemptively against the book critic, affirming in advance that even this critic’s recommendation of a sharp, clever yet occasionally bleak novel with a generally unsympathetic lead is little more than an expression of the critic’s own subjectivity, and is therefore no reliable indicator of how the rest of the world will receive his sixth work. So, once again, he proves that he’s a sly one, and simultaneously urges each potential reader to go discover the trenchant social criticism of Hotels of North America for themselves.

In his 1991 hit song, Black or White, Michael Jackson meditates on racial equality, singing, “I’m not going to spend/My life being a color.” However, Jackson’s well-documented, complicated relationship with his African American appearance speaks to the contrary. In a way, Jackson’s transformation from his natural skin tone to an eerie, bleached white speaks not just of his profound personal battle with identity, but a broader problem in America as a whole. The simple fact is, that as a result of systematic white supremacy, many African Americans do spend their lives “being a color.” This troubling issue forms the central motif of Kentucky-born writer and academic Tom Williams’ short story collection, Among the Wild Mulattos & Other Tales.

The burdens of oppression, violence, and inequality shouldered by black Americans weigh heavy. But how are bi or multiracial people affected — the shades of grey, if you will, in the simplified divisions of ‘black’ and ‘white’ — and how are they recognized and represented in cultural phenomena like literature? Here, Williams attempts to address these matters in their multifarious forms.

Almost 7% of American adults — around 9 million as of the 2013 Census — are genetically comprised of more than one race. In June, the Pew Research Center published Multiracial in America: Proud, Diverse and Growing in Numbers. Of the 1,555 participants of Pew’s survey, only 60% claimed to feel proud of their multiracial heritage, and 55% reported experiencing racist slurs, jokes, and threats due to their mixed parentage.

The findings of the PRC study demonstrate the complexity of racial identity, and how the degree to which people struggle depends in no small part on the race to which they most identify. Participants with a biracial black and white background reported receiving a notable quantity of racial profiling and discrimination, aligning with the many prejudices targeted against black Americans. However, despite such a parallel, many multiracial individuals do not report a sense of connection with people of the same racial mix, indicating a lack of strong shared biracial identity.

Author of The Mimic’s Own Voice and Don’t Start Me Talkin’, and currently Chair of English at Kentucky’s Morehead State University, Williams explores in detail the experience of biracial Americans in a contemporary environment that claims, albeit falsely, to be ‘post-racial.’ The eponymous ‘mulatto’ is a term traditionally denoting a person with one black and one white parent, or sometimes referring to someone with mixed black and white ancestry. Not commonly used today, mulatto is regarded as at best archaic and at worst a racial slur, which is reasonable considering the etymology of the word is based in the Latin mūlus, or mule, the infertile offspring of a horse and donkey.

Perhaps unsurprising given his own mixed race heritage, Williams is explicitly concerned with representations of biracial identity, using fiction to consider the ways in which biracial individuals navigate a world that is unsure whether to treat them as black or white. The majority of these stories are located in the Southern and Midwestern states, where racism remains rife, and racial tension is high. One character, in ‘Who Among Us Knows the Route to Heaven?,’ describes his reception as a biracial child in 1970s Ohio as “(o)dder than two-headed calves, stranger than Uri Geller,” and when watching TV at that time, that “(n)ever once did I see a face or family that looked like mine.” It is this alienation that Williams is most curious about, and the steps some biracial people feel forced to take to in order to counteract it.

Thematically, the collection ranges from a twist on the tortured writer trope in the opener, ‘The Story of My Novel: Three Piece Combo With Drink,’ to Doestoyevskian doubling in ‘The Lessons of Effacement,’ and the relationship between image and identity in ‘Movie Star Entrances’ and ‘The Finest Writers in the World Today.’ The cord tying these narratives together is identity; a notion encompassing our sense of self, how we are perceived, our manipulations of these perceptions, and those aspects beyond our control.

Despite Williams’ concentration on representing biracial characters, his stories share a universality that prevents them from alienating readers of other races. ‘The Finest Writers in the World Today’ focuses less on race, exploring the strange phenomenon of celebrity impersonators. Williams humorously imagines the consequences of a lookalike agency — ’Cause Celebs’ — introducing the doubles of famous writers; a group not traditionally celebrated for their appearance, but for their talent. It is discovered that the popularity of these doubles comes not from their ability to imitate, but from the ability to represent an author without all the troublesome drinking, arrogance, or ridiculous demands. Dead writer? No problem, a “plain creepy” William Burroughs, or Gabriel Garcia Marquez (“the manager of a Mexican restaurant near Clintonville”) double can step in. As authors do experience a huge amount of celebrity — recent examples include Karl Ove Knausgaard, Elena Ferrante, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie — Williams’ satire cuts close to the bone.

Another particularly strong story, ‘Movie Star Entrances,’ scrutinizes our obsession with how we are perceived, and is accordingly one of the most relatable narratives. The protagonist, Curtis, is a shy and timid employee of Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts; a self-described “biracial suburbanite,” whose childhood in Des Moines left him desperate to “find a place where his presence was not so spectacular, where he might be among others like him.” With a work party looming, and a special lady’s attention to attract, the self-conscious Curtis turns to a very odd agency to re-invent himself.

Run by Ramon and Miriam, an entertainingly odd couple, Movie Star Entrances promises an extreme makeover, which thoroughly convinces the bashful Curtis. However, despite their extraordinary efforts at transforming him, he finds that his brief moment in the spotlight is not enough to change his perception of himself, and “his tawny…undistinguished skin.” Williams hits the right balance between humor and melancholy, the story a reminder of the sadness and frustration that can arise from growing up without a sense of place — in this case due to race, but applicable to anyone that has struggled with identification or self-confidence.

Williams’ shines when he allows his characters to interact with the uncanny, absurd, troubling, and bizarre, epitomized in the disturbing ‘Ethnic Studies’. A group of men — Javier, Teng Lo, Amos, and our unnamed narrator, all in “the general family of brown” — are offered $500 a pop by a university professor to engage in a highly problematic demonstration of racial variety that is reminiscent of the 19th and 20th century ‘human zoos;’ degrading exhibitions emphasising the differences between ‘primitive’ peoples and white Europeans and Americans. Feeling increasingly uncomfortable and exploited, the men retaliate, putting on a display of racial stereotypes that highlight the absurdity and racism of objectifying of people of color. As thus still, unfortunately, all too common — whether the use of black backing dancers by a white performer, or the wearing of traditional native American headdresses by white teenagers at music festivals — Williams brings us uncomfortably close to how little we’ve advanced from the abhorrent racist practices of our white predecessors.

While Williams’ characterization is generally strong, and he generates authentic, engaging personas, what is glaringly absent is positive female representation. Frequently, the women in these stories are background props, or fulfil an archaic, rather sexist role, such as object of desire, lover, or girlfriend. Only once, in ‘The Finest Writers in the World Today’ does a woman take a vaguely central role, but rather than being celebrated, her confidence and drive to succeed are portrayed as arrogance and obsession. More bothersome is the puzzling vignette ‘A Public Service,’ which takes the form of a kind of marketing spiel for a pornographic website focusing on larger women’s bottoms, imaginatively named ‘rearview.com.’ While it’s clear that Williams’ is attempting to engage in a commentary on the objectification of women:

Denigrating women. Invading their privacy. Who told you that shit? We’re showing women, real women single moms, widows, divorcees…But we’re respectful, We don’t show faces so nobody knows just who it is who’s carrying around all that sugar.

What he produces instead is a rather uninspired, directionless vignette. For female readers, the story serves no purpose aside from an unnecessary reminder of the misogynistic, patriarchal society we must live in.

Although the thorough exploration of this collection is enlightening, at times entertaining, and often disquieting, Williams’ explicit repetition of the biracial motif becomes somewhat tiresome, with almost all of the stories mentioning that the protagonist is ‘biracial,’ in no varying terms, within the first few pages. This degree of exposition leaves the reader feeling vaguely patronized, as if their powers of deduction would be too weak to figure this out without guidance. However, the closing story — the eponymous ‘Among the Wild Mulattos’ — with its depiction of an isolated, biracial utopia for those desiring to escape the whitewashed landscape of America, provides some reinvigoration.

Despite its flaws, this collection forms a fairly vital function: enriching and positive representation of biracial Americans in contemporary literature. What it lacks in gender and geographical diversity, it makes up for in diligence and unwavering focus. While Williams’ reiteration of biracial protagonists can appear excessive, this does, in fact, remind us of the need for such attention; it is not just our society that is dominated by white people and culture, but art and literature, too.

“There are no magic words,” said William Gass in his seminal collection The World Within the Word. “To say the words is magical enough.” Gass, no stranger to such conjuration, has practiced his own brand of experimental, decadent, and richly complex literary bewitchment for nearly half a century. From the tangled beauty of his debut Omensetter’s Luck (1966) to the sui generis meditation On Being Blue (1975) to his American Book Award-winning magnum opus The Tunnel (1995), the 91-year old belle-lettrist has indelibly marked American letters with a luxuriant, lavishly jeweled prose style whose gorgeous obscenities landed him in one of the great literary grudge matches of the last century, facing off against the arch-moralist John Gardner. In one of their more legendary exchanges, Gardner, a fine novelist in his own right, claimed that the difference between them was “my 707 will fly while [Gass’] is too encrusted with gold to get off the ground.” To which Gass famously responded: “There is always that danger. But what I really want is to have it sit there solid as a rock and have everybody think it is flying.”

That extraordinary mimesis is once again marshalled for Gass’ newest collection Eyes: Novellas and Stories, his first work since 2013’s Middle C. Comprised of two novellas and a handful of short stories, Eyes circles familiar Gassian material — isolation, meanness, obsession, and the wonder and terror of representation — while packing enough formal inventiveness and lyrical sleights-of-hand to keep even the most seasoned Gass acolyte pleasantly off-balance. As might be expected from its title, Eyes is concerned with the implications of sight; more precisely, it is the inverted capacity of seeing — what Jan DeBlieu calls “a glimpse of all that happens out of the realm of human vision” in the book’s epigraph — that especially grips Gass here. These stories strive to tease out the invisible relations required of our existences in order for something — anything — to be seen. “Only once had the world realized these relations; they would never exist again; they had come and gone like a breath,” one of his characters says early on, and the mystery of these words hangs on a wire above the entire collection. What comprises our vision of ourselves? Of others? Of objects? What unseen metaphysical scaffolding — like a photographic negative — can be intimated from the limited world of the visible?

Nowhere are these questions handled with more grace, verve, and surprisingly un-Gassian gentleness than in the opening novella, “In Camera”, which tells the story of Mr. Gab, a greedy (and possibly criminal) aesthete whose love of photography supersedes any moral framework, and his orphan assistant Mr. Stu (a diminutive of “You Stupid Kid”) whose physical deformities and feigned ignorance belie the development of his interior life. Mr. Gab, owner of a drab photography print shop possessed of a suspiciously fine library of images, has found life to pale in comparison to his beloved photos. In the idealized image he sees —

a testimony to the unerring fineness of the photographer’s eye; an eye unlike the painter’s, he claimed, because the painter constructed; the painter made up his image as if the canvas were a face; while the photographer sought his composition like a hunter his prey, and took it away clean, when it was found, to present in its purity, as the result of an act of vision, the sort of seeing no one else employed.

Through the mouthpiece of Mr. Gab, Gass uses the language of photography throughout in order to complicate and, at times, ennoble the act of seeing. “The right click demonstrates how, in an instant, we, or our burro, or our shovel, or our eye or nose or nipple, were notes in a majestic symphony,” says Gab. In the surprisingly tender denouement, a crisis enables Mr. Stu to help Mr. Gab see that “a whole world made of fragility and levitation” can, perhaps, exist among and between us outside the frame. There is subtle, nuanced mercy and heart in what develops between the two, like a photograph years in development finally presenting its richness.

The collection’s other novella, “Charity”, is vintage Gass, a remarkably complex exploration of shame, privacy, pride, and the ambiguous motivations inherent to the act of giving. It follows a young lawyer, Hugh Hamilton Hardy, whose self-loathing arises from his status as “an EZ mark” among panhandlers, schemers, and beggars. A rejected act of charity haunts him from his childhood:

having known both sorts of shame — having inflicted shame and suffered it — shame searing his soul so its skin smoked — Hardy knew the difference between a guilty conscience and crushed pride, between — in a shameless world — getting caught and being defiled.

Gass interweaves sexual memory and dialogue from Hardy’s most recent relationship, adroitly calling into question the ways we use (and abuse) our own sexual currency as charitable gesture. The increasingly blurred lines between shame, need and generosity underpin a surprising exchange at the story’s end that echoes the charitable trauma of his youth. Gass calls into question how we curate the objects of our charity, and what we choose to ignore out of shame or self-interest. In “Charity”, the empathetic offering is as likely as not a desire in disguise: an inverted way for Hardy to coerce others to “feel sorry at him, for a change, all night long.”

The short stories featured in the collection are, by and large, about objects rather than people. “Don’t Even Try, Sam” allows the battered and forgotten piano Dooley Wilson plays in Casablanca to air its grievances in a one-sided interview about old Hollywood, artifice, and memory. It isn’t clear if the piano is even functional (as its keys seemingly refuse to plink), but that is largely beside the point as this funnily eccentric one-off — the literary equivalent of a ditty — ponders the ways in which storytelling provides meaning and, even if only briefly, wards off obscurity. “Soliloquy For an Empty Chair”, meanwhile, gives voice to a foldable metal chair in a barber shop that somehow becomes a melancholic rumination on the inevitability of disintegration. “We die through use…when rust’s slow debilitations pick at what we are and what sustains us with more repetition and determination than the woodworm,” says the chair. In these stories, the oft-ignored life of objects is brought to the fore, vignettes whose psychosis, humor, wit, and absurdity are both a joy in their own right while also a subtle interrogation of how, where, and why we spend our attention.

Returning to Jan DeBlieu’s lovely epigraph, “eyes”, beyond being receptacles of vision, are also geographic features “where an underground spring suddenly bursts to the surface.” These places of mystery — “where dry ground becomes soaked with life-giving water” — are pitch-perfect allegories of Gass’ fiction. In his more than capable hands, our condition is slandered, complicated, buffed, broken open — and, finally, illuminated. It is perhaps an irony that Eyes: Novellas and Stories, a collection written near the end of his career, makes for a wonderful entry point into the Gassian literary cosmos. In these strange, piercing stories we read of ourselves hungrily and with a growing awareness. We read for the inimitable prose style, of course, and the brilliant narrative gambits — but we also read to see what he sees. Mr. Gab, when rhapsodizing over his photographs, professes that our lives “are lifted up and given grace when touched by such lenses”; so, too, are Gass’ stories “such lenses” in which life and literature shimmer and intensify. May we all learn to see with such eyes.