Brackett Omensetter arrives, with his wife, family and belongings in the rural American town of Gilean. It swiftly becomes apparent that he is someone out of the ordinary, as he sets off a ground swell of violent emotions in the once tranquil commmunity. Who is he? What does he represent?
Greeted as a masterpiece when it was first published in 1966, Omensetter's Luck is the quirky, impressionistic, and breathtakingly original story of an ordinary community galvanized by the presence of an extraordinary man. Set in a small Ohio town in the 1890s, it chronicles - through the voices of various participants and observers - the confrontation between Brackett Omensetter, a man of preternatural goodness, and the Reverend Jethro Furber, a preacher crazed with a propensity for violent thoughts. Omensetter's Luck meticulously brings to life a specific time and place as it illuminates timeless questions about life, love, good, and evil.
"[
Omensetter's Luck is] Gass’ first novel, and his least avant-gardeish, and his best. Basically a religious book. Very sad. Contains the immortal line “The body of Our Saviour shat but Our Saviour shat not.” Bleak but gorgeous, like light through ice."
-David Foster Wallace
"
Omsensetter's Luck is the work of a totally committed, totally uncompromising and extraordinarily gifted writer."
-Walker Percy"A rich fever, a parade of secrets, delirious, tormented, terrifying, comic...one of the most exciting, energetic and beautiful novels we can ever hope to read."
-Harper's 
