Cloud books provided the following annotation: "Gass's attempt to direct attention to the process of how literature unfolds on the page and his request that both critics and raeders pay more attention to the "building blocks of literature" - the way words are used in physically constructing the shape and edifice of the book - was brillaintly executed in this experimental essay/novella. The work embodies Gass's view that literature is language and that a reader should respond to the sensuous body of language with the same sort of excitement and participation that he would to any other sensual experience. Narrated by Baby Babs Masters, the lonseome wife of the title who is lady language herself, Willie Masters emphasizes the sensuous qualities of language - its colors, sounds, shapes, and textures - in almost every conceivable fashion. Each of the four sections of the book is printed on different-colored, different-textured pages; the photographs and large variety of graphic and typographic experiments insure that the reader's attention never leaves the page and also free the book from most of the linear conventions of narration. Although the book is virtually plotless, the different sections roughly correspond to the different stages of the sexual intercourse that Babs is having with a particularly unresponsive lover named Gelvin. The book's central metaphor is obvious: reading a book should be a sensuous experience, but too often readers are unresponsive and ignore the physical aspects of language. Not content upon receiving praise from the critics again, the book also won the American Institute of Graphic Arts award as one of the fifty books of the year."Michael Wood reviewing this book for NY Review of Books in 972 stated "Willie Masters' Lonesome Wife is a thin book, though one of considerable ambition. The dissatisfied Babs Masters (the lonesome wife) challenges the reader, enticing him or her with a text of literary variations. The text is written in a number of typefaces and sizes, the text shaped and sub-divided as Gass sees fit, at points even falling off the page. There are coffee mug stains and photographs, a page mirrored in another, and a page taken from Passions of a Stableboy. Gass tries to bring alive his text, and the reader is drawn in: directly addressed by the text, questioned and challenged. Reader and writer mirror the male-female relationships in the book, but the author also fades, leaving a text with a life of its own and a reader facing it. Ultimately Gass tries to create a disembodied text, with neither Gass nor Babs Masters present, only the words, the words. It is a well done exercise displaying the power and potential of the word and text, of literature standing alone. It is a call to arms, while gently reminding the reader that it is only words and that life itself is elsewhere. Gass writes well, handling the different styles he employs convincingly. It is a clever book, and short enough that it does not wear thin. The experimental look and feel may not be to everyone's liking, but it is a worthy volume."This book utilizes four different colored paper stocks for its pages. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.