Uncommon readings: Gilbert Sorrentino

Published on Friday 18 December 2009 19:16

LEE RANDALL in praise of author Gilbert Sorrentino

DESPITE a healthy output – 25 volumes of fiction and poetry over a 50-year career – when he died in 2006, American author and educator Gilbert Sorrentino was more of a succss d'estime than a household name. What a crying shame.

In an insightful essay written for Book Forum, Gerald Howard notes that although Sorrentino was an experimental novelist – for example, he began Mulligan Stew with a collection of publishers' rejection letters – he was also "the postmodernist you are most likely to share a boilermaker with". As resolutely inventive as all his books are, as scornful of clich and of lazy narrative convention, they also betray, in their language, in their characters, and in their gritty details, a longstanding intimacy with the lumpen side of life. Whether his characters are caught bellying up to the bar at some boozy artists' and writers' bash in the Village or some Brooklyn waterfront dive, "These people are real, are real, are real, they are / absolutely rotten, and are real," as Sorrentino writes in his 1968 long poem "The Perfect Fiction".

It's been too long since I read Sorrentino, but on my shelves sit not only this best-known work, Mulligan Stew, but Abberation of Starlight (one of his few novels to be published by a large commercial house), Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and The Moon in its Flight, a collection of short fiction. Within those covers lies some of the most exciting, moving, and absorbing fiction ever written.

If you're uncertain about plunging into a novel, do yourself the favour of reading The Moon in its Flight, which Howard shrewdly assesses as "a work in 13 pages (that] says all that can possibly be said about callow Roman Catholic boys from Brooklyn and lovely Jewish girls from the Bronx and the unbridgeable cultural distances between them." Next, try Abberation of Starlight, which dissects a failed summertime seduction from numerous points of view and via numerous unorthodox formats.

Sorrentino was a brave writer, incapable of boring his readers. What I remember most is not the detail of the stories – which means I have all the fun of rediscovering them, hooray! – but the fact that, time and again, in the brief space of a sentence, he made me feel as if my heart lay exposed on the dissecting table.

Fiction that makes you gasp. What could be better?