There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel ["Mulligan Stew"]. There is also a question as to whether the New York publishing community can survive it too, although that, of course, is much less interesting. "Mulligan Stew," instead of consisting of meat and vegetables, consists entirely of literature, of parody and complaint and paranoia and pop-absurdism. It is as if Buck Mulligan was a hero or had written "Ulysses," instead of Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce. But Mr. Sorrentino contains, and reviles, them all.

"Mulligan Stew" is full of Joyce, too much so; and of Nabokov, Flaubert, Proust, Gogol, Flann O'Brien, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund (Bunny) Wilson, Norman Mailer, Henry James, Bernard Malamud, the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Dekker, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Anaïs Nin, Zane Grey, Erica Jong, William H. Gass, various Latin Americans, everybody else I...