Billed as a "new wave murder mystery" whose subject is really "the comic possibilities of modern literary history," Mulligan Stew appears to be Sorrentino's lunge for the main chance….

While Mulligan Stew could use a little of the mystery's rigor, it fits far more comfortably in the avant-garde's cracked but commodious crockpot. The avant-garde tradition may be temporarily exhausted, but it has produced some notable messes. Would that the overstocked Mulligan Stew were one of them.

This particular melange, too clever to bother with the mechanics of mystery, deliberately (so deliberately) exploits the most vapid cliche the avant-garde has to offer. You've got one sentence to guess it. Right, the novel about the writer writing a novel….

One section is pretty funny. Before the novel proper begins—before even the title page—Sorrentino parodies a number of publishers' and editors' (mostly reject) letters about the novel….

Apart from...