Mulligan Stew is a quite wonderful book of literary joking and parody—if there had been no Joyce, no Gide or Sterne or Borges or Robbe-Grillet or Nabokov or Perelman, I'm almost convinced that Sorrentino could have invented them. Since he didn't, his book could be called derivative, but it plays with its great originals with such lively intelligence, understanding, and affection as to make obscure the distinction between creative and critical imagination….

[The fussy woodenness of the dialogue of the novel within this novel suggests] the puzzles we get into by trying to use language, any language, at all. The novelist who tries, and fails, to make sense with words, the characters who struggle to get out of one book only to find themselves in another, even less congenial one, are in a way our representatives, since the "real" world is as incurably verbal as any fictional...