Mulligan Stew was surely a remarkable book. Brawling and sprawling over hundreds of pages, it seemed to want to take on the world, satirizing, lampooning, and railing against all that it saw. Now comes Aberration of Starlight, and if it is to lay any claim to the remarkable, it will be to a very quiet kind. Aberration tells of the events of one weekend during the summer of 1939, during which Tom Thebus, a traveling salesman, attempts the seduction of Marie Recco, a young divorced Catholic woman, and in so doing provokes hope and dread in Marie's son Billy and her father John McGrath. The story is retold four times, each time focusing on one of these four principal characters. In contrast to Mulligan Stew, Aberration of Starlight is disciplined in length and form, modest in ambition, and downright decorous in tone.

Sorrentino's epigraph to this book explaining the...