[Gilbert Sorrentino's characters in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things] are like those stick figures that a lecturer sketches on a blackboard to illustrate a point, and his manner of narration is usually the lecturer's, analytical, sardonic, anecdotal when it suits him; he appears to be conscious of the moments when his audience's attention flags. It is sometimes dry statement ("We deal here with …"), but very often it is venomous, and it is always self-conscious.

A chapter is allotted to each character, and we observe their pathetic meanderings. The narrator pities a few of them and loathes the rest. If one happens to live in New York, which I do not, these stereotypes are perhaps recognizable and justify Sorrentino's spleen, his settling the hash of art galleries and trend-spotters, luminaries, little magazines, and what-not. So it is very much an insider's book….

Few people are able to write as...