["Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things"] is full of carefully planted instructions about how it must be read. Don't expect a story…. Forget verisimilitude…. You need not look for development….

After such disclaimers, the reader is almost prepared for an austere anti-novel in which he may have to do most of the work. But instead he gets eight conventional portraits of marginal figures in the New York literary world 15 years ago…. Writing and painting badly, they spend much of their time trying to make it professionally or in bed with a wretched parade of equally fraudulent and unfulfilled partners.

Sorrentino finds these counterfeiters so contemptible that he shows little interest in telling their stories or exploring the reasons for their desperation and failure. Instead, he offers himself as the satiric observer driven to expose falsity because of his passion for genuine art; and he intends his book "an antidote...