[Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things captures] the feel of the fifties, an aimless decade nurtured on nostalgia, a time which of late and for some hollow reason has itself become the focus of nostalgic maundering. This book, among its other contributions, should help to stanch that dismal backward flow of warmth. As Hannah Arendt has pointed out, horror, like its practitioners, is most often drab and gray and inward, not black and bold as the cliché demands. That is the tone and setting of the novel. The people are artistic: writers, painters, and the like. Artistic, not really arty, although maybe that's what they really are.

Sorrentino has given himself the Cervantine prerogative of doing what he damn well pleases with his characters, going back to where the novel got its start as a new form—old as it came to be soon thereafter. His purpose is creative...