"Aberration of Starlight" openly steals from Joyce, O'Nolan [Flann O'Brien], and Doctorow's "Ragtime." It is fashionably a study in nostalgia…. Mr. Sorrentino sees in the early reign of Roosevelt and in the Depression an America that resembles Joyce's Ireland (and Chekhov's Russia, perhaps Maupassant's France). He sees a shoddy, caddish provincialism, a touching innocence and vicious meanness.

The plot is there for form's sake: a tacky love story in which everybody's motives are tainted. What makes the novel interesting is its psychological angles of vision. We get to see all the characters as they think of themselves and as they appear to others….

What Mr. Sorrentino brings off so beautifully is tone of period: He has caught New Jersey in the Depression with Flaubertian accuracy. He begins (lifting with eclectic nicety from David Galloway's brilliant novel "A Family Album" of 1978, which posits its story entirely with descriptions of...