Gilbert Sorrentino is a veteran poet who began publishing fiction just about when critics were announcing its demise. The Sky Changes (1966), Steelwork (1970), Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), [and] Splendide-Hotel (1973) … are examples of the novel's renaissance, as it turns from an attempt to capture life through belief-suspending conventions back to-ward the truths which those conventions slight. (p. 154) Sorrentino sees time as the enemy … and seeks the same actuality ...

[It is] only to be expected that a new Gilbert Sorrentino novel is going to provoke skeptical whispers if it seems to have a "narrative"—one of the dirtiest words in the Lamont/Sorrentino world of "Sur-fiction … Ur-fiction, and Post-Modern fiction to boot." A veteran of Mulligan Stew might do a particular double-take, too, at the new book's title page: Aberration of Starlight is published by Random (Hasard) House. Is this the same Gilbert Sorrentino? Now that...

[Mulligan Stew] is a crazy quilt of popular culture, "sub-literary" genres, and unusual narrative voices. Its basic story of a novelist writing his most recent work is interlaced with all variety of playful, parodic, and fictive allusions. Eventually this motley production exemplifies Sorrentino's main concern: "Surfaces, I'm interested in surfaces," he remarked in a 1974 interview. "For me, life is right in front of you. Mysterious because it is not hidden. ...

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 d...

There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel ["Mulligan Stew"]. There is also a question as to whether the New York publishing community can survive it too, although that, of course, is much less interesting. "Mulligan Stew," instead of consisting of meat and vegetables, consists entirely of literature, of parody and complaint and paranoia and pop-absurdism. It is as if Buck Mulligan was a hero or had written &#...

Let's begin with the essentials. Mulligan Stew is utterly dazzling. Its pedigree goes back, not to the well-made novel, but rather to the "anatomy"—those extravaganzas that sprawl across world literature, offering encyclopedic, and usually comic, views of life and its foibles. Like Gargantua and Pantagruel or Tristram Shandy, Mulligan Stew sustains a display of linguistic virtuosity that takes your breath away. It contains some of the best parodies since S. J. Perelman at his mos...

Billed as a "new wave murder mystery" whose subject is really "the comic possibilities of modern literary history," Mulligan Stew appears to be Sorrentino's lunge for the main chance…. While Mulligan Stew could use a little of the mystery's rigor, it fits far more comfortably in the avant-garde's cracked but commodious crockpot. The avant-garde tradition may be temporarily exhausted, but it has produced some notable messes. Would that the overstocked M...

[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 nov...

In Aberration of Starlight Gilbert Sorrentino uses procrastinated seduction not as voluptuous delay but as a gamble that just wasn't in the cards…. This is a tease novel, then, and not very gratifying at that. Tom is a bore and Marie is banal. Instead of discovering or inventing compensations that would free them, as characters, from the anonymous pattern of libido and denial, they back off into the twaddle that surrounds them. Their heads, and what little is in them, dominate the narrative an...

"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 sa...

Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide-Hôtel is a splendid book. The Splendide-Hôtel ('built in a chaos of glaciers and the polar night'), invented by Arthur Rimbaud and reinvented by Sorrentino is a place in the country of a poet's mind where people and poems come to stay for a while, perhaps forever. Sorrentino's heart rests there a spell to render alphabetically the Splendide-Hôtel and its guests and its pests (so many rats as to take over the whole world.)...

In 1971 Gilbert Sorrentino published a novel about poets, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, a savage book full of judgments his acquintances must have prayed would not be thought to refer to them. ("Free! Free! Irremediably poor. Such work is irremediable because it has no working parts. It is a great chunk of, say, Liederkranz."…) I mention this book because it is very good, still awaiting its public, at least on my coast, and because Sorrentino has both gifts, fictional and poet...

The Orangery, a collection of 84 liberally formed sonnets, each containing a variation of the word "orange," is not about orange. True enough, though, as Sorrentino says in one of these poems, "These oranges hold it all." Non sequiturs as sequiturs, sequiturs as non sequiturs, are here "absolute logic." You are, when you read this, entering a world where experience is what it is. Not yours. Yet you are invited in even when you are not "invited" in. &#x...

Since all literature is susceptible to parody, why not, then make parody literature? Gilbert Sorrentino has, with impressive results. "Mulligan Stew" has given me as much pleasure and intellectual joy as I have had from a novel in a long time. "Mulligan Stew" is a work of contemporary experiment, and there are those who will classify it under the new, somewhat sagging banner of post-modernism, a movement ripe for redevelopment. But it is experiment raised to such a level of comed...

[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-consciou...

["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, ...

A work of true comic genius, [Mulligan Stew] not only entertains and engages the intelligent reader, but also manages to shed light on the processes of literary creation, on the making of bad novels as well as good ones. Mulligan Stew may prove to be the literary curiosity of the year, perhaps the decade….

Mulligan Stew is a quite wonderful book of literary joking and parody—if there had been no Joyce, no Gide or Sterne or Borges or Robbe-Grillet or Nabokov or Perelman, I'm almost convinced that Sorrentino could have invented them. Since he didn't, his book could be called derivative, but it plays with its great originals with such lively intelligence, understanding, and affection as to make obscure the distinction between creative and critical imagination…. [The fussy woodenness o...

The prose criticism that Sorrentino has published in little magazines shows his power of making lucid distinctions. In poetry [as evidenced in The Darkness Surrounds Us] he still sounds too much like those from whom he has learned, especially Creeley, but what happens to him happens to him, indubitably, and he uses Creeley's mode with such virtuosity that one feels he is doing so as a temporary expedient, as a man may borrow another's good saw until he has one as excellent, and yet be cutting ...

[The Perfect Fiction] is a surprising collection of intellectual and evocative poems. As the title suggests, the poems are concerned with reality, which is depicted frequently as drab, dark, depressing; relief lies only in the futile dreams of something better which never arrives. Evoking the spirit of "the haunt / grim in sunlight: reality," Mr. Sorrentino taps the cliché, the vernacular, and the vulgar; he resorts to banality and triteness, and obscurity to describe "reality&#x...

A master of so-called experimental fiction, Sorrentino [applies in Aberration of Starlight] his impressive technical skills to the tale of a vacationing Brooklyn family in 1939, with mixed results…. Using a series of short narratives, letters, questions and answers, and internal monologues, Sorrentino artfully delineates a world in which desire is constantly thwarted by convention and fantasy is restricted to the suggestions of pulp magazines. His language is brilliant, exposing the sentimental, evas...

Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino's last novel, was an over-stuffed, aggressively avant-garde portmanteau bulging with allusions to James Joyce and Flann O'Brien; it enjoyed not only critical success but some popularity as well. Barely a year after publishing that behemoth, the prolific Sorrentino has produced a different kind of triumph—a tightly focused novel [Aberration of Starlight] that is by turns funny, sexy, and sad…. The verbal extravagance and formal pyrotechnics of Mul...

[Gilbert Sorrentino's] work takes in the form and tradition of such writers as Rakosi, Bronk and, in emotive stance, Bly. His diction is terse but not sparse [in The Orangery] and he has the observant knowledge of the authoritarian poet, and the ability to expand simple action or sight into a vast panorama of feeling and pathos, much of it implied, and here lies the skill.