Avner Landes, The Delegation (Operation Dodecahedron)

One might look forward to a new novel by Avner Landes because his previous, debut novel, Meiselman: The Lean Years, promised to reinvigorate, or at least to sustain, the legacy of American Jewish fiction of the sort represented by Roth, Bellow, and Malamud (with a dash of Bruce Jay Friedman and Stanley Elkin for extra spiciness). Landes’s portrayal of his Jewish characters and milieu is as close in its scrutiny as Malamud and as frank in that scrutiny as Roth (the huffily offended tone of some of the reviews of the novel and its matter-of-fact depiction of its protagonist’s flaws suggested that the reflexive indignation with which Roth’s frankness was sometimes greeted has not entirely dissipated). Meiselman serves to remind us that the quintessential Jewish novel has arguably been broadly comic in outlook and method—broad enough that it both captures the absurd conditions attending modern Jewish existence and the further absurdities that inform efforts to cope with these conditions in ordinary Jewish lives.

The Delegation certainly maintains Landes’s focus on the situation of Jews (if anything even more acutely), but readers will first of all need to reckon with the novel’s most conspicuous feature, its formal arrangement. It ostensibly relates an historical narrative about the World War II-era visit of two emissaries from Stalin’s Soviet Union, the poet Itzik Feffer and the theatrical personage Solomon Mikhoels. Stalin has sent them on a world tour to drum up support for the Soviet war effort, specifically to appeal to their fellow Jews for assistance in the Soviet Union’s heroic struggle against Hitler’s fascism. But this historical narrative—actually a novel written by Izzy Shenkenberg (a character introduced in Meiselman)—is only one layer of the novel’s discourse. A stream of footnotes appended by Shenkenberg runs below the main narrative, and a further stream of notes to the notes runs below that. The reader can choose his/her way through the text—following each layer separately, interrupting the narrative to read the notes (leading to further notes), reading discrete chunks of each sequentially, etc. . By necessity, then, this is a novel that requires the reader first of all to be aware of the way its formal device governs our experience of the work rather than the narrative it appears to supplement.

While the “story” embedded in the novel’s three-tiered structure is drawn from historical fact, the way the novel brackets the story in this intricate formal configuration transforms it into an element of the novel’s artifice, artifice that makes The Delegation an adventure in the act of reading before it is “about” anything else. Given the choices the reader can make in approaching the text, it is almost literally the case that each reader will have a different experience of the book, will in effect read different books, although in retrospect the three layers work together distinctly enough and form an appreciably coherent whole. In this way, The Delegation is closer to a precursor work such as Julio Cortazar’s Hopscotch, which similarly offers the reader multiple pathways though the text provided, than it is to other novels incorporating footnotes, such as Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, or the several such works by David Foster Wallace. All of these works interrupt the customary linear progression assumed by most narratives (and most readers), conveying the impression that we are moving backwards or sideways (in The Delegation flash-forwarding to another time and place). Such a move prompts the recognition—at least momentarily—that narrative itself proceeds through artifice, invoking an illusion that depends on our willing consent to its credibility. The labyrinthine scheme through which The Delegation presents its core narrative, along with various elaborations and the exposition of its authors’ efforts to create it, renders the conventional suspension of disbelief only a secondary consideration in the reading experience.

It might seem this sort of complexity is an obstacle to an appreciation of the very real seriousness of the underlying story and its equally sobering implications. The actions and the subsequent experiences of Itzik Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels, both authentic historical figures, illustrate the perilous circumstances of Jews in Stalin’s Soviet Union. (Both were killed in the early 1950s, Feffer executed for treason and Mikhoels murdered by Stalin’s thugs.) Feffer’s fate seems especially poignant, since he is portrayed as a true believer in the ideals of communism, but the story of the Feffer-Mikhoels tour also illustrates most immediately the vulnerability of diaspora Jews to the exploitation of such idealism (to socialism and progressive progress if not to communism per se), although not only Jews are shown to be susceptible to appeals to social justice and equality, as the novel’s depiction of the figure of famed actor and singer Paul Robeson, both in relation to the Feffer-Mikhoels mission and to Stalin’s regime in general, further makes clear. The tour is ultimately motivated by Stalin’s assumption that the the Jews, especially American Jews, have the financial resources and the influence needed to bolster the Soviet Union’s cause in fighting Hitler. That Stalin has this caricatured vision of “the Jews” does not seem to occur either to the two delegates or to those with whom they interact while in America, and the tour, which ends with a rousing speech given by Feffer, is to all appearances, a success.

If the novel’s structure diverts some attention from the serious themes it does also explore, it cannot be said that the narrative voice and tone announce that this is an earnest examination of the Jewish situation, as Feffer and Mikhoels themselves refer to it. The center of consciousness in Izzy Shenkenberg’s novel is Feffer, and he is portrayed as an unequivocally comic character, beset with anxiety caused primarily by his bad case of hemorrhoids, so that he spends much of his time worrying that he won’t reach a bathroom in time to prevent a horrendous accident, or that he has soiled his clothes and is emitting foul odors. Perhaps the most outrageous moment in the novel occurs when Feffer and MIkhoels are visiting Albert Einstein (himself portrayed comedically as a dirty old man) and does indeed soil his underpants, so severely that he must steal a pair of Einstein’s underwear. The depiction of Feffer’s affliction turns him to the sort of of hapless figure made familiar in much American Jewish fiction (and adopted by other, non-Jewish writers such as Thomas Pynchon) and, as with most such figures, this very haplessness almost inevitably persuades us to be on his side, feeling empathy for his plight even as we are laughing at him. In this case, we might begin to question whether our laughter is altogether seemly, once we consider the ultimate fate awaiting both Itzik Feffer and Solomon Mikhoels not too long following this journey through America. In this way, Landes takes a relatively obscure figure whose story might at best seem like a cautionary warning against a too credulous idealism and renders him a rather tragicomic character, although finally we must judge him to be deluded in his faith in the Soviet system.

Feffer doesn’t realize he is a victim of this system until it is too late, but it turns out he is the victim of an agent contributing more conspicuously to his suffering. It appears that the narrator of the novel Izzy Shenkenberg has written is not a third-person stand-in for the author but something like a first-person narrator, if indeed this narrator was a person: a hemorrhoid, apparently a roving hemorrhoid who has chosen Itzik Feffer as current host. Again, this conceit might seem to belittle the importance of the story of Feffer’s experience as a representative figure in modern Jewish history, but it seems in keeping with the complaint registered in the Author’s Note by Izzy Shenkenberg—who is, after all, the source of the conceit—about what he calls “Jews-Like-Dead Jews” books, of the sort unfortunately favored by Jewish readers. Izzy tells us that in The Delegation he has conceded to this predilection, after the failure of a previous book that defied the genre, and written a dead-Jew book, although not one that works by resorting to “hacky jokes” that reinforce stereotypes that don’t even provoke real laughter. In Shenkenberg’s novel (and Landes’s), laughter doesn’t trivialize disturbing subjects but heightens the disturbance by mixing the ridiculous and the horrific. Why isn’t it possible for a character such as Feffer both to serve as a martyr to a kind of deadly naivete and as someone who also suffers terribly if ignominiously from hemorrhoids?

Perhaps it is a mistake to think of Landes’s novel as primarily the framing of Izzy Shenkenberg’s The Delegation. The Author’s Notes don’t merely add a metafictional flourish to the central historical narrative but transform that narrative into an element within a larger narrative, the narrative of its own framing, or at least the circumstances motivating the framing. In this case, we might more appropriately take Izzy to be the protagonist of Avner Landes’s The Delegation. His questionable state of mind (some combination of resentment and insecurity) and his struggle to understand his audience, his status in the literary world, and really his purpose as a writer are the wellsprings from which the chronicle of Feffer/Mikhoels mission has emerged, and ultimately it is this, the whole context of literary creation, that The Delegation explicates. You could call this metafiction—writing that depicts the situation of writing itself—but that very situation encompasses much larger questions about Jewish identity and experience.

 

Alvin Lu, Daydreamers (FC2)

Alvin Lu’s novel, Daydreamers, immediately declares itself to be writing about writing. It begins with a “Translator’s Preface” that identifies its main text to be a manuscript written by the translator’s father (the translator acknowledges this might not be certain), ambiguous in its genre: it “bears novelistic traces, even as it is preoccupied with the truth.” Furthermore, the protagonist of this quasi-novel is the author’s son—the translator. Is the translator a further extension of this character in the father’s novel, or is he indeed the actual son who has been fictionalized in that novel? Ultimately, Daydreamers leaves this question unanswered, so that the further question of what is “real,” what a figment of characters’ imaginations is rendered superfluous. All is fiction, and all of its elements point only within the compass of that fiction.

Of course, this is true of all fiction, but our habits of reading continue to tempt us to maintain the opposition “real/fiction” even when faced with what literally has been presented to us as a work of fiction. Daydreamers concerns itself directly with the problem of determining what is real in the story offered by the father’s book in the figure of “Lena Wu,” a character whose motives, and finally her very identity, are a subject of investigation for all of the other characters, uncertainties also left unresolved (although with many hints that she is indeed a phantom). The character thus serves as an effective device in giving the novel a plot of sorts, although how seriously we are to take the device as a means of exploring the porous border between illusion and reality is not so clear.

But perhaps this would be an expectation that the main figures in this novel—all of whom are Chinese-American—would not would not hold of works of fiction, in which such a distinction does not actually apply. In addition to the translator’s father, another writer character is Yvonne Fung, who has some reputation in the Chinese community in the Bay Area but does not otherwise appear to be widely known (her main occupation is as a real estate agent). In the father’s novel, Yvonne is enlisted to find Lena Wu and tell her story, but excerpts from her other writing are interpolated throughout the text. In one such excerpt, she writes of the Chinese view that “writing was action, decisive and irrevocable”; further, traditional Chinese culture “does not harbor the illusion that fiction is somehow not the truth.”

In this way of thinking, writing is itself a reality, and fiction, despite ostensibly being “made up,” is still an effort at revealing the truth (perhaps with more freedom to invent along the way). If we assume that Alvin Lu is attempting not merely to dramatize such ideas but to embody them in his own novel, then the seemingly self-enclosed form of Daydreamers is really a way of affirming the self-sufficiency of even such a highly wrought novel to assert its own authority to get at the truth that lies beyond mere stolid fact. While the novel does not resolve the mysteries that serve as the twin engines of its plot—What really led to the death of “Uncle Rafael.” the event that leads the son-narrator to both Yvonne Fung and Lena Wu, and who is Lena Wu?—this seems itself an expression of the deeper truth that emerges from Daydreamers: factual truth is often elusive, difficult to determine, but fiction is the medium to which we can turn for the most compelling representation of this more profound insight.

It is also certainly the case that Lu’s novel provides us with insights into the ethos characterizing the Chinese-American community in the California Bay Area, of course one of the oldest and most established of such districts in the United States, although in this case the dominant lineage is Taiwanese. Among the central concerns for the characters in the novel is the preservation of writing in Chinese—the father’s novel, as well as the interpolated fragments from the writing of Yvonne Fung are written in Chinese script, and the father belongs to a literary society (presided over by one Mrs. HU) dedicated to sustaining literary writing in Chinese. The son, of course, has made himself proficient in Chinese writing (although his sister, the subject of the father’s previous book, is not), although his efforts are mostly applied to keeping visible the work of the older writers whose audience has largely been confined to those who read Chinese-language publications. But for these writers the rewards of writing appear to be in the writing itself, not in external recognition, an attitude that their professional success in other fields of endeavor makes possible and their persistence in the Chinese language perhaps makes necessary.

Despite the metafictional intricacies and the novel’s atmosphere of noir-like mystery, one could say also that Daydreamers is an immigration success story. The endeavor to continue cultivating a Chinese literary tradition is a kind of luxury attendant on apparent prosperity resulting from achievements in business and technology, and the attempt to solve the puzzle of Uncle Raphael’s death also serves as a means to reveal the habits of mind and conduct prevalent in this particular enclave of the Asian-American community, in particular those very attributes that have contributed to the success (in Uncle Raphael’s case, perhaps also the failures) these characters have achieved. The narrator is tasked with assisting his father as he tries to review the status of Uncle Raphael’s business (a publishing company), and as he meets with the employees we are able to survey Raphael’s somewhat familial business practices. Similarly, both Yvonne Fung and Lena Wu display their own kind of unorthodox business methods, although certainly Yvonne is more conventionally successful at it than Lena Wu, whose life seems closer to a hard-luck story than what we are able to gather about the other characters.

At the end of his preface, the son/translator comes as close as we get to an explanation of what “really happened,” what real-life circumstances inspired the father’s manuscript. He tells us that, from his perspective, his father “got most of it right.” If we take this preface at face value, he is affirming that the projection of the son’s point of view is essentially accurate, and implicitly that the events related did happen. Yet even here, we are given reason to doubt that the story involving Lena Wu is indeed to be trusted. We are told further that “in the scene where I finally meet up with Lena Wu, I think he was not merely wrong, but embellishing.” Indeed, “in real life that meeting never occurred.” While this at the least implies that the whole narrative is more fiction than “real life,” if we still wonder whether the son as translator of the narrative” might also be the father’s creation, we are truly left in a funhouse of fictive illusion doubling back on itself. Whether we really should go so far in interpreting the novel’s devices in this way, stranding ourselves in the absolutely indeterminate, is arguable, but even if we don’t, Daydreamers is no less compelling as a work exploring the possibilities inherent in the situation of writing itself as an animating artistic conceit.

My reviews of Avner Landes’s The Delegation and Alvin Lu’s Daydreamers, now at Unbeaten Paths.

Prior to his most recent novel, The Devil is a Southpaw (2025), Brandon Hobson’s fiction has been most notable for its portrayal of struggling young men, often Native American, and of the dynamics of Native American family life, as well as for its use of Native American folklore and cultural practices. None of these features are emphasized to the exclusion of other themes that might arise in any depiction of struggling and alienated American youth, as if dramatizing the particular problems of Native Americans was the overriding goal, although some reviews of Where the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed in particular did present them as “social problem” novels of a sort. It is perhaps inevitable that a writer of Hobson’s background (he is an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee nation) would have his work characterized as a vehicle of cultural identification—which it partially is, of course—but even Where the Dead Sit Talking and The Removed, the novels that brought the writer to critical prominence and established him as a Native American “voice,” show that Hobson does have an accompanying interest in the effects of point of view, and a willingness to depart from the underlying realism that he does also work to convey in these novels.

This more adventurous ambition is even more apparent in The Devil is a Southpaw. Again the emphasis is on youthful males, in this case two adolescent boys named Milton Muleborn and Matthew Echota. As in the two previous novels featuring teenage protagonists, Milton and Matthew are detached from family, although they are not orphaned but through much of the novel are present to us as inmates in a juvenile detention center. Their misdeeds are left pretty nebulous (mostly drugs and general disobedience), and none of the offenders to whom we are introduced seem especially prone to violence—indeed, the violence perpetrated or threatened inside the detention center comes from the “drill sergeants,” the guards who add to the inmates’ misery through their callous and contemptuous attitude. What makes both Milton and Matthew feel most estranged from the community values of their rural Oklahoma town is their attachment to art, to creativity in general, which the drill sergeants urge them to abandon in favor of more sensible, manly pursuits.

The most immediate manifestation of the protagonist’s artistic inclination is that the story of Milton and Matthew in the Tophet County Juvenile Correctional Facility is actually presented to us as “a novel by Milton Muleborn,” written after the putative events occurred (Part I). Parts II and III of The Devil is a Southpaw offer us the perspective of the “real” Matthew Echota and Milton Muleborn. But if Milton is the author of the interpolated novel entitled The Devil is a Southpaw, Milton Muleborn is also, of course, a fictional character in Brandon Hobson’s novel of the same name, and our view of the character is illuminated just as much through his imaginative projection of his earlier experiences as through the more straightforwardly confessional representation we find in Part III—Milton’s commentary on his novel and on the course of his life more generally. Ultimately, however, I don’t think that the portrayals of Milton Muleborn or Matthew Echota are in themselves meant to be the novel’s primary concern. Milton is rather the agent of its formal and stylistic devices, which are more numerous and more adventurous than in Hobson’s previous novels. Matthew Echota, for example, while he leaves an impression as a prodigy of sorts, really serves as an object of fascination for Milton, someone he both admires and resents for his seemingly effortless facility with art and, ultimately, success as an artist. This fascination, in turn, motivates much of what Milton does in The Devil is a Southpaw, both as character and creator.

Milton is driven to write The Devil is a Southpaw, in fact, as a way of ordering his own ambivalent feelings about the influence his memories of Matthew have had on subsequent, rather disordered, life:

Behold my innocence: my entire life has been a longing to be close to Matthew Echota, but it was a longing not uncommon among people who have lived indigent, lonely lives as adults, who have failed to maintain employment, regular health screenings and good finances. Matthew, being an idee fixee, is my worst characteristic, it’s true, it is absolutely the worst, not my mental health diagnosis or my intelligence or poverty, despite what anyone else says or believes.

Although Milton refers to his novel as a “memoir,” the portrait of Matthew Echota it presents is one conjured by Milton’s imagination. “I created a fictional version of Matthew Echota in my own specific way,” Milton tells us in Part III, which perhaps allows Milton to think of the work as a memoir—it is finally all about Milton and his attempt to counteract Matthew’s influence, not just by altering the facts about the real Matthew Echota, making him a more vulnerable and diminutive figure, as well as also depicting his death at the end of the story, but also by asserting his artistic authority in the act of transforming Matthew into his own artistic creation.

It could be said either that Milton succeeds in remaking Matthew Echota as well as his own unsettled youth into an artistic vision of sorts or that he overdoes it, mistaking exaggeration and indulgence for genuine aesthetic expression. The prose in his novel is often overcooked, deliberately extending itself in meandering compound-complex sentences and invoking an artificially enhanced vocabulary (as if writing with a thesaurus nearby). The narrator writes of Matthew’s effect on the inmates of the correctional facility:

We knew early on that he possessed what we wanted, even if his mother put his glasses on him first thing in the morning or read him Anacreontic verse while she trained him in adages written in modern English as they relaxed in the sultriness of low clouds on warm afternoons, or when she sat with him upstairs at the public library longer than any son had ever dreamed of on the face of the Earth, training him with the apodictic determination of a mother whose love for her son was inexhaustible, a fierce and immortal influence, an irresolvable love none of the rest of us had received or could even comprehend. . . .

The plot of Milton’s novel is similarly diverted from its apparent purpose: what is initially a combination prison memoir and realistic expose of youth incarceration is interrupted by scenes registering how the inmates’ isolation makes them susceptible to dreamlike visions and ghostly presences, the narrative sometimes erupting into outright surrealism, as when the facility is bombarded by a plague of frogs, an episode that perhaps most directly represents Milton’s resort to imaginative embellishment. The culmination of such embellishment is in his novel’s final sections, in which the inmates stage an escape that sends them into a phantasmagoric dreamscape populated by Matthew’s disappeared sister Nora, the doppelgangers of Salvador Dali and Frida Kahlo, and which appears to the boys “like the dream world we had read about in books, a place of haunted mansions with the ghosts of murdered lovers, sick horses, and headless knights, with the bones of the dead scattered around. . . .” The novel ends with Matthew and Milton about to be re-apprehended and taken back to the correctional facility. Their retreat into art isn’t finally going to cancel out reality, which will assert its prerogatives.

Parts II and III of The Devil is a Southpaw (Brandon Hobson’s novel) would seem to be the implicit recognition of this uncomfortable truth. Part II offers an ostensible interview with the older Matthew Echota (conducted by “Sanbo Hornbond”). The interview is brief, and doesn’t really provide a vivid account of the older Matthew beyond establishing that he holds a respectable position in the art world and has overcome whatever obstacles he encountered in his younger days—although both his experience in a “corrupt juvenile detention center” and his connection to Matthew are confirmed: Matthew offers an explanation for his incarceration (one not mentioned in Milton’s novel), and he arrives at the interview with the manuscript of The Devil is a Southpaw (presumably sent to him by Milton). The effect of this ostensible update of Matthew’s life is to give us a view of him outside of MIlton’s interested perspective, sandwiched between the literally fictional portrayal of the younger Matthew and Milton’s later reflections, supposedly more anchored in the actual truth (about himself, at least). But of course there is nothing to bely the possibility that this Matthew, and the purported interview, are also Milton’s creation, although Part II most immediately reminds us that both Matthew and Milton are the creation of the author of the novel appropriating the title of Milton’s novel—Brandon Hobson.

It is not misleading to call Hobson’s novel a metafiction, even though it shares with his previous realistic novels the concern for the struggles of youth (if anything made more dramatic here by introducing his characters as literal prisoners in a correctional facility) and the depiction of the lives of rural Oklahomans (with somewhat less emphasis specifically on the circumstances facing Native Americans). While the reference to Sanbo Hornbond—an anagram for Brandon Hobson, of course—as the interviewer in Part II is an amusing reminder that the characters in The Devil is a Southpaw are a product of the writer’s imagination, it does not exactly undermine the representational illusion on which the novel still depends. Nevertheless, the novel as a whole does show a greater interest in the formal possibilities of fiction as an object of the writer’s interest, and Hobson clearly intends to make the reader aware of the effects of form on our perception of the story he is telling.

The Removed used a fragmented, shifting point of view as its overall organizing principle, but in The Devil is a Southpaw, we are obliged to be aware of the way point of view always conditions our access to narrative “content,” and to that extent it is inherently unreliable. However, to say that a fictional account is unreliable is not to say that no meaning or truth can be found in it: its meaning requires that we consider not merely what is represented but also its source in possibly hidden motives, and its truth requires that we defer interpretation until we can sufficiently register the formal order of the work as a whole. This is actually true of all works of fiction, but a novel like The Devil is a Southpaw makes the necessity of these recursive moves especially explicit, so that in this sense it becomes a novel about reading a novel, albeit not to the point that it is no longer about the characters and experiences it portrays. Perhaps the most admirable achievement of The Devil is a Southpaw is in the balancing of its more adventurous strategies with its still compelling depiction of lost youth and their often bleak environment.

The novel is more adventurous as well in its use of style as a device that works directly to help characterize its protagonist, a device that prompts the reader to realize that Milton Muleborn is being a little more pretentious than is good for our judgement of him. While Milton’s language in Part III, in which he revisits his youthful experiences apart from their role in his novel, is somewhat more subdued, he remains a rather extravagant stylist, although less through reaching for the fancy and unfamiliar word and mostly through a penchant for rambling sentences. However, such a style may finally serve to remind us that Milton is a writer, by aspiration if not by trade, and The Devil is a Southpaw is a novel about the importance of art and creativity to outcast young people such as Milton and Matthew. Matthew’s fanciful excursions into reverie and sheer fantasy similarly might be judged as the overly ambitious flourishes of a budding young writer, although they also further allow Hobson to add more unconventional elements to the aesthetic framework of his novel, which is reinforced by the periodic placement of drawings, presumably by Milton, throughout the text.

These more varied devices, not previously so much in evidence in Hobson’s fiction, could be explicated as themselves the complement to the fundamental realism continuing to motivate Hobson’s work. The Devil is a Southpaw is not merely the testimony to the mistreatment of adolescent boys in a modern juvenile “correctional” institution (although it is that), but it is also the story of two young inmates’ attempts to cope with their circumstances by affirming the ability of imagination to transcend those circumstances. This doesn’t quite succeed entirely, at least for Milton Muleborn, but that is one of the realities that The Devil is a Southpaw portrays At the same time, the portrayal itself, through its reflection of the boy’s commitment to the idea in the novel’s own imaginative order, is ample compensation for the reader.

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction is available in these formats:

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(This is the introduction, as it were, to a short book I will shortly make available entitled Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. As explained in the prologue, the book is an attempt both to introduce Sorrentino’s work to readers less familiar with it and to re-introduce a body of experimental fiction to those who might have forgotten how consistently committed to the continuous renewal of literary art it was.)

 

This book is not a biographical study of Gilbert Sorrentino’s life and work. Although it became more evident to me while trying to write about Sorrentino’s whole career as both a poet and a writer of fiction that understanding a writer’s intentions can be relevant to a well-grounded interpretation of a literary work (as long as they are not regarded as the final authority), and that the writers’ attested experiences can be useful to the critic if they are used to judge how experience has been aesthetically transformed, I have no background as a biographer, and it is Sorrentino’s work that needs renewed attention, not his life circumstances. Still, the dearth of biographical information about Sorrentino beyond the most cursory is a significant hurdle for a critic to clear, and a proper biography to mitigate error and certify facts would certainly be welcome.

But neither is this book an exercise in academic criticism—certainly not as currently practiced in what’s left of literary study in the academy, and not really even as it existed prior to the advent of theory and its subsequent metamorphosis into various versions of cultural studies. My focus is on explication of text, but my readings of Sorrentino’s works are close readings only in the sense that they give unqualified attention to the formal and stylistic qualities of those works. They don’t necessarily provide exhaustive analysis that attempts to take the measure of a literary work’s aesthetic dynamics in the way some New Critics set out to do. There is attention to context, related both to Sorrentino’s work as a whole and to literary practices in general, as well as some citations to external sources when such sources can lead to a further appreciation of the text at hand.

Readers will probably notice, however, that “context” of the kind academic criticism presently emphasizes the most is largely missing here. I do not dwell on the historical, sociological, and political implications of Sorrentino’s fiction, nor do I attempt to subordinate that fiction to its utility as historical analysis or cultural diagnosis. Readers expecting that sort of emphasis will surely be disappointed with my approach, and this examination of Gilbert Sorrrentino’s writing is probably not going to be their sort of thing. What is most “old-fashioned” about my approach is probably its underlying assumption that “literary criticism” names a mode of critical writing that seeks to account for the literary effects of literature, which it does not view as secondary to the critic’s real concerns beyond it. Literary criticism exists to help us understand how a literary work achieves its own integrity, not to direct our attention elsewhere, to something else the critic finds more important (these day, that would usually be politics). We should read Gilbert Sorrentino’s books because they offer us a distinctively rewarding reading experience that expands our appreciation of the possibilities of literary form, not because they instruct us about history or might lead to our moral and political improvement.

While the tone of this study is prevailingly analytical, the analysis is “technical” only if you believe that any attempt to disturb the surface purity of the literary text with any critical concepts (perhaps including the characterization of what we are reading as “text”) is an undesirable imposition on the pristine act of reading. The terminology I use should be immediately familiar to anyone who takes literature seriously to begin with (or at least its denotation clear from the context of its use) and is always employed to explicate and clarify Sorrentino’s strategies. Since Sorrentino is a writer who habitually invokes unconventional strategies, any critical effort to comprehensively cover all of Sorrentino’s published work will necessarily venture interpretations requiring extended explication. And that is indeed what is offered here: sustained exposition of a body of work that systematically defies established precepts about the nature of prose fiction accepted in mainstream literary culture. If the reader finishes this short book believing that Sorrentino’s project as a writer has been coherently elucidated and that the aesthetic achievement of individual works of his has been cogently described, I would consider my effort a success.

If the scope of that effort does not encompass the biographical particulars of Sorrentino’s career as a writer, a thorough reckoning with what he wrote (and to a more limited extent what he said about what he wrote at various times) certainly does leave a vivid enough impression of a writer with very strong opinions and an unequivocal commitment to his understanding of the demands of art. Absent more widely available biographical information about Sorrentino’s personal and professional life outside the writing of his books, only idle speculation would have that these  somewhat cantankerous traits carried over to his interactions with people, although based on stray reports from scattered sources it seems likely that he was willing to accept the consequences of being faithful to his vision (losing friends over his portrayal of them, for example). He was certainly willing to bear the consequences of his intransigence in adhering to the principles of aesthetic experimentation that motivated his work as a fiction writer and that resulted in a kind of hand-to-mouth existence in the publishing world, often circulating his manuscripts among numerous publishers before finally securing one willing to take a chance on his latest offbeat offering.

For those of us who think that the urge to trace the features of a writer’s work to their source in the writer’s life us too often indulged in strained interpretations and ought to be resisted, perhaps we know enough about Gilbert Sorrentino to judge the work efficaciously: born to an Italian father and Irish mother in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (where he befriended fellow writer Hubert Selby, Jr.) a stint in the Army while attending Brooklyn College, where he returned after his discharge and founded the literary magazine, Neon, although did not finish his college degree. After beginning to publish his own poetry, he became associated with the journal, Kulchur, which focused on literary criticism and in which Sorrentino published many of his own critical reviews and essays (later collected in Something Said (1984). At this time he also began writing his first novel, The Sky Changes (1966). (He wrote an earlier, more conventional novel—described by Sorrentino as “very, very long”—that was never published, presumably consigned to oblivion.) After The Sky Changes was published, Sorrentino wrote his second novel, Steelwork.

In the second half of the 1960s, Sorrentino worked as an editor at Grove Press, which he left in 1970 after completing Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (published in 1971). (Among the books he worked on as editor were Selby’s Last Exit to Brooklyn, as well as The Autobiography of Malcolm X.) During the 1970s he seems to have subsisted mainly on fellowships and occasional teaching jobs. (Unfortunately, his early novels didn’t sell so well). In 1979, the publication of Mulligan Stew seemed to finally promise a degree of commercial success, but, unfortunately, while this novel did establish Sorrentino’s reputation as an important experimental writer (and remains his best-known and best-selling book), that promise wouldn’t be fulfilled, as Sorrentino couldn’t really adapt his talent to the kind of conventional thinking that writing a “successful” novel would entail. Thus, the most consequential development affecting the course of his subsequent career was the offer to join the creative writing faculty at Stanford University in 1982, an appointment that ended only with Sorrentino’s retirement in 1999. This job may have restricted his ability to pursue writing full-time, but it also allowed him to write the sort of fiction he wanted to write without concern for publishers’ disapproval or financial uncertainty.

This condensed biography shows that Sorrentino was more or less able to live an outwardly literary life, despite being from a working-class neighborhood in Depression-era Brooklyn. But the “literary” assumptions accompanying Sorrentino’s career were always heterodox and antipathetic to the prevailing consensus about acceptable literary practice; in his reviews he was often openly hostile toward the writers who he believed profited from this consensus. Perhaps what we can most readily take from surveying Sorrentino’s life as a writer is that his primary commitment was to the integrity of literature itself—to its reclamation as a vibrant art that doesn’t just repeat the inherited formulas and lifeless gestures that dominated a literary culture characterized more by the pretense to seriousness than to its actual pursuit.           

A superficial reading of Sorrentino’s work might suggest that he is essentially an iconoclast, a writer who overturns existing literary forms simply for the sake of doing so. Although there is truth to the claim that Sorrentino’s fiction is iconoclastic, his approach is not to flagrantly ignore the demands of form, or to reject outright the influence of literary history. Sorrentino wishes to replace traditional narrative structure as the default formal principle of fiction with new forms invented or adapted for the work at hand. In this way, he actually pays more attention to form than most novelists, either conventional or “transgressive.” Similarly, Sorrentino does not dismiss the literary past, although the writers he invokes may not always be the most obviously canonized. That Sorrentino takes preceding literary achievements seriously is made explicit in his criticism, but it is equally clear in much of his fiction that his writing originates in a far-ranging familiarity with the forms and tropes supplied by literature itself and by particular writers he admired (even if Sorrentino’s use of them often tended to parody and burlesque). Sorrentino was “alt lit” only in that he offered alternative strategies beyond simple storytelling, not because he disdained the appeal to aesthetic order altogether.

Sorrentino’s iconoclasm is perhaps more apparent in the “content” of his work, not just in his lampooning of bohemian attitudes or academic pretension or middle-class sexual mores but in his radical skepticism about human nature and the crass sensibilities that dominate American culture. Sorrentino is an iconoclast most clearly in his criticism, which on the one hand champions writers Sorrentino believes are undervalued, but on the other also unleashes some uninhibited attacks on those he thinks are not just overrated but degrade the artistic standards of literature. These strong opinions, which can seem peevishly dismissive, along with his portrayals of unredeemed human degradation, no doubt for some readers conveyed the impression Sorrentino’s work was even more formidable than his unfamiliar formal strategies already suggested it must be.

But idol-smashing was not in itself the primary goal motivating Sorrentino’s work. It is the necessary initial gesture implicit in his larger project of reorienting the aesthetic expectations  of readers who assume that narrative form is the only form that might give shape to a work of fiction. To rebuild the formal structures of fiction, the old structures must first be razed, but Gilbert Sorrentino’s fiction is ultimately more about what can replace the structure that was leveled than the mere act of subverting existing arrangements. It doesn’t go too far to say that Sorrentino would like us to take delight in the formal variations he offers in each of his novels. In this sense, Sorrentino’s fiction has an affirmative purpose, but it is an affirmation of the capacity of art—specifically literary art—to renew itself through the exercise of imagination.

This was certainly what most captivated me when I began reading Sorrentino’s fiction. I found Sorrentino after I had already discovered other postmodern innovators such as John Barth and Robert Coover, but encountering Mulligan Stew made me think I had come upon a writer who upped the metafictional ante over even Barth and Coover and had dazzling comedic skills that encompassed satire but went beyond the merely satirical to create a kind of absolute comedy that takes nothing seriously, including itself. (Later, upon reading M.M. Bakhtin, I found the critical perspective that would accurately describe this kind of comedy as “carnivalesque.”) While none of Sorrentino’s post-Mulligan Stew novels quite attempted to replicate its audacious structural complexity, nor to repeat its outrageous devices in the same encyclopedic way (although the latent comic attitude would always remain), Sorrentino’s subsequent work continued consistently to challenge literary convention, each new release promising its own sort of originality and surprise.         

What I also discovered is that most mainstream reviewers did not really know how to account for Sorrentino’s literary project. Most seemed to expect that a Sorrentino novel would violate the established norms with which they were familiar, but, while critics would usually acknowledge Sorrentino’s writing skills in general, the typical response to the formal provocations encountered in his work was that he was engaged in “playing games,” that he seemed disdainful of the imperative to be accessible to ordinary readers. Although there were certainly critics who appreciated Sorrentino’s adventurous ambitions, very little effort was made in the prevailing outlets of literary journalism to ponder his alternative literary strategies more deeply or to consider seriously the notion that the norms observed by most writers of fiction might be deficient and in need of revision. Sorrentino was left to assume the reputation of an incorrigibly eccentric writer little interested in appealing to the general reader, and his later novels, although in some ways indeed more accessible to the average reader, were not really much reviewed in the most popular mainstream publications at all.,

Sorrentino had his champions, and he did rather better among academic critics, at least in depth of analysis, if not in the amount of attention paid to his work in comparison to other writers perceived as “postmodern.” Indeed, only one book by an academic critic, Louis Mackey’s Fact, Fiction, and Representation, has been devoted entirely to Sorrentino’s work (and it examines only Crystal Vision and the three novels comprising the Pack of Lies trilogy). William McPheron’s Gilbert Sorrentino: A Descriptive Bibliography usefully lists critical essays written about Sorrentino (as well as reviews of Sorrentino’s books), but this book was published in 1993 and has not been updated to cover all of Sorrentino’s career. Many of the critical considerations by academic critics are more interested in using Sorrentino’s work to exemplify broader philosophical issues that his inveterate self-reflexivity and breaking of form (especially in Mulligan Stew) tangentially raise, or in placing Sorrentino’s fiction in a taxonomy of postmodernism, so that neither the full range of Sorrentino’s aesthetic strategies nor the distinct progression of his work as a whole are as well-appreciated as they should be for a writer of Sorrentino’s accomplishments.

My current effort here, then, is to contribute in some small way to advancing this more complete view of Sorrentino’s career as a writer. It isn’t as expansive as a critical biography might be, or as detailed in its close readings as a more focused analysis of an individual work can be, but it attempts both to survey all of Sorrentino’s published writing from his beginnings as mostly a poet through to his final, posthumous, novel, The Abyss of Human Illusion, and to consider the various aesthetic objectives informing Sorrentino’s approach to the creation of literary art. Although Sorrentino is most often described as an “experimental” writer (and this is the category in which I myself initially placed him), the longer view of Sorrentino’s body of work reveals that his aesthetic purposes are in fact multifarious, if ultimately all unified in an effort to discover the still unrealized potential of fiction as a form of verbal art. Sorrentino is indeed an experimental writer, but that word in itself does not describe the specific strategies, accentuated to different degrees in different works, by which he effects his distinctive manner of experiment.

Thus this book is organized more or less chronologically (some slippage with the final books), but also according to an analysis of these multifarious purposes as they are manifested in particular works. I have identified what I believe are the separable but ultimately integrated aesthetic modes that are prominent in Sorrentino’s practice, each of which is more predominant in some of the novels but are also present in many of the others. This allows the opportunity to emphasize the panoply of strategies Sorrentino employs, while acknowledging his underlying commitment to formal innovation and the self-sufficiency of literary language. These commitments are what unites all of Sorrentino’s fiction and mark it as among the most distinctive in postwar American literature, but they do not determine the specific narrative devices—or whether narrative is even present—that Sorrentino chooses to use, or preclude the possibility that an individual work might pursue specific kinds of effects that Sorrentino’s formal designs also make possible, as I hope my discussions of each of Sorrentino’s published novels will show.

Some of Sorrentino’s works, of course, have been more widely discussed than others, and while I give ample attention to books such as Mulligan Stew and Crystal Vision, I also try to give extended consideration to all of his books, in some cases more extended than is generally available through extant critical commentary on Sorrentino, especially the later ones (after the Pack of Lies novels). While Mulligan Stew will no doubt remain the Sorrentino novel most likely to find its way onto reading lists dedicated to postmodern fiction, and his early work up through Crystal Vision will likely attract most new readers, familiarity with the shape of his whole career can only enhance appreciation of Sorrentino’s strategies in those novels, as well as perhaps encourage interest in the lesser-known titles (some of which are out of print). The subtitle of this book promises an “introduction” to Sorrentino’s work, but it is really more accurately an attempt to re-introduce a writer whose work arguably most purely embodies the practice of “experimental fiction” in postwar American writing.

 

Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction

Daniel Green

Contents

Prologue

Sorrentino the Poet

Sorrentino the Realist

          The Sky Changes

          Steelwork

Sorrentino the Metafictionist

          Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

          Mulligan Stew

Sorrentino the Craftsman

          Aberration of Starlight

          Crystal Vision

          Blue Pastoral

Sorrentino the Anarchist

          Pack of Lies trilogy

                    Odd Number

                    Misterioso

                    Rose Theatre

Sorrentino the Formalist 

          Under the Shadow

          A Strange Commonplace

          The Abyss of Human Illusion

Sorrentino the Comedian

          Gold Fools

          Lunar Follies

Sorrentino the Local Colorist

          Red the Fiend

          Little Casino

Epilogue

          Splendide-Hotel

(This is the final chapter of my upcoming book, Gilbert Sorrentino: An Introduction. I do not currently have a publisher, so, tentatively, it will be available as a free ebook or pdf. More info to come.)

Splendide-Hotel

In the early to mid-stages in Sorrentino’s career as a writer of fiction, Splendide-Hotel seemed something of an outlier among his books (so much so that some critics hesitated to identify it as a work of fiction at all). But in the last phase of his career, when he was publishing a series of short novels organized through the collage method featuring a sequence of connected vignettes, it became possible to see Splendide-Hotel as the precursor to this approach, It, too, dispenses with narrative and the development of characters in favor of self-contained prose compositions that seem disconnected but that ultimately realize their own form of unity-in-division.         

The unity in Splendide-Hotel is manifested both structurally and thematically. The book contains 26 sections, each of them corresponding to a letter in the alphabet, and the theme that those entries each help to elaborate is indicated in the book’s title, which is taken from a line in Arthur Rimbaud’s Illuminations: “And Hotel Splendid was built in the chaos of ice and the polar night.” Sorrentino takes Rimbaud’s image and metaphorically erects a more fully materialized site—in “S” we get a fully detailed description of the hotel:

. . .the dark-wood paneling and lemon-colored wallpaper of many of its suites, the huge crystal chandeliers of the Golden Age Room, the oiled mahogany and oak furnishings of the Men’s Saloon—all assure the guest that he is in one of the very last of the truly regal hotels Although lacking such amenities as a swimming pool and a gymnasium, the Splendide is equipped with almost anything else a guest may desire. . . .

Sorrentino has made his Splendide-Hotel “real,” but its reality is the reality created by the artist’s imagination, the residency for which the Splendide is built. As the narrator says of a painter known for painting pictures of waiters: “they are totally unlike any waiters that anyone will ever see. And yet—and yet surely they must be the waiters employed by the Splendide. By an act of the imagination, the artist has driven through the apparent niceties of restaurant dining to reveal the bewildered rage and madness therein.” The waiters’ “irrational behavior and broken spirits do exist: in the imagination, purified against all change in the Splendide.” This notion is central to Sorrentino’s conception of the essence of literary creation and affords an appropriate rejoinder to those critics who claimed that Sorrentino paid insufficient attention to “reality”—the writer’s verbal creations are real, “willed into existence by an act of the imagination.

Sorrentino arrived at this view of the act of creation through his extensive reading of William Carlos Williams (both the poetry and the fiction), and Williams along with Rimbaud might be seen as the de facto protagonists of Splendide-Hotel, each of them at different points invoked as “the poet.” The attention given to poets and poetry in Splendide-Hotel on the surface at least might leave the impression that it belongs to poetry (and the criticism of poetry) than to fiction—an impression that is reinforced in the Dalkey Archive edition of the book by the Afterword provided by the poet (and Sorrentino friend) Robert Creeley. Some critics have even referred to Splendide-Hotel as itself a collection of prose poems rather than a work of fiction, and while we might consider the book to be, in part, a meditation of sorts on the implications of poetic language, and there are numerous passages confirming Sorrentino’s own skills with language (such as “Y,” in which the narrator associates “love” with the color yellow), Sorrentino’s subsequent books, and especially the late works, would show that the structure and style of Splendide-Hotel continues to  inform his efforts to create alternative formal patternings in works of fiction.

 Reading Splendide-Hotel reminds us, however, that Sorrentino indeed was first of all a poet, and that all of his fiction proceeds through formal assumptions that reveal a poet’s awareness of form more than the narrative instincts of a traditional novelist. (As a poet, Sorrentino is inclined toward formalist-inspired lyric poems rather than shapeless “free verse.”) In neither his poetry or his fiction does Sorrentino conventionally “wax poetic” through the kind of lyrical figuration that often passes as “literary” writing. Love is not “like” yellow, it is inhabited by it, embodied in the arrangement of images:

. . .It may be, though, that in flailing about, the notion that yellow is love’s color appealed to my sense of design. I think of the pale sun that occasionally shines above the massive hotel: I think of Amarillo: I think of the color of the walls in that tavern where the men still sit, drinking red beer. The peeling paint of those walls, a kind of dull mustard-yellow, is close to the color I envision. Nothing spectacularly brilliant will do, The color is somehow perversely pleasing in apposition to that which it surrounds.

But is this “I” Gilbert Sorrentino the poet, author of Splendide-Hotel, or is it an invented narrative persona, masquerading as the author and tempting us to assume he speaks for the author? On the one hand, this narrator performs the tasks a narrator conventionally undertakes, introducing characters, setting up a situation, at times even telling a brief story, but on the other he freely acknowledges that this is a role he plays, that he is, fact, making things up. In “P,” he tells us that a “painter whom I have invented has recently painted a picture which, after some deliberation, he has decided to call P. It is not a good painting, but I find myself strangely drawn to it.” This picture reminds the narrator of an old photograph that includes his grandparents in a composition much like that of the painting. “What is strange, of course, is how this painter should have come upon his subject, notwithstanding his butchery of it.” This does not seem strange to any reader who did simply pass over the narrator’s declaration that the painter is invented: the painter came upon his subject because the author/narrator contrived the situation in which the mysterious coincidence supposedly occurred.

Mysteries in fiction are always contrived, as are plots, settings, and the idea of character development, and Sorrentino’s fiction, at least after Steelwork, makes no pretense to concealing its own contrivances. Along with perhaps John Barth, Gilbert Sorrentino may arguably be the most purposefully self-reflexive writers in postwar American fiction. Any serious consideration of the phenomenon of metafiction as it emerged in the 1960s and 1970s would have to give a exprominent place to Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Mulligan Stew, and Splendide-Hotel continues the practice established in Imaginative Qualities of directly acknowledging the presence of the author (or at least that authorial persona) engaged in bringing the work we are reading into being. (Mulligan Stew relies less directly on this kind of direct discursive gesture in calling attention to its own blatant artifice.) Even though it returns us to Sorrentino’s antecedent interest in poetry, Splendide-Hotel now serves not just as an aesthetic progenitor to some of Sorrentino’s later work, but as one of the paradigmatic examples of the rule-breaking strategy that arguably became the challenge to conventional assumptions about the nature of form in fiction most closely identified with the earliest “postmodern” writers.

 If Splendide-Hotel is often enough overlooked, lurking between Imaginative Qualities and Mulligan Stew in the confirmation of Sorrentino’s gifts as a writer of experimental fiction and immediately followed by a last resurgence of activity as a poet (three volumes in 1976, 77, and 78), it nevertheless affords a reader of Sorrentino’s work a worthwhile reminder that it all arises from the poet’s enhance awareness of language—the alphabetical structure of Splendide-Hotel directs us to the very source of language, and Sorrentino’s fiction never really lets us stray far from it. There are no Sorrentino novels that invite us to look past the words on the page, as the shaper of form, and contemplate instead the illusionistic space occupied by “real people” caught up in the story being told about them. Sorrentino is more interested in the total effect his verbal arrangements might have on the attentive reader than in conjuring such an illusion.

Sorrentino certainly paid a price for maintaining this aesthetic throughout his career. After the semi-success of Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino conceivably could have enlisted his genuine comedic skills in further “rollicking” comic novels or postmodern Menippean satires, or transmuted his Bay Ridge past into more straightforwardly autobiographical narratives rendering the old neighborhood—books that might have sustained or even increased the commercial value of his fiction. He did not do that, of course, the partial feint toward commercial appeal of Aberration of Starlight notwithstanding, if anything further reducing the commercial viability of his novels with every new release. Perhaps there were those who thought Sorrentino thus showed at the least some impatience with conventional reading habits (if not outright contempt for them), but his disdain for mainstream literary culture was more often directed neither at readers nor critics, but at publishers whose notions of quality in books were pretentiously middlebrow and unshakably commercial.

Sorrentino’s list of rejections from such publications was prodigious. Luckily, all of the works Sorrentino wanted to publish did find homes with one or another of the myriad independent presses that help to get adventurous fiction into print. (Dalkey Archive being among the most prominent of these.) That Gilbert Sorrentino persisted in writing his own inimitable versions of formally adventurous fiction right up to his final, fatal illness finally suggests he did believe there was and will be an audience for this work, however much the American “book business” wants to ignore it.

I have now managed to transport the contents of The Reading Experience from Typepad to Word Press. However, as in some episodes of Star Trek in which the transporter malfunctions, the blog has rematerialized in a somewhat scrambled form: I have not been able to reproduce the features of the Typepad version exactly, and thus have altered the blog’s organizing principle accordingly. Most of the posts I wanted to preserve (there were many with stale links or ephemeral content that I discarded) and the reviews (numerous of which first appeared in other venues) and longer essays have been arranged on pages to which I have linked on the sidebars. These pages present the posts that seem to me to still have resonance and/or relevance, or that I just want to preserve.

I must say I do not find Word Press to be nearly as intuitive and user-friendly as Typepad. (I sampled the AI Editor, but, like all other iterations of AI I have experienced, it is a disaster–AI is quite literally destroying civilization).Typepad made formatting and posting simple and easy, while Word Press seems to make them as cumbersome and confusing as possible–so cumbersome that I am now not at all sure when, or even if, I will continue posting on this blog. Perhaps I will get used to the needlessly byzantine processes here, but it could be that, at least for me, the era of blogging is finally over. Alas: Why is it we can never have nice things?