Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

A novel without a plot, starring characters which aren't fully formed. So why does it work?

Sorrentino is using this flimsiest of frameworks to attack the false, the exploitative, and the undeserving of the Art World. He names no names, which adds a sort of timelessness to the mockery: if you don't know specifically who Sorrentino is referring to, you certainly know of somebody like them.

The approach wears a bit thin at times, but Sorrentino's wearily-amused tone keeps the book palatable. The only real downside is that it's too meta to recommend to some readers who might otherwise appreciate its humor.

It's funny that even though Gilbert Sorrentino wrote many books and was a distinguished--albeit somewhat too unknown (especially by his own countrymen) writer--it is this his first book which I like the most. As it works out it was the first book of his I read also--not by design. It's just the way it happened. In any case this book skewers the artistic and literary pretensions of his time in a sometimes nasty, always ribald and sardonic fashion. Sorrentino starts out his literary career by drawing for us portraits--more or less caricatures that is of an elitist driven New York artistic scene (circa the 50's and 60's) and their more often than not shallow, shabby and phony pursuits. One could of course just dismiss it of course as the show more envy of a havenot wanting to be a have. The only problem is so much of what Sorrentino has to say is right on target and even worse--fair. Apart from that Sorrentino although he built himself quite a niche in the literary world always remained something of an outsider. In any case this particular book doesn't just work because it's an attack on a particular literary or artistic scene or because he does it with a mocking or a sarcastic writing style. They certainly play into it but beyond that there is a certain kind of insight not only into how he portrays the characters but in the way he seems to address the reader of the book him/herself to question their own subservience and pretensions to the 'culture' of their own times. show less

Viciously funny. You have to close the book every few pages sometimes, look up with a sigh, and say a long reverent "Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn."

Sorrentino takes a sardonic look at society in the 1950s and 1960s. Not just the grey flannel suit types, but also the beatniks and the hipsters which latched on to any developing counterculture - those who embraced the appearances of a counterculture, but were never able to shake an inner core of mediocrity. Comically shitty poetry, vicious and bitter minor magazine editors, women who want to screw Ho Chi Minh, and so forth. It reminds me of parts of [b:The Recognitions|395058|The Recognitions|William Gaddis|http://d.gr-assets.com/books/1309209622s/395058.jpg|1299804], with the man who pretended to be show more Hemingway, the art critic who gives good reviews for pay, the entire party scene of Greenwich Village, and so forth.

Sorrentino plays a bit with meta-fiction tricks too, with his narrator (a character with his own pungent flaws) offering criticisms, or frank admissions of the vein of "I don't know and I don't care about this part", "This part will be boring, let's skip it".

Maybe if you've ever prided yourself on being different from the masses you might see a bit of yourself in here. There's the spooky part about it. show less

I'm too young to have lived through the fifties, but I'm utterly convinced that phoniness and fakery must have reached a pinnacle in that decade, largely because of this great novel. It's a corrosive satire, not of the pervasive I-like-Ike suburban culture as one might expect, but of the downtown New York intellectuals and artists who opposed it. In devastatingly funny prose, their motives are mocked, their sufferings are skewered, and their mediocrity is made manifest.

If you've ever patted yourself on the back for being smarter than the Philistines around you--and who hasn't done that when the subject of Sylvester Stallone's salary came up in conversation?--you'd do well to read this book, spotting glimpses of yourself on every page.

Hilarious and searing satire of New York's literary world in the 50s and 60s. Beautifully written, the only drawback being a streak of misogyny that I'm blaming on the time it was written.

Unbelievable writing talent, lavishly displayed. not an emotion revealed, but intellectually gripping and taking you this way and that, suddenly turning around to show yet another possibility. the master of what ifs, without a why. Because he could.

Every time you read a Sorrentino, a week is added to MJ's life.