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The Sky Changes (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))

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The man is nameless, yet we begin to know him personally. His sadness, his anger, and his frantic attempts to salvalge a marriage damaged beyond repair are emotions apparent in the pages of the book, The Sky Changes. Gilbert Sorrentino has written a compelling psychological novel in which a man travels across the contry with his children and his driver, and a wife who no longer cares for him. The man recounts his thoughts as he heads west, giving us an intimate look at the cracks of his marriage; cracks which ultimately lead to the shattering of lives. Sorrentino, who has written many books in the past, gives us one more reason to understand why he has been the recipient of many prizes for his past works. Certainly, this is one of his best yet.

"Divorce in America" reads the large print heading on the back cover blurb of Sorrentino's novel The Sky Changes. The novel chronicles the last ailing days of a tired marriage headed precipitously towards a bitter split. The front cover shows an anonymous two-lane road, extending out and away over a hill that leads to some far beyond. Here is the road that will carry Husband and Wife, Children and Driver, across the country, on roads that lead forward always to some imagined place, some Mexico. The dynamic of relation in this marriage, and the road trip across America where it all unfolds; here is the study, subject and structure. Sorrentino has talked in interviews about his respect for the Oulipo poets, and their disciplined structures, how it frees up space for creative expression.

"The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit... the arbitrariness of the constraint only serves to obtain precision of execution."
Igor Stravinsky

The structure: the towns, the stops, and the things that happen there. Jacksontown, Ohio, Indianapolis, Indiana, Urbana, Illinois, Memphis, Tennessee, Jackson, Mississippi, Lawton, Oklahoma, Gallup, New Mexico, Grand Canyon, Arizona, Las Vegas, Nevada, Bakersfield, Madera, and San Francisco, California. The episodes are patched together with flashbacks and flash-forwards, an exercise in teasing out the infinite singularity and process of the end-game of a marriage.
The subject: Sorrentino enters into the silent and hidden world of soured love, and faces knife-edge tension with word-detail precision and attention, exposing the secrets and strains to all the world. This is the stuff that never gets talked about, the stuff that gets harbored in the tormented minds of those involved and subsequently hushed up when the end comes and the marriage falls apart. "Divorce in America" reads the heading on the back cover blurb. This book does what sociology can only hint at, with its statistics and social norms. Here is the source, a biting and unforgiving look at the sick state of relations in our society. And yet, there is an implicit sense of hope, that maybe if this hidden disease is exposed, that there can be a more careful and considered approach to this thing, love. But The Sky Changes is littered with broken minds and trapped hearts, skeletal souls scattered across the tired landscape of America, waiting, perhaps, for some kind of release.