Red the Fiend [Hardcover]

Gilbert Sorrentino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1995

A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been. Employing direct, elegant sentences, while retaining his characteristic formal inventiveness, Sorrentino evokes this unyieldingly grim Brooklyn boyhood, describing close, familial conflicts that deepen and widen to reflect the hardships of Depression-era life.

--This text refers to the Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Red, the barely adolescent Irish-American antihero of Sorrentino's latest novel, lives with his mother at his grandparents' dingy Brooklyn home, where he's become the perennial target of his grandmother's sadistic hatred. When she makes an egg too runny and soft, Red is punished; when she finds lice in his hair, she comments that the infestation is a sign of his inherent evil and douses his head with vinegar. Patrolling the comings and goings of her family, belittling the occasional excess like ladyfingers ("those God damned Protestant cakes") or a movie, whipping Red mercilessly, Grandma strangles the household into an eerie submission. In the process, she turns the stolid, helpless Red into a "fiend" who flogs himself with her belts and rarely rises above a state of pummeled apathy. Sorrentino (Under the Shadow), who's a poet as well as novelist, recreates with immaculate care Red's brutally dysfunctional family and the dangerous city streets (circa 1940) into which the boy escapes. The violence and pain of his tale jars with the aloof serenity of his writing, however, and, for all his craftsmanship, his characters, so grim, gray and mutilated, probably won't stoke the interest of many readers for long.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

This novel chronicles the early life of a boy named Red who lives in Depression-era New York City under the truly malevolent eye of his grandmother. The gifted Sorrentino (Misterioso, LJ 10/15/89) examines the development of Red's personality under the influence of Grandma's repeated and vicious physical and mental abuse, which is described in overwhelming detail. While this book is a tour de force, this reviewer cannot think of a single person to whom he would recommend it. Written somewhat in the vein of Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho (LJ 1/91), it is simply too graphic in its brutality. If you have a readership determined to read all literary fiction, or if you have fans of Sorrentino in particular, buy this. For other collections, it has little appeal.
David Dodd, Univ. of Colorado at Colorado Springs
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 213 pages
• Publisher: Fromm Intl; First U. S. Edition, First Printing edition (January 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0880641630
• ISBN-13: 978-0880641630
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,949,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sorrentino wallops The Waltons, August 10, 1998

By 

David V. Matthews (Aliquippa, PA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Red the Fiend (Hardcover)

This novel definitely destroys the sappy Waltons-style familial myths that dominate so many books and movies about the Depression. Sorrentino captures the self-destructiveness of his novel's unhappy, uneducated, unloved characters quite well, a self-destructiveness stemming from their quite brutal environment. I liked Sorrentino's use of two formal methods--via his omniscient third-person narrator--to report on his characters' grim mental states: his eschewal of direct quotes, instead using only paraphrases (e.g., "Grandma said that...") to capture the characters' loss of individuality; and his narrator's frequent reporting of the characters' thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. However, Sorrentino's vivid and masterful writing style doesn't quite conceal the novel's near-total lack of positive character development. Red, Grandma, and most of the other characters begin the novel screwed-up and merely become progressively worse, with no epiphanies. Of course, why should epiphanies occur to characters who have been too busy surviving day-to-day to develop even rudimentary senses of self-awareness?) In short, anyone who wants to know, in often graphic and brutal detail, how a dysfunctional childhood can actually damage a child should read this novel.

5.0 out of 5 stars It's dark, dark very dark !!!, May 26, 2007

By 

Juan Carlos Uribe (Bogota, Colombia) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Red the Fiend (Paperback)

With a very rare and unique style, the novel is construed as a collection of short stories about the same character, a small boy named "Red" whose life is destroyed every single day by a sadistic grandmother and the conditions in which he lives, where no redeeming situations will ever take place.

Red is placed at the center of everything that is arbitrary and destructive in a person's life, where no matter what you do, or where you go, everything is a struggle and cruelty is omnipresent. The writing is fantastic, but most probably every reader will hate the book as its makes you crawl into Red's skin and suffer with him during its 213 pages and at the end you will ask yourself what is the purpose of enduring such torment.

0 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Dysfunctional doesn't begin to describe this family., March 24, 2009

By 

Dick Johnson (Oklahoma USA) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Red the Fiend (Paperback)

A new term is needed for this group. As described by Amazon, this is about a boy who may never live to become an adult; his mother who is one only in the biological sense of the word; his father - ditto; his mother's parents - Grandpa the meek, Grandma the ....

The boy entertains many words to call Grandma, most of which I can't print here. Let's just say they are not favorable.

Sorrentino, in his normal anything goes style, will drag you in to this depressing bit of black humor. His linguistic tricks are always fun to read. He proves that you have to be able to write very well before you've earned the right to play with the rules. (Unfortunately, many of today's young writers try to do this without learning to write by the rules first.)

I think any book by Sorrentino is worth reading. This one, however should not be the first of his to pick up.