The Sky Changes [Paperback]

Gilbert Sorrentino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1986

Sorrentino''s first novel is a disturbing acc ount of the damage and pain inflicted on all concerned as a couple and their children journey from New York to San Franc isco, still holding on to an illusion that their marriage ca n be rescued. '

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Composed with dazzling and precise verbal dexterity, The Sky Changes is replete with sadness for lost love and despair over a cheapened American culture." -- Washington Post 4-6-86

"Gilbert Sorrentino is a poet, and The Sky Changes is poetry influenced by an insight both agitated and clear." -- Gwendolyn Brooks, Book Week 5-8-66

"The Sky Changes is not the glad, mad trip of Kerouac's 'On the Road' but a bitter, more adult insight into hip America." -- Kirkus 3-1-66

"The Sky Changes is the best fiction of divorce I have ever come across, a truly moving shattering experience." -- Richard Elman, Commonweal 12-5-69

"Though its tone is dominated by despair and disillusionment, The Sky Changes also offers the pleasures of Gilbert Sorrentino's intense concentration and the poignancy of those few moments when redemption seems possible." -- Los Angeles Times Book Review 4-20-86 --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Product Details

• Paperback: 139 pages
• Publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux (April 1986)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0865472432
• ISBN-13: 978-0865472433
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,467,925 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Certainly, this is one of Sorrentino's best yet., February 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Sky Changes (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) (Paperback)

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.

4.0 out of 5 stars Divorce in America!, September 2, 2005

By 

Mark DeRespinis (Boulder, CO USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Sky Changes (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) (Paperback)

"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.