From Publishers Weekly
In what is arguably his best book to date, Sorrentino ( Mulligan Stew ) has crafted a novel out of 59 independent, short, surreal tales, most of which are Freudian in tone. The setting of the sketches is never delineated (many of the individual pieces take place within the minds of various characters) and the prose itself reads like archival material or old-fashioned newspaper reports. There is, of course, no single protagonist. The leading character in one story might turn up as a minor one in another or merely be mentioned in passing. Thus does the author expand his fictional society. Yet the characters' actions, desires and relationships are so deftly chronicled, and each story's plot so well integrated, that the work becomes a rare specimen of the genre: an intellectual page-turner
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
These 59 sketches--inventive elaborations of half-recalled images--combine a Joycean sensibility with the linguistic playfulness of Robert Coover. Several characters appear in more than one vignette along with recurring images that include a half-clad woman by a kitchen window, a snowman, and three women dressed in white by a dark lake. There is some discussion of signs and signifiers and their relationship to object. Sorrentino pokes fun at literary theory and critical methodology while at the same time using insights derived from such theories. His form is perfect, and his method presents the reader with a mysterious and tantalizing puzzle, yielding a haunting and powerful reading experience. Recommended for contemporary literature collections.
- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.
