“Elegy for G.S.”: my tribute to Gilbert Sorrentino in the form of a mostly imageless text collage.

“Clouds”: the only completed page of my project to adapt Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pecuchet.

I don’t believe the latter has been seen by anyone except a few close friends.

Scott Esposito’s latest Quarterly Conversation is up at his site, including an roundtable on Haruki Murakami, an interview with Zak Smith (of the drawing for each page of Gravity’s Rainbow fame), and a mostly pictureless comic I did as an elegy for recently deceased author Gilbert Sorrentino, Elegy for G.S. (Now found at: http://www.madinkbeard.com/webcomics/picturelessc/0005.html)

I’m quite happy with how the piece turned out. While I use almost no pictures, I’m not sure I could have done the text in any other way.

I began my review of Gilbert Sorrentino’s 2002 novel Little Casino, noting the growing sense of similarity among his works as I read more and more of them even as they also consistently varied in form. With this, his last novel, Sorrentino continues his work of variation and similarity.

A Strange Commonplace is organized into two parts of 26 chapters (52 total just like Little Casino). Each chapter in part one shares a title with a chapter in part two, though the titles are not in the same order. While many of Sorrentino’s works have identifiable organizational structures, I cannot discern any sense to the paired chapters, as if the author titled the chapters to cause the reader to search for connections between the pairs without there actually being any. Perhaps the pairings were some kind of generative device.

The chapters narrate the stories of numerous characters, tracing small moments from their lives, short periods of time, or outlining their whole lives in a few pages. The reader of previous of the author’s works will find familiar themes and tropes: adultery, failure, nostalgia, irony, dark humour, and the occasional dream-like fantasy. As one reads through the novel, some chapters seem to relate to others: a similar love triangle, the repeated appearance of a grey homburg, repeated names, and other repetitions of object or situation. Upon further investigation one finds subtle differences: one story may tell of a couple and the man’s lover, named Claire, while another chapter seems to elaborate on the same story, except this time the lover is named Clara. I imagine that Sorrentino has peppered the novel with repetitions and variations to give an illusion of coherency on the narrative level that is really a coherency on the level of the writing itself. Similar to the chapter titles, the stories, objects, and characters have coherency in language if not narrative.

In writing this review, I looked back at my numerous reviews of other Sorrentino books. I have the feeling of having said all I can about his work that might relate to this novel. There are no surprises to be had for the fan of Sorrentino, yet that is not to say this book is boring or of lesser quality, rather it is another example of Sorrentino’s prodigous skill with variation.

For a better idea of what Sorrentino’s work is like, see my other posts on him. You can also pay a visit to Ready Steady Blog’s minisite on Sorrentino.

In one section that really jumped out to me, Sorrentino expresses something that has always bothered me: the idea that a character, during the writing process, starts doing things on his/her own.

I’ve never been able to understand writers how say: “at a certain point in my story the characters began doing things by themselves.” I’ve never quite understood that. At any moment in your story you can kill your hero. Just kill him in a sentence: “He died.” I mean, you’re the boss. You take charge of everything. In any kind of literature you take charge. The idea that writing is some kind of mysterious process that goes on “by itself” is sort of an insult to the writer, it seems to me. (My transcription)

This attitude is evident in his novels and stories, an sense of controlling his characters because they are words on paper, not real people. The lack of this illusion is probably one thing that would turn people off from his work.

In a previous Sorrentino review (See here (off site)) I mentioned the difference in his works. The more I read though the more I begin to see the underlying sameness in content. The novels are consistently different in form, but beneath the ever changing structure lies a certain similarity. In this, his most recent (and I believe 16th if I count correctly) novel this similarity is apparent. Perhaps I am particularly susceptible to it, since I have read so many of his novels in the recent past. We find again the Brooklyn of the mid to late 20th century, the failed characters, the memory and nostalgia (be if often ironized), the indeterminacy from the narrator. The work holds a particular feeling of looking back and remembering, and evokes a certain youthful nostalgia, especially in regards to the first experiences of sexuality.

The novel is disjointed, held together by few of the strings that one looks for in a conventional plot. Characters come and go, sometimes their whole life in a few pages, never to be heard from again, or mentioned again in such a way as to leave one wondering whether it is the same character or another with the same name. Some review I found claims that the novel tells the story of a young man growing up, but I find this theory specious, an attempt to create a unified plot where there is none. The novel relies on setting, theme, and form to hold it together. Many might not call it a novel at all.

Fifty-two short chapters divided into two parts. In an interview with Publisher’s Weekly, Sorrentino explains the chapters:

“I had to stop it somewhere, so I stopped at 52 chapters–the number of weeks in the year. That determined the length of the book. I don’t believe in organic form. All form is utterly artificial.”

Each chapter tells a short vignette first and then after a mark of division (three small black squares) the chapter continues with a second voice directly or tangentially commenting on the preceding story. Again from the same interview:

“One day I wrote a chapter… It was a vignette. It was the work of a professional writer, which was all right. But it didn’t interest me. Then, a few days later… I came across the thing. I was not enchanted. Underneath it, I drew a line and made some wise-ass comment like, ‘What is this crap all about?’ as if another voice was talking about what I had written. And as I was doing this, I thought, I’m going to write the primary text, and then I’m going to write a commentary on the primary text, and I’ll use my commentary to comment on earlier primary texts and on other commentaries. In other words–open all the doors…”

The effect of all this is interesting and often rather confusing. The commentary can be quite obscure in its connection or meaning, even within its context at the end of each chapter. I quote some of the last commentary, which among other ideas brings up the title of the novel itself:

A casino is a “little house.”
�
“Little casino” is a neat tautology.
�
Hoyle, on the card game, Casino: “Suits are of no importance.” And yet, in the game, a Little Casino is the Two of Spades, and is worth one point. Such contradictions and blithe disruptions are the stuff of poetry.
�
Like many things, the game is no longer in fashion. Just as well. There are many instances and objects of value and beauty that should be kept private, even secret… (213-14)

Occasionally the vignettes echo some of Sorrentino’s other novels and stories. For instance, chapter 51 right from the beginning sets a scene quite similar to the novel Aberration of Starlight:

He has on navy blue woolen trunks, cinched by a white canvas belt with a tarnished nickel-plated buckle, and a white cotton athletic-style shirt, on the chest of which is embroidered a navy-blue anchor to echo the embroidered white anchor on the white leg of his trunks. His mother and grandfather are with him, as are two teenage girls, Helen and Julia Carpenter. They have small breasts, which he looks at surreptitiously as often as he can, the little degenerate… (209)

And it continues. Readers of the previous novel might recognize the characters: mother, grandfather, and the two teenage girls, as well as the boy, except here, characteristic of this work, an element of sexuality has been injected into him. In a way it is also cut from the same cloth as Crystal Vision: the stories come from the same milieu, are disconnected but related, and comment on the narrative is incorporated into the text (in LC it is a second voice, while in CV it is the proliferation of narrators that comment on each other).

I don’t have a lot to say about this novel. Recommended? Yes. For most readers? Probably not.

References:

Barbato, Joseph. “A Writer’s Writer Returns.” Publisher’s Weekly. May 27 2002: 30.

For readers of this blog, it should already be evident that I think highly of Gilbert Sorrentino. I’ve been reading a lot of him lately, and it’s been a rewarding and enjoyable experience. While certain themes and motifs are becoming more evident across his work, I am still amazed by the variety and inventiveness in his work. Aberration of Starlight is, like many of his works, a highly structured work, and it is within that structure that the novel comes into its own.

In the summer of 1939, somewhere out of the way in New Jersey, a number of vacationers stay at a lodging house. Marie Recco, a mother separated from her cheating husband–along with Billy, her ten year old son, and John McGrath, her recently widowed father–arrives at the house and quickly catches the eye of Tom Thebus, a divorced salesman. After some flirtation Tom and Marie go out dancing one night, against the strong wishes of her father. The whole novel spins around the fulcrum of this one date on a summer night.

Part Ulysses, part Sound and the Fury, the novel is structured in four parts for the four characters within which a variety of styles, forms, and structures are utilized. Each part is focused through one of the characters though not in the traditional “first person” viewpoint. The sections progress through lyrical description, dialogues, letters, questions and answers, fantasies (pornographic and not), straight narrative, and disjointed images/scenes/vignettes/etc. Each section is of almost equal length (about 50 pages in my edition) and, upon closer examination, seems to follow the same order of structuring (i.e. first an objective description, then a letter, then a dialogue, etc.).¹

The whole work has been carefully orchestrated (no doubt about that) to slowly reveal the elements of the story, the back-story, and the characters. We first see through naive Billy’s eyes, then through hopeful yet naive Marie’s, then Tom’s (I don’t know what to call it) view, and finally John’s jaded view from old age. The way Sorrentino slowly unfolds the story and characters around a simple date between a man and a woman is impressive, showing us how what has gone before leads all the characters to the place they occupy.

The novel is at times humorous but also sad. It is realism of the less illusionistic variety. He does not try to make us believe the story is actual happening, but the events and situations feel true.

As usual, Sorrentino’s use of language is masterful. He skillfully uses the naivety and colloquialisms of the characters to modulate the language, often incorporating a rather excessive use of clich�d phrases, for instance:

But all the time Tom was cool as a cucumber, his voice nice and calm, a smile on his face, just a gentlemanly difference of opinions. Marie would look up at him once in a while, blushing to beat the band when he caught her eye, my God, she looked like a peach! Frau Schmidt was as busy as a goddamn bee, Christ only knew what kind of baloney she was giving that long drink of water, Mrs. Copan, the poor bag of bones was drinking it all in… (140)

In the end the work exhibits, once again, Sorrentino’s seemingly pessimistic view of people in general and their relationships, or perhaps that is just what makes an interesting story. But, the last words we read in the book are quoted from Brian O’Nolan: “The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.”

Were I to recommend one Sorrentino novel to an interested reader it would be this one. While it exhibits many of his strong points (structure, language, invention) it also maintains a more cohesive and traditional underlying narrative that will appeal to readers less accustomed to experimental narratives.

¹ For an explanation of the structure see Robert L. McLaughlin’s “Teacher’s Guide” to the novel at the Dalkey site. It lists the form of the ten chapters of each of the four sections. The essay also delves more into the novel than I.

Somewhere (sadly, I don’t have a reference), I have seen it written that Gilbert Sorrentino endeavors to never write the same novel twice. At first, this appears as a rather obvious goal — why would anyone rewrite the same novel? — but upon further consideration one can see how easily authors (or other artists) recreate the same works, formally, thematically, stylistically (off the top of my head, consider the novels of Paul Auster (who, don’t get me wrong, I adore) and how similar they are in many of their plot elements and themes). Sorrentino’s novels are an impressive array of variation and inventiveness. Beyond that matter and his consistently high standard of writing, there is little to be said for direct and obvious similarity in his novels. Each one is new and exciting.

Conversely, turning to his short stories and the volume of such at hand, The Moon In Its Flight, one finds a rather depressing repetition. While I am not opposed to the idea of variations on a theme (much can be done with such a project, e.g. Queneau’s Exercises de Style or Bach’s Goldberg Variations), Sorrentino’s lack, I think, a planned variation. Many of the stories in this volume (his only of short stories, spanning from the 70′s to the present) just seem like retellings. And rather uninteresting ones at that.

I should disclaim before I go further that I am not, as a rule, a fan of short stories. It is a rare volume that catches and holds my interest. Perhaps this repetition characterizes the short story collection in general, and perhaps, also, the proximity of the stories as a collection does more damage to these stories than one would wish. Out of the context of the others, no doubt, some of these pieces would really stand out from the work of lesser writers.

On to the stories.

I can’t avoid bringing up the term metafiction. It is inescapable in light of Sorrentino’s style. The most notable feature of his writing is its interrogation of language and narrative. He doesn’t let the reader forget that these are stories and they are created with language, an often ambiguous and comic system which we use to communicate. He plays with narrative realism (“That the poems were indeed accepted has little bearing on this story–although I suspect that it is not so much a story as a minor change upon a common fable.” (40)), and he questions language, simultaneously using and disavowing certain terms and uses. Most often, this playfulness is couched within a first person narrator, not, thankfully, the “author” but rather a character, a storyteller who seems to be telling us a story as he heard it or, often spottily, remembers it. That Sorrentino can make these narrators be more than just an authorial voice makes his metafictional style work within the bounds of a certain kind of realism. The stories feel “real” without trying to maintain an illusion of direct representation.

He has a tendency to use words in quotes, blatantly pointing out the clich�d or misused term while employing it (rather, dare I say, like the deconstructionist sous rature). Lists are also frequently used as a playful language game, giving us, for example, three or four words for the same action. Lists vary from the brief one of three or four words to the exaggeratingly huge (see Sorrentino on Lists). For instance the short list in this passage works to bring out Sorrentino’s dark humor:

“Three days later, in a studio apartment in Chelsea, wherein lived a restaurant hostess and her high-school teacher boyfriend–the later an old friend of the husband’s–he [the husband] drank a quart of vodka and cut his wrists with a penknife, a table knife, and a beer-can opener, which, I just now recall, used to be called a “church key.” Those were the days.” (201)

This passage also showcases the ever present sense of nostalgia found in most of these stories. The narrative voice is frequently looking back on the past, often nostalgically, upon the late 40′s or 50′s. The nostalgia is accompanied by an acceptance of the loss of innocence, the facade of the innocence of those times made evident:

“Mr. Pearl had a sad little desk, about as big as a minute, as simple people were wont to say in “a more innocent time” (see: Second World War, the Holocaust, Korean “police action,” etc.)” (51)

As a whole the characters in the stories are failures, frauds, depressives, those that have been cheated on and those that have cheated. The portrayals of people are overwhelmingly pessimistic. I’m not sure anyone comes out in a positive light. The setting is often a New York filled with soi-disant artists who produce nothing or only crap, yet pretend they are doing something. (“He moved in a world of fakes like himself, so that their mutual interest lay in interdependent lying.” (45)). The last sentence of the book brings this to the fore:

“But I know that this is nonsense, nothing but a ruse with which I have been faithfully complicit so as to make the landscape of my life seem more valuable and interesting than it ever was.” (266)

This statement could apply to any number of characters in the stories. One of the great themes of these stories could well be the way we try to give our lives importance, even if it is a sham.

A predominant number of stories also feature a married couple and the lover of one of them, told through the eyes of one of the players involved. “Decades” and “Things That Have Stopped Moving” tell almost the same story, the latter with more embellishment on the part of the narrator. Both feature a married couple, Ben and Clara (Stein in the former and Stern in the latter), and even contain a scene of the lover (the narrator, in both cases) buying a bottle of Gordon’s before a sexual liaison with Clara. In another story we have Dan and Clare, rather similar, in both name and the basics of their story, to Ben and Clara.

Some of the stories do stand out even in their similarity. “In Loveland”, another story about a marriage breaking apart, is an interesting doppelganger story. “Gorgias”, aptly titled, deals, in three short sections, with the way rhetoric can affect people’s perceptions of each other. Some stories bear traces of Sorrentino’s more formal experimentation. “Times Without Number” is noted as being created from 59 sentences from 59 works of 59 authors as well as 118 sentences from his previous stories. “A Beehive Arranged on Human Principles” is written in all questions, similar to his novel Gold Fools. Judging from a number of the images in it, I have the feeling that “Allegory of Innocence” is somehow connected to Henri Zo’s illustrations for Raymond Roussel’s New Impressions of Africa (similar to Sorrentino’s novel Under the Shadow). And “The Sea, Caught in Roses” reads as if it were constructed in some odd way, though I am unable to say how (It could be that rare instance of what the Oulipo call a “canada dry”: a story that looks as if it were written under some constraint but is not.).

I read most of one story aloud and was delighted by how well it sounded. The phrasing of his sentences (and his frequent use of commas) makes the writing read beautifully. Regardless of my thematic, conceptual gripes with the volume, the writing is… well… let’s just say that Sorrentino knows how to write, and that is the true beauty of the volume. Too bad that what the words are saying do not measure up to the high standard of the writing.

I’d heartily recommend that the reader of this review, if she is new to Sorrentino, try reading one of his novels first. For those interested in the mid-century New York bohemian art scene, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is an excellent place to start. Aberration of Starlight is another excellent novel that is nearly perfect formally, and Mulligan Stew is perfect for those readers who like the large allusive metafictional novel.

I end with the last sentence of the first story, that for which the volume is named. If anything, this may give some indication of Sorrentino and his relation to art. Something to ponder as one reads his works:

“Art cannot rescue anybody from anything.” (20)

[Originally posted at Dan Green's The Reading Experience paired with Dan's review of the same book.]

Gilbert Sorrentino is a novelist of fragments. From the unending, unanswered questions of Gold Fools through the mostly disconnected bits of story in Under the Shadow and Little Casino to the broken narrative of the Pack of Lies trilogy, many of his novels come in a shattered disconnected form. Crystal Vision is no exception. The novel consists of 78 short chapters with no explicit narrative connection (beyond recurring characters), though an obscured formal connection can be found.

A number of Brooklynites stand around on the corner, at the drugstore, around the newsstand, or in a bar telling each other stories. The stories in general seem to date from post World War II, perhaps the late 40′s, though the stories often tell of the past or the future. The cast of recurring characters is large and all have rather odd names: Arab, Drummer, Professor Kooba, Doc Friday, Little Mickey, Pepper, Irish Billy, etc. The novel is the narration of these characters’ conversations.

Similar to such old tale collections as The Decameron, The Arabian Nights, or The Canterbury Tales, a framing device surrounds numerous interior stories, but in Crystal Vision the two levels of telling never separate. The characters constantly comment on each other’s stories, on the narration itself, the content, the words or the accuracy. Not only do the characters comment on each other’s stories they often seem to be commenting on the novel’s narration. In other words, this is a prime example of metafiction.

How about this? Willie says, and catches all three eggs and two tangerines [which he had been juggling] in his mouth and swallows them. Whole.
�
That last smacks of hyperbolic fustian, the Arab says.
�
Willie catches all three eggs and two tangerines in his mouth one at a time and propels them into a cellarway.
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That’s better, the Arab says. Not perfect, but better. Acceptable. (45)

I found the novel rather confused when I first started reading, but the longer I read it, the more it began to work for me, the more I enjoyed it. No story appears, but one slowly becomes familiar with the characters and discovers a depth to these rather disappointed men (the storytelling characters are almost exclusively men, though women appear in most of the chapters). Humor is not lacking — often I found myself laughing aloud, particularly at the Arab’s tendency to misuse or mispronounce words in his attempts to sound smart (“I shall grow a garden, the Arab says, to enableate me to be liberated from the economical and financious stricturations and exigents of the capitalistic system.” (258))– but sadness, longing, and nostalgia prevail over these stories, as well as frequent evocations of memory (both real and imagined).

Sorrentino uses no quotes or dashes to mark dialogue, and this confuses the identity of narrators, blurring the line between the narrator of the novel as a whole (who mostly adds “[someone] says” and the occasional actions or descriptions) and the narrators of individual stories within the novel. The way the characters reply and critique the narrator adds to this blur. They even go so far as to comment on the use of quotation marks on certain words or phrases:

The Drummer ignores him and “strains every fiber of his being” toward Professor Kooba.
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It’s a great relief to me that that phrase is in quotes, Curtin says. A great relief. (150)

The mimetic reality of the fiction is further confused by impossible occurrences, such as characters in one (or more) locations commenting on a story ostensible being told by someone at a completely different place. Also, a character known as “The Magician” appears now and then to create strange happenings, though he is not always successful with his attempts; most often he just appears disguised as another character.

I imagine much of this would bother some readers — those who prefer the unbroken fictive dream, but Sorrentino is a master at what he does. This is no mere gimmickry, the results are amusing in themselves and intelligent as fictive devices.

The formal and semantic constraint of this novel is the use of the 78 cards of the Tarot. According to Louis Mackey in his essay, Sorrentino is using the Rider Deck designed by A.E. Waite. While I found the early chapters, related to the Major Arcanum, rather easy to interpret in regards to the card in question, the later chapters were more oblique, excepting the use of numbers of things representing the number of the card. The image of the card is often directly referenced in the story (a character is basically just describing the card as if it were a vision he received), rather than used as an element from which a story is created.

Crystal Vision bears a number of similarities to Under the Shadow (see my review) particularly its fragmented narrative and the initial difficult hurdle to reading, but in comparison, Crystal Vision coheres more as a whole, thanks to the recurring cast of characters and setting.

References:

Mackey, Louis. “Representation and Reflection: Philosophy and Literature in Crystal Vision by Gilbert Sorrentino.” Contemporary Literature 28.2 (1987): 206-22.

Under the Shadow, like many of Gilbert Sorrentino’s novels, is a novel of fragments, so much so that at first I was skeptical it was a novel at all and not just a collection of vignettes with some hidden relation to each other. The first chapter is a scene at a memorial service. The next tells about an arson at a publishing warehouse. In the third, a number of characters in a house look outside and see a snowman. The fourth discusses a man who has been trying to find a passage he remembers from a book. An unnamed catastrophe of some sort leaves behind nonsensical clues in the fifth chapter, and the sixth is an oddly written description of a house. By this point, thirteen characters have been named, none appearing in more than one chapter (a number of other characters go unnamed). Twenty pages into a 140 page novel and it’s not looking much like a novel at all. I was a little frustrated, but I kept reading and elements in the chapters started to cohere: some names became familiar (ah, reoccurring characters!), images repeated, running themes became evident. When I got to the end I went right back to the beginning and started again. The second time through the early chapters took on new light. The characters were familiar, rather than just empty names, and there was a context to the events.

The novel is made up of fifty-nine chapters named with short non-descriptive nouns (Memorial, Fire, Snowman, Dusk, and Clues are the first five). The copy on the back of the book says, “They remind us of Raymond Roussel’s characters amid his inimitable ersatz pastorals…” The reference to Roussel is not coincidental, as the chapters are based on the drawings Roussel commissioned Henri A. Zo to create as illustrations for his New Impressions of Africa in 1928. Fifty-nine pen and ink drawings described for Zo by Roussel in a phrase or two. While this constraint is not explicitly stated in Sorrentino’s novel, a number of clues are offered. In the chapter entitled “Book”, just before the middle of the novel, a character pages through a book with 59 illustrations and captions which have nothing to do with the text of the book. Sorrentino lists the captions, parodic captions of the real illustrations and Sorrentino’s use of them. I also noticed a number of name allusions to Roussel, Zo, and Roussel’s characters.

The novel itself has a Rousellian feeling about it. Mysteries abound, as do strange circumstances and odd characters. But, while in Roussel the mysteries are explained, demystified, as soon as they are offered up, in Sorrentino the mysteries remain unsolved, perhaps unsolvable. As one reads through the novel (perhaps more so on a second reading) connections between the chapters help illuminate some aspects of the mysteries, but in the end, they remain open. Sorrentino uses Rousselian elements but in a way different than Roussel, his work is Rousselian on the surface but not at a slightly deeper level.

While a number of images recur in the novel — objects made of “blue metal”, unexplained translucent “spheroids”, Worcestershire sauce — one maintains a higher level of prominence. Throughout the novel references are made to three women in white, often at a lake. These women appear in relation to numerous characters as memories, dreams, artistic images, never exactly the same and never explained.

Of all the chapters and the seemingly endless proliferation of characters that fill them, a proportionately large amount of chapters is devoted to a man named Tancred who burns down a publishing warehouse early in the novel. Most of his appearances put him in a mental hospital where his psychologist also figures as a character. Tancred is obsessed with the idea of destroying “official memories”. The prominence of this storyline becomes more important as one notices how the rest of the novel is based on memories, half or falsely remembered. Every chapter is looking back at some event from a future time. This looking back and the unreliability of memory create the unsolved mysteries of the novel. Randomly selecting a chapter, I find:

Being a historian, he believed, of course, that the past is history, and that history, that which happened somewhere, can be retrieved, almost whole. But as the months and then the years passed, he revised, then doubted, and finally discarded these beliefs. The tortured scrawls on his stacks of paper, he came to know, were not the way to the past. They were the meaning of the past. (77)

Reading this novel, I began to think of a diagram, a map to pull together the various strings of story. I wondered if in some way it would all connect together to give some answer, but pragmatically, I think the point of the novel is that it won’t all make sense in the end. There is no closure, just the reiteration of a new mystery.

While the main constraint of the novel is the formal and semantic adherence to the 59 Zo drawings, there are chapters that seem to be written under other constraints. The sixth chapter by all appearances is an example of “semo-definitional literature”, wherein one replaces words with their dictionary definition (and looking it up in the Oulipo Compendium, I see that Sorrentino has used that procedure before as evidenced by a number of examples (pages 224-5)). This leads to such sentences as:

One of the female persons turns the eyes, as if for viewing, out an opening in the wall, and comments on the particular excellence of the partly destitute-of-light, considerable inland body of standing water, which they have, on every occasion, conceived of as theirs. (17)

I can mostly reconstruct that as: One of the women looks out the window and comments on the beauty of the dim lake, which they have always thought as theirs. Or something like that.

Perhaps other constraints are hidden in the chapters waiting to be found.

Once again, Sorrentino has amazed me with his work. Getting past the initial difficulty of the early chapters is the challenge to reaching a better understanding of the novel as the pieces fall together. He makes us work at the reading, but this reader finds it worth the effort.

The List: Let me propose the idea of a list of questions formulated about a given character and so proposed without complementary answers to the questions. This list forms a kind of discontinuous, scattered narrative unit. The questions allow us to fill in the absent answers, the asked-for information. This occurs whether or not the reader knows the answers, that is, whether or not the character has performed in such a way as to allow the reader to come up with the answers. If there has been no information provided, so that the questions cannot be answered, the reader is, nonetheless, strangely urged to answer them with data which the questions themselves imply. This list is a kind of system of negative narrational energy.

Now, this list of questions, initially proposed as finite, that is, a list sans answers, creates another list (of answers) if the writer decides, later, in perhaps another work, to answer them. This list creates another scattered narrative unit. If these answers are, by means of punctuation, combined or broken up, e.g., if two answers are made into one, if one answer is made into two etc., etc., this narrative unit becomes not only a set of answers to a set of questions but a curiously “sensible,” if slightly skewed, positive addition to the text(s). The answers detach themselves from the questions which occasioned them and shift onto another narrative plane. The manipulation of the answers by the application of punctuational choices let us sees a “truth” about the character nowhere prefigured in the texts. The materials concerning the character are enriched in ways that the “imaginative” could not succeed in doing.

What is most fascinating about such an enterprise is that the list of questions, despite a lack of cohesion, commonality of themes, unity of concerns, etc., etc., will produce a list of answers that form a coherence. It is as if the set of questions, drawn from whatever sources and with no expectation of being answered, has within itself a reliable narrative statement.

So far as I can tell, none of this will work if the answers are in hand as the questions are being drawn up, i.e., the questions must be “innocent” of expectation. In this procedure, what seems to be an aleatory exercise turns out to be exercise in prefigured form. It is another revelation of the enormous power latent in the list.

(Sorrentino, Gilbert. “Writing and Writers: Disjecta Membra.” Something Said (2nd ed). Dalkey Archive, 2001. 357-8)