English Studies Forum

The Forum Reviews

Ah, Sorrentino

M. ElizGilbert Sorrentino. The Moon in Its Flight: Stories. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2004. 266 pp.  Paper, $16.00.

By Joseph Dewey, University of Pittsburgh—Johnstown  

Consider the telling tension revealed within a (melo)dramatic lament of one of Gilbert Sorrentino’s character-narrators too-aware of being a character-narrator: “Ah, the sweet romance of sophisticated fiction, eez eet not wondairful?” The first part is a wistful exclamation, shot through with anxious frustration, romantic naivete, and tender nostalgia. Such heartbreaking angst is immediately qualified, however, by the playful smart-assy question, which self-consciously re-angles such nostalgia with a Cheshire smirk. In the wake of the mid-century guerilla campaign waged against the clean and easy contract of realism, what narrative has lost is authenticity or, more specifically, as Sorrentino reminds us time and again here, the benevolent savor of authentic illusion. In Sorrentino’s fictions, we are left uncertain how to define such loss; we are left suspended, each story shifting uneasily between world and word, too much Carver for smirks, too much Beckett for tears.

For more than thirty years now, Gilbert Sorrentino with ground-breaking brio has mapped the heartbreaking distance between the lived life and the narrated life, exploring (and exploiting) the marketplace vs. bedchamber rift that since Hawthorne has compelled the American imagination: specifically, the tension between the earnest, practical work of community so fraught by the complicated busy-ness of love and the splendid retreat into ornate isolation, the attractive withdrawal into a wholly symbolic landscape, the fuselage world(s) self-consciously embroidered by words. The Moon in Its Flight is the first (and long overdue) gathering of Sorrentino’s accomplished short fictions—some familiar, some new--and it serves as a brutal and enthralling introduction to the radical implications of what has become a cliché of the mid-century avant-garde revolution—that the stories we tell are gorgeous contrivances, self-sustaining and self-justifying. Despite Sorrentino’s humane and generous sense of urban realism and his evident sympathy for his characters’ awkward negotiations of love and marriage, the story—character, plot, suspense, climax, etc—is never permitted to be an end in itself.  Rather, Sorrentino in turn appreciates, regrets, deploys, denigrates, relishes, and despairs over his own “magical authorial power”--how language, inevitably coming after the fact like a hobbling paramedic conducting clumsy triage, attends to the chaos of event by talking its sheer unmanageability into accessible perimeters of design and intention. How the story struggles against its own telling, a disconcerting and illuminating tension that here leaves Sorrentino’s late-century reader just outside the comforting fuselage-world of the traditional story, left with our need for drama, organized excitement, generous suspense, aggravated tension, and the humane release of sympathy and wonder. Left, in short, with the cool despair of reach.

As storyteller, Sorrentino measures the human condition in two temporal dimensions: the past and the ceaseless interrogation of it that passes for the present. These are voices that persist as their own excuse, restlessly interrogating the tectonic moment that we call “need,” that bald intrusion of attraction, that persuasive and catastrophic pull. This is love among the print-addicts: tales of writers—most often frustrated or, worse, mediocre—publishers, booksellers, diarists, doctoral candidates, literature professors; their stories, in turn, are filtered through a stubborn voice-over, a narrative authority that is itself a conjure of words, thus one telling step removed from authenticity, uncertain (even uneasy) over the implications of such lavish responsibility. The voice senses its intrusiveness, but revels in its unreliability, exposes the decisions of construction and scene-shaping, departs the narrative without bothering with tidy resolution, and thus forfeits its own legitimacy. We watch as language struggles with fact—we are reminded at regular turns that a writer is staging and reforming events, reader and writer agreeing in tacit conspiracy that clarity is the intention not the achievement and that voice cannot talk its way to truth, cannot fathom its own content. Thus, story after story, Sorrentino affirms even as he implodes the premise of conventional narrative: how the fierce spiral into disaster that is the experience of contemporary love renders, upon its review into language, a menacing, coaxing beauty, a sense of consequence, of foreshadowing, of pattern. The plots therefore happen not among characters (they, and their dilemmas, are sweet distractions) but rather in the accidental conspiracy of writer and reader, apart yet a part, two socially-retarded nerdy bookworms who prefer the lonely company of words to the unchoreographed world, two calculating (and desperate) romantics who need the theater more than they need the movie.

The best stories herein draw on Sorrentino’s experiences during the heady promise of 1950s and the tonic energy of the bohemian village life in New York and San Francisco, the jittery vivaciousness, the jazzy liberations, the earnest pretentiousness, the difficult collisions between artistic integrity and the marketplace, and the sheer audacity of the first (and last) generation beats. Generously Sorrentino recreates post-war America with immediacy—and often scathing (and howlingly funny) insight. The stories (and the characters) are freighted with a sort of hands-on familiarity, the reader sensing an unexpected intimacy with Sorrentino. Not surprisingly, given the context of the mid-century sexual revolution that came to define that generation’s emotional evolution, Sorrentino’s stories center on the rich malice of the heart, the disturbances inevitable when the heart makes its move.  Story after story, we eavesdrop on fractured marriages or on unexpected encounters nuanced by voracious desire (his description of a first kiss is both erotic and dynamic) or on the inevitable ways that passion so irresistibly drivels off into potato love or on the darker, kinky fetishistic curiosities that permit the exhilarating (and empty) rush of novelty. The stories resist sentimentality—although they permit  sympathy for suffering souls so completely lost in their sexual freedom. Sorrentino can offer no satisfying remedy, no revolutionary insight into the heart’s mayhem--the want we have for each other, the carnal itch, the bored and furious adulteries, the savage terrorism we visit upon hearts given to us to tend. Rather we enter into the community of reader and writer that, unlike those other bindings, cannot be diminished, cannot be betrayed, cannot be cheapened. We are sentenced to narrative—the earnest play of storytelling that argues the casual street brutalities of the heart are enhanced into a sort of nobility-enough only as they find their way to language.

Sorrentino cannot shake his conviction that life-lived is essentially, even necessarily ridiculous—until, of course, it is rendered as narrative. The reader becomes part of that ennobling alchemy—print-hungry, word-fed, page-fat, the necessary noun in direct address. Within the sonic styling that has always been Sorrentino’s signature prose line, within its evident craft, its aural economy, its effortless colloquial accessibility, its musical texture and its figurative reach, we are grateful for such complicity, grateful for such inclusion.