Brooklyn-born Gilbert Sorrentino published his first novel in the mid-60s and worked rather prolificially until his death in 2006. Sorrentino was one of those rigorously experimental novelists, who devised a new template or formal constraint system for every project. Fool’s Gold, the first book of his I heard about, is written entirely in questions. It sounds frivolous, but he makes them work.
Mulligan Stew, his fourth and most famous book, was re-issued last year by Dalkey Archive in their “Essentials” line. Their first edition of the text had dropped in 1996, with a cover design more suitable for software packaging.
MS is basically about a writer named Antony Lamont, who is trying to write a new, flashy postmodern murder mystery novel called Guinea Red. Lamont's work in progress is about two men, Ned Beaumont and Martin Halpin, who rival each other for the love of Daisy Buchanan, yeah, that Daisy from Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. At the top level, MS is an epistolary novel containing Lamont's drafts, sketches, workshop dross, as well as letters to his sister, his colleagues, and an ex-mistress. At a deeper level, Lamont's characters are somehow keeping their own diaries and documents in their fictive world, which is only actualized to the extent that Lamont's (limited) imaginative powers can draw it.
Early on, Lamont shares a passage from his story "O'Mara of No Fixed Abode," which he wrote in the heyday of the American postmodern 60s. This excerpt is exhausting to read, composed as it is of interminable chains of noun clauses that arrest any sense of narrative progression:
He loved, to crosseyed distraction, the pal of his cradle days, the way to go home, a sleepy-time gal, sweet Georgia Brown, that "certain" feeling, a black bottom (tsk-tsk), blue room, breezin' (along with the) breeze, Charmaine (the girl friend), to only do the things he might, a lucky day, May "Blue" Lou, mountaing grinnery, his dream of the Big Parade!, one alone to be his own, someone to watch over him,...
To give a sense of Lamont's literary reputation, here is a clipping of a review of his previous volume by the critic Moise Abraham Dubowitz for Kings Think.
"...Anthony Lamont, one of the unfortunately (for us) indefatigable journeymen of what used to be known as the avant-garde, has here written, in Rayon Violet (the title is never explained), his most incomprehensible, most viscous work to date...only the most dedicated masochists...will find their way to the end of this travesty on the art of fiction, replete as it is with...cardboard characters, others who disappear (or change) halfway through the book, shifting locales which 'seem' to be the same in many particulars, and a particularly offensive caricature of a Jewish business, done without...taste or sensitivity. A total failure."
Alongisde which Lamont has scribbled marginal notes like "It's a honky-tonk parade!" and "hast'ou heard tell of the Dubowitz Curse?"
The more Lamont procrastinates and doesn't work on his manuscript, the more agency Beaumont and Halpin are able to take on. And these guys are very dissatisfied with the work. Martin journals his experience: "The first thing to note is that Lamont has not employed us in some time, I would say at least ten days, perhaps even more. This is a great pleasure, in one sense, because Ned and I have dreaded the restaurant scene, dreaded the ridiculous dialogue that Lamont will surely put in our mouths." These characters are like actors and performers off the clock, able to reflect freely and candidly on their job.
As we read MS, we go back and forth between Lamont's struggles and what's going on in his fiction. Lamont is overly wounded by an English professor who "snubbed" his work from a syllabus, and generally starts cracking up, alienating everyone around him through his vituperative and bitter correspondence, and turning into a lonely racist crank. Meanwhile, the fictive world of Guinea Red, which Lamont renames to Crocodile Tears at one point, starts to eerily auto-generate all manner of text.
Halpin's inventory of the house that makes up the fictitious novel's setting includes books of their own. One of these books, quoted at length, seems to hold nothing but mutated aphorisms, odd combinations of different figures of speech (maybe a kind of metalepses), in the style of the Oulipo writer Marcel Bénabou.
Where there is smoke there is always broken eggs.
What do women want? Spinoza queried. A lifetime of observation has shown that the answer is a sailboat in the moonlight.
When an editor says they are not interested in your work at the present time they mean forget about it.
One is enraptured by drops of water that hold the secrets of the universe inside their prosaicness.
Another stretch of print matter in the fictitious world seems to follow the Oulipo's "Brazzle" plot generator, which is done by semantically transforming existing titles and author names. See for instance this bit from a catalog of the fictitious publishing house that Beaumont and Halpin would have been running.
CHILLER ON THE CHAIN
Mildred Haviland
A taut, tingling, and topical thriller about a crazed killer who obsessively selects his helpless victims from among the shoppers who patronize the various stores of a Southern California supermarket chain. Mrs. Haviland, creator of the "Mealy Dick" murer mysteries and the author of more than 215 books under various pseudonyms, has, in Chiller on the Chain, fashioned a compact, "now" novel of twisted passions and smoldering hatreds that reveal the sick soul of California society. More than just "another mystery," the novel is a compelling study of pathological consumer mentality. Illustrated with maps by Albert Almore.
SEPTEMBER $5.99
Elsewhere, we find riffs on other Sorrentino titles: “The Dry Ranges by Gilford Sorento,” from the author’s debut The Sky Changes, as well as “Imaginary Jollities on Factual Wings by Gilberto Soterroni (Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things).
And, maybe most outrageous, is the diction of a certain art critic named Barnett Tete, quoted at length by Bill, who is quite celebratory.
Q: Do you feel that art is about to make another significant breakthrough?
A: Cultured Brahmins that we are or bend the knee in tearful orison to be, yet how we wish that we were still those mere shells of solid brick and soft sentimntal mud. It is, of course, but youth remembered, a cig and a Coke, but the wild singing and general traipsing around! It's like to bust you up. A breakthrough is like an evening. There's no way to start it out directly, first the sun must go down, and Old Sol has his own mind. I mean to say a true breakthrough claims great antiquity. You don't go boo-boo-boo and hot dog! and of a sudden you're dealing with a Cezanne or a Jocko Conlan, no sir. The ways of innovation are strait and fraught with maladroit. Would the French tongue have been reified had the redoubtable Sade not been nabbed for a youthful indiscretion? Sic transit semper tyrannus, or as a wag has it, "Hats off! The flag is passing by." And may God help you if you don't whip your bowler from our sconce in such circumstance! One waits for the brave spirit who will paint the inner meaning of the nosepicker who stands bemused before the drum majorette's teeny skirt and panties to match amid a storm of sour fifes.
Later on, Ned Beaumont manages to actually, physically escape the manuscript, leaving no trace except for lines of prose on Lamont's typewriter in the pastiche of an Irish brogue.
Thou must remember how we two, in our hot youth, wi' the blood surging like that of Achilles in his mighty wrath, our lion-courage turning us into two mighty capitanos, lay siege to the pocy fortresses wherein ruled in stupor those slothful emperors, who, slight!, were naught, i' truth, but apple-squires, an' whose profit entire was dredged up out o' their pandering to the base appetites o' the mob. Their books, why, they were no more than possets for doxies, or, to make the best face on't, peurilous additions to such flummery as draw-gloves...
Okay, obviously we're dealing with a metafictional novel. It foregrounds the relationship between fiction and its fictioneer, forcing the reader to stay conscious of how she's participating in the "actualization" of a literary "world." It foregrounds language and its capacity to conceal and reveal at once, leading to the sense of a self-begetting text, in a proliferation of historical styles, that could sprawl on and on to mega-novel scale.
In fact, the metafictional antics of this book start before you even open up to the copyrights page.
The first ten pages of the actual book are taken up with a series of rejection slips from publishing houses and other textual accouterments. They all lodge the suspected complaints against this maximalist metanovel: it's too difficult! Here is senior editor Edgar Naylor: "Put it this way: I am off play: for the rest of my life: even in my own fictions. I however, know what Sorrentino can do — and what Joyce himself could do — when he is not playing, and I will wait my time for that."
If these clippings put together an accurate picture, then Sorrentino the author had finished work on MS by the mid 1970s, then struggled for three years to find a publisher. It's not like he was a new voice; he'd been publishing poetry and fiction since the late 50s.
Much of this material is flarfy and vapid in the ways someone familiar with the literary world may recognize. People talk about their own recent pubs at the earliest occasion. For these readers, it's not the 60s anymore: the book is too ironic, too long, it “exhausts one's patience,” and is “more 'shadow' than anything else.” Sorrentino is savage about the publishing world and the sensibilities that run it; I remember a review clip from later in the novel that says among other things that the book under review "would have delighted both Marx and Wittgenstein."
One extended piece in this front matter section is a reader report that accurately summarizes the novel's structure, and offers a sympathetic reading that locates the work in the "limping, bedraggled, yet noble and undefeated rear guard of the Late-Post-modern movement." It nails down what's going on with the novel in ontological terms, since Lamont's characters take the form of corporeal beings, like actors in a troupe.
"That is, Halpin and Beaumont are 'alive' as people other than the Halpin and Beaumont Lamont creates. ... Rather than allowing such Post-modern Ur-techniques to clutter the page as so many shards of compositional process as has been the fashion these past ten years or so, Sorrentino makes these paradigms, as it were, flesh. It is a notable coup, a kind of stylistic ventriloquism accomplished with great verve."
Including this discourse practically means that the novel is already doing its own literary criticism before you have even started reading it. Any commentary from your host or anyone else is already meta-commmentary.
But it's also too sympathetic: it's a rhetorical honey pot. In the plot summary, they write that Lamont's fortunes decline "with the assistance of his sister, her husband, his ex-mistress, an English professor, et al." The unquestioning alignment with the novel's anti-hero is a gesture to try to align the actual reader with the addressee projected by Lamont's utterance.
What the rejection slips, the reader report, and the exasperation of Lamont's creations revolve around is the dying out of the high American avant-gardism of the postwar period. Sorrentino's structure is much more simplified compared to Pynchon or McElroy's sprawling projects of the 60s and 70s. And yet, this work is colder, more rigorously formalist, and more crufty with its language experiments — very much like Joyce in Ulysses — than the chief model text, Flann O'Brian's At Swim-Two-Birds. These qualities make the book notably difficult, even for fans of maximalism.
Many passages were a slog for me, not because so much of it is bad on purpose, but the sheer grotesque length of these set-pieces, like a “masque” play of a baseball outing, not as good as the Circe episode in Joyce’s book.
But all the same it’s an entertaining novel, not just as a humorous frame tale of a man’s descent into egosticial hysterics, but as a roman a clef for a literary culture that we no longer experience, nor can we access historically.