Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

Rating:
Summary: So here I am, writing a review of Sorrentino...
Review: At its best, this book is really, really mean. Sorrentino has a great eye for some of the most crapulent cliches of American intellectual life, and the characters he sketches here are their embodiments. The passages on the 1960s "back to nature" movement and the dread vers libre that it inspired are extermely funny, and deserve to be read aloud.

Here's the thing though - Sorrentino belonged to a generation of writers who for some reason managed to convince themselves that if they paused every fifteen pages or so in the midst of some narrative and said "well, here I am writing a book about a bunch of people who don't really exist," or something similar, they were displaying the very height of literary sophistication and originality. Words cannot convey how quickly this "metafictional" approach became stale, and like Jacobean drama, absurdist theatre and Disco music, it seems pretty much destined to be viewed as a phase in the history of the arts distinctive mainly by virtue of its freakishness. Which is realy kind of ironic, given the nature of Sorrentino's quarry.

Rating:
Summary: Great when not an in-joke
Review: First three-quarters of the book are great. The prose was pitch-perfect, the composition and literary technique masterful, the narrator self-aware and reader-involving. An absorbing, fascinating read.

Then the book got a bit repetitious. Some material went over my head. Other stuff seemed to be an "in" joke between Sorrentino and his friends. By the end I was relieved.

Still, if you like heavily literary fiction with a strong sense of humor about others', and its own, pretensions, you'll enjoy this minor masterpiece.

Rating:
Summary: The perfect vaccine for overgrown egos
Review: I'm too young to have lived through the fifties, but I'm utterly convinced that phoniness and fakery must have reached a pinnacle in that decade, largely because of this great novel. It's a corrosive satire, not of the pervasive I-like-Ike suburban culture as one might expect, but of the downtown New York intellectuals and artists who opposed it. In devastatingly funny prose, their motives are mocked, their sufferings are skewered, and their mediocrity is made manifest.

If you've ever patted yourself on the back for being smarter than the Philistines around you--and who hasn't done that when the subject of Sylvester Stallone's salary came up in conversation?--you'd do well to read this book, spotting glimpses of yourself on every page.