From Publishers Weekly
In two sets of 26 brief tales each, Sorrentino (Little Casino) puts life's losers through their paces. Like ever-widening rings in a pond of purposeful noir cliché, their sad-sack stories, some of which share titles across the book's two parts, intentionally fail to connect: "Pair of Deuces" in the first part, for example, listens in on an aged card player ruminating in a retirement home on his lifetime of runs of bad luck, while "Pair of Deuces" in the second part tracks the hopelessly mismatched couplings of Jenny and Ralph and Inez and Bill over Christmastime. "A Small Adventure" in each part follows the fantasies of several wretched, abandoned wives who set out for a bit of sexual fun and revenge. Elsewhere, man leaves wife for floozie secretary; beautiful woman becomes both an object of desire and a victim of sickness and abuse; a barely acquainted couple decide in a wildly futile stab at romance to meet in a year at Rockefeller Center. Sorrentino's virtuosic vernacular shifts convincingly to match different genders and stations. His erratic permutations on familiar themes are set in an anachronistic everyday and somehow manage to be strange, striking and unsettling even as they deliver doom after doom. (May)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
Sorrentino's inventiveness, needling humor, and laser-perfect syntax have earned him critical acclaim, a cultlike following, and the Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. A bit of a magpie--the title of this set of interconnected short short stories is from a poem by William Carlos Williams--Sorrentino riffs on other writers, movies, music, art, and games of chance. He can be cutting in his satire, and bullying in his eroticism, and now adds anger to the mix as he portrays a circle of struggling New Yorkers living back in the sexist, alcohol-sodden, and hypocritical 1950s on into the egomaniacal present. Ugly sex, adultery, and vicious domestic battles make a misery of marriage and family life, and old age is nothing to aspire to. Memories fizzle and morph into fantasies, and one elderly fellow courts death with solitary card games. The book itself resembles a deck of cards, what with its 52 tales imprinted with repeating patterns and emblems, and sly Sorrentino shuffling the cards, cutting the deck, and dealing some tough hands. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Review
Gilbert Sorrentino’s last book, Lunar Follies, skewered the aesthetic pretensions of the art world. In his latest, the emphasis is on domestic and marital strife. Sorrow and bitterness are pervasive, the humour is dark, infidelity rife, drunkenness common, and the rape of women is almost inevitable. A Strange Commonplace is a work of short fictions, without a novel’s arc or the haphazardness occasionally found in a collection of stories. In the two books that make up this work, the exact same twenty-six titles-possibly an abecedarian, Oulipian-inspired device-from the first book introduce different material, and are shuffled into a different order in the second. Such repositioning of titles may encourage us to stop viewing them as sacred artefacts.
Operating on the same level as the recycling of titles is the disposal and substitution of character creations with the names Ray or Janet affixed to them. A narrator refers to Ralph and Inez as “somewhat fragmentary people-perhaps sketchy is a better descriptive,” and in another piece, a different narrator asks, “Is she really Claire? Or is she Inez? Or Cora, or Anna? Who is she?” Though the same names pop up, many pages separate their individual-that may be too lofty a word-stories. It’s also possible that other characters with the same names are in very similar situations. Depersonalisation precludes the empathy many readers like to experience for characters they are reading about, yet no one could say that the types Sorrentino deploys aren’t recognisable from life and other fictional works.
The urban, male-driven world that’s presented extends over an unspecified number of years, but common to all the tales is that a male character will screw all women, while a female will do the same with almost every man. If the figures depicted in this book could ask themselves one question, a reader could imagine that it would be: How can I get away with what I’m about to do?
Both men and women in this book know certain things quite well: class distinctions, especially when underscored by a pearl gray Homburg or the right dress; where to get a drink; the best way to be insensitive; and how to carry grudges. It might be said that grudges are their most faithful companions.
Through his exquisite command of language, Sorrentino shows how the figures, with their often ugly thoughts and desires, function in their sordid, deceitful world. An old man plays cards by himself, waiting for a certain combination to appear so he can kill himself. Nothing he does will cause this mystical flush to materialise. “So he did not torment himself with the anguish suffered by those who believe that luck and chance are incremental and progressive and fair, that is, that luck must, of necessity, change.” In another piece, everything that’s wrong in a marriage is expressed with economy. A husband arriving home late says to his wife:
"Is that my delicious supper? he said, and she looked up from her book as if suddenly aware of him, and then at her watch. Oh, I get it, he said. Let’s see, a cardboard pork chop sitting in fat, Ann Page carrots and peas, mmm, and what’s this? plaster? oh, mashed potatoes à la skins and lumps, a gravy boat full of, uh-huh, grease! And, of course, a luscious salad with a bright orange gourmet dressing. I can’t wait. The kid’s in bed, I suppose, God forbid you should keep him up a few minutes so he can see his father."
The predicaments of women in lowly positions are rendered equally well:
"In the diner, the three young men eat-stuff their faces, is an apt phrase-and patronize the waitress with happily disingenuous compliments on her pink polyester uniform, her hairdo and the net that covers it, her white crepe-soled shoes. They ask her opinions on pop stars, hip-hop artists and grunge bands, her thought on music and clubs of which this exhausted fifty-three-year-old woman has never heard. And so she stands dumb before them, smiling the smile of the impotent insulted everywhere."
Thinking of her ex-husband, Claudia has this opinion about herself: “She had never thought, never, that she’d hate anyone as much as she hated Warren, and she often smiled sourly to herself when she acknowledged the fact that she had permitted her hatred to ruin, utterly, what was left of her life.”
These are grim urban tales. A father who is not close to his children hopes that his friends are in the same lousy position, “otherwise, the touch of normalcy that would inform their lives, were the opposite true, would destroy him completely. They had to be as strangers to the strange and thankless adults who were their children and who, it had to be, hated them, or, more exactly, held them in disinterested contempt.” What can take another novelist many pages to get across, Sorrentino, a true master, sets down in a few sentences. His books, with their ferocity, attention to detail, and imagination, are inspirational.
Jeff Bursey (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Operating on the same level as the recycling of titles is the disposal and substitution of character creations with the names Ray or Janet affixed to them. A narrator refers to Ralph and Inez as “somewhat fragmentary people-perhaps sketchy is a better descriptive,” and in another piece, a different narrator asks, “Is she really Claire? Or is she Inez? Or Cora, or Anna? Who is she?” Though the same names pop up, many pages separate their individual-that may be too lofty a word-stories. It’s also possible that other characters with the same names are in very similar situations. Depersonalisation precludes the empathy many readers like to experience for characters they are reading about, yet no one could say that the types Sorrentino deploys aren’t recognisable from life and other fictional works.
The urban, male-driven world that’s presented extends over an unspecified number of years, but common to all the tales is that a male character will screw all women, while a female will do the same with almost every man. If the figures depicted in this book could ask themselves one question, a reader could imagine that it would be: How can I get away with what I’m about to do?
Both men and women in this book know certain things quite well: class distinctions, especially when underscored by a pearl gray Homburg or the right dress; where to get a drink; the best way to be insensitive; and how to carry grudges. It might be said that grudges are their most faithful companions.
Through his exquisite command of language, Sorrentino shows how the figures, with their often ugly thoughts and desires, function in their sordid, deceitful world. An old man plays cards by himself, waiting for a certain combination to appear so he can kill himself. Nothing he does will cause this mystical flush to materialise. “So he did not torment himself with the anguish suffered by those who believe that luck and chance are incremental and progressive and fair, that is, that luck must, of necessity, change.” In another piece, everything that’s wrong in a marriage is expressed with economy. A husband arriving home late says to his wife:
"Is that my delicious supper? he said, and she looked up from her book as if suddenly aware of him, and then at her watch. Oh, I get it, he said. Let’s see, a cardboard pork chop sitting in fat, Ann Page carrots and peas, mmm, and what’s this? plaster? oh, mashed potatoes à la skins and lumps, a gravy boat full of, uh-huh, grease! And, of course, a luscious salad with a bright orange gourmet dressing. I can’t wait. The kid’s in bed, I suppose, God forbid you should keep him up a few minutes so he can see his father."
The predicaments of women in lowly positions are rendered equally well:
"In the diner, the three young men eat-stuff their faces, is an apt phrase-and patronize the waitress with happily disingenuous compliments on her pink polyester uniform, her hairdo and the net that covers it, her white crepe-soled shoes. They ask her opinions on pop stars, hip-hop artists and grunge bands, her thought on music and clubs of which this exhausted fifty-three-year-old woman has never heard. And so she stands dumb before them, smiling the smile of the impotent insulted everywhere."
Thinking of her ex-husband, Claudia has this opinion about herself: “She had never thought, never, that she’d hate anyone as much as she hated Warren, and she often smiled sourly to herself when she acknowledged the fact that she had permitted her hatred to ruin, utterly, what was left of her life.”
These are grim urban tales. A father who is not close to his children hopes that his friends are in the same lousy position, “otherwise, the touch of normalcy that would inform their lives, were the opposite true, would destroy him completely. They had to be as strangers to the strange and thankless adults who were their children and who, it had to be, hated them, or, more exactly, held them in disinterested contempt.” What can take another novelist many pages to get across, Sorrentino, a true master, sets down in a few sentences. His books, with their ferocity, attention to detail, and imagination, are inspirational.
Jeff Bursey (Books in Canada)
-- Books in Canada
Book Description
“Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.”—Jeffrey Eugenides
“For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique figure in our literature. He reminds us that fiction lives because artists make it. …To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.”—Don DeLillo
Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. Ensnared in a jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities from the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with their children, as writers struggle for credibility, as wives walk out, and an old man plays Russian roulette with a deck of cards, their stories resonate with poignancy and savage humor—familiar, tragic, and cathartic.
Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of more than 30 books, including Little Casino , finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A critical and influential figure in postmodern American literature, he is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award. His frequent appearances on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm can be heard at www.kcrw.org . Once an editor at Grove Press, Sorrentino is professor emeritus at Stanford University and lives in Brooklyn.
About the Author
A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.
