Gilbert Sorrentino, who died last May shortly after the publication of A Strange Commonplace, lived and wrote in the margins of the book industry, a self-exiled stylistic contrarian who held the field he worked in with a mixture of reverence and disdain. He was the author of eight books of poetry, an editor at Grove Press as well as two or three literary magazines, a teacher at Stanford University, and the writer of at least fifteen novels, all of which are reportedly still in print, if you know where to look. Best known, if he is known at all, for the hodge-podge satire Mulligan Stew and two PEN/Faulkner award nominations, Sorrentino was an experimental and subversive author who believed in art but not in publishers or, perhaps, in readers.
I would suspect, being new to Sorrentino myself, that A Strange Commonplace is a fine introduction to his work. At under two hundred pages, and composed of several dozen short, two-page snapshots each as finely honed as any prose-poem, this is a quick, lively read with enough depth to feed any reader hungry for a literate snack.
Though Sorrentino can be unconventional, there is still a place for plot and character in A Strange Commonplace, if only so that such pedestrian conventions can be subverted. Within the vignettes there is a repetition of situations, characters, incidents and coincidences that lend a coherence and build tension across the pages. What emerges is, possibly, a fractured portrait of a mythical family spanning forty years.
There's a beautiful woman named (perhaps) Claire who dies young and is (perhaps) the niece and/or lover of brothers Ray and Warren, though in many vignettes they have no name, or have similar names, or are described the same with different names. They change ages and occupations, and remember things differently, and often chapters are told entirely in a dream state. And there are seemingly endless appearances of wives and lovers and rivals who drift through each other's lives in a shifting, kaleidoscopic parade. There's a party where the wife leaves and bad things happen to her; a dinner that never gets eaten. Over time objects accumulate and gain meaning: Tarzan movies, Rockefeller Center, a polka-dot scarf, a poker game, and in a touch of absurd beauty a pearl-grey Homburg hat that appears whenever a man's pride needs deflating.
But aside from the experimental form, what is most striking about Sorrentino's work is the clarity of his observations, and the depth to which he describes character's motives and feeling. Take this nearly off-hand gem that in startling brevity sums up the contradictions of what might be termed the Sorrentino condition: "He believed it now, standing in the breezy shade. Oh, not really, but he believed it even now ... he was not only too old to dupe himself, but he was too old to pretend he could." Or this melancholic passage: "So he would sit, occasionally laughing, not at himself, precisely, but at the fact of himself, that he should be so ludicrously and persistently alive." And this, a summation of the entire book's character: "Coincidence, as life proved over and over again, is so routine as to bugger comment."
Of course, like all experimental fiction, A Strange Commonplace demands a lot of the reader. Attention to detail, for one. And for another, the willingness to disregard facts which contradict the details you were so attentive to remember. Also, you'll need to be willing to suspend disbelief until it has been stretched out into blind faith in the author's talent. Many will be unwilling to take this step, in the way most people think Finnegan's Wake or The Sound and the Fury is simply noise on the page. And if you can't take that step, it's okay. Sorrentino knew he wasn't for everyone, and he didn't care. This, his final work, is a grungy, funny, and sloppily romantic book, a caustic, engrossing exploration of desire and regret and stoic doomed resolve.
- Michael Ramberg