The Moon in Its Flight

April 5, 2004
This collection of new and old stories from poet and novelist Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew
) hews to a self-consciously modernist agenda. Many of the pieces are different versions of a single narrative about adulterous triangles connecting mediocre writers, their sexually voracious wives and their backstabbing business associates, set in a sour New York–San Francisco milieu of beatnik literary wannabes and "deadbeats." The caustic realism of these stories about the falsity of art and love in postwar urban America is accompanied by an ironic meta-commentary on the falsity of literary realism itself, in which Sorrentino bemoans the unreliability of the narrator, advertises his own writerly artifices ("Now I come to the literary part of the story.... I grant you it will be unbelievable") and decries the middlebrow conventions that make such artifice commercially necessary. His own highbrow allegiances are proclaimed in hallucinatory passages composed of the sort of cryptic non sequiturs ("Bossed by one schemer, so slow in sliding along the blue, horizontal mime who had stretched from one hem to the next, an idle guttersnipe bawled in humping a whore whom a pimp's trull had long since sassed") his admirers call "Joycean" for their intense, enigmatic imagery. But underneath Sorrentino's cynical tone and avant-garde stylings, his themes—art corrupted by ambition and commerce, youthful desire corrupted by marriage—reveal him to be a romantic at heart.