Cruel pleasures

MAY Gilbert Sorrentino rest in peace -- although in life, or in literature at least, he was never one to take it easy. Sorrentino died last month at 77. His writing spanned five decades, during which he published 19 novels, 11 collections of poetry and a book of essays. Sorrentino did not stop and he did not settle. Perhaps at the cost of greater celebrity -- critics for the most part snubbed him -- he never allowed himself to ease into a comfortable style, a reassuring authorial voice or a single narrative strategy. To the end, the only constants in his work were determined innovation, rigorous attention to formal concerns and a delinquent’s unease in the soft-carpeted parlors of literary convention. He wrote in a vertiginous and sometimes actively nauseating cacophony of styles, donning and casting aside disguises in a one-man vaudevillian frenzy. Almost bursting at the bindings, Sorrentino’s novels strain at the confines of mere bookdom -- “the whole ‘book’ dodge,” he called it with a wink in 1983’s “Blue Pastoral,” as if the pulp and glue of the text itself were just another in an endless series of cons.

Take his best-known novel, “Mulligan Stew,” which in lieu of a title page famously opened with facsimiles of 17 letters from editors rejecting a novel called “Mulligan Stew” and which went on to feature a novel within that novel, a 40-page play (players include James Joyce, Susan B. Anthony, the Marquis de Sade, a shortstop named Foots Fungo and the Sin of Onan), a series of hilarious erotic poems, diary scraps, letters, fake book reviews, journal articles, publishing catalogs and interviews. Or take “Blue Pastoral” and its clamor of voices: faux-Elizabethan, pseudo-Chaucerian, spaghetti-and-meatballs-imitation-Eye-talian. Or 1995’s coldly menacing, minimalist “Red the Fiend,” or last year’s “Lunar Follies,” composed of 53 satirical reviews of imagined artworks.

Sorrentino lived and died in Brooklyn, and the borough is all over his work, although he sometimes set his stories in Queens or the Bronx, or New Jersey for laughs, or still more pitiably, in arty Lower Manhattan salons. Even when engaged in the most high-modernist literary acrobatics, Sorrentino’s writing emits a certain rough-knuckled machismo. But for all his barroom bumptiousness, he could also be gentle, playful, profound, crushingly funny, brilliant and simply and lyrically beautiful. At his best, he wrote like the actor he described in 2002’s “Little Casino,” who “had an uncanny ability to let the audience see his tender vulnerability beneath the intentionally revealed cupidity and the hearty bluster, so that when he was on screen, one watched three people at once.” Or in Sorrentino’s case, several dozen.

In one of the vignettes that make up “A Strange Commonplace,” Sorrentino’s last novel, a man phones a friend with whom he had lost touch decades earlier. “He didn’t know it, but he called because he needed to make a story for himself, since the always changing story that he had held in his mind for all those forty-one years was his friend’s story, not his.” But his call is not welcomed and, angered by his old friend’s rudeness, “the story that he had prepared to release ... became another story.” He lies, and tells the story in a manner flattering to the friend, the better to hook him with. He reminds the friend of a loan the friend had generously given, though in fact, as he remembers it, the friend had mooched off him. “The story was emerging into the eternal present of all stories, an insubstantial present, a chimera.” Having gained the friend’s attention, he delights at recalling the day years before when, after together buying him a birthday present, he and the friend’s wife spent an afternoon at “a motel in Belmont.” Then he asks if he’s still a drunk. The chapter ends ambiguously: It is unclear which version of the story was true, unclear even perhaps to the man who was telling it.

The vignette serves as a neat summation of the novel’s concerns: betrayal, alcoholism and cruelty -- but also memory’s tricks, narrative’s distortions and truth’s ever-changing masks. The same scenario reappears in the second half of the book: Ralph, after shopping with his friend Bill’s wife -- this time for Bill’s Christmas present -- takes her to a cheap motel while at the same time, back home, Bill gets drunk and beds the baby sitter. The rest of the novel works in the same way. Short vignettes depict a series of repeated scenarios: A woman leaves her husband, who’s sleeping with his secretary; he tries and fails to win her back; a woman waits for her cheating husband to come home late from work; a woman leaves her drunken husband at a party and has sex with two men on the roof, or she is raped by two men in the bathroom, or in the hall. The characters draw from a common pool of names. (Janet, for instance, is the wife in one story, the mistress in another.) A few appear and reappear: a beautiful young woman named Claire or Clara, doomed to die young; an oily, red-haired writer; a black man in an expensive blue suit. So do a few oddly iconic objects -- a pearl-gray homburg, a polka-dotted scarf, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce.

This all takes place in Sorrentino’s usual stamping grounds in the middle of the last century. The men are opaque, deluded saps who believed dumbly in a “glittering future ... of beautiful wives and happy children and perfect lakes and summers,” and, not finding it, seek salvation or at least distraction in “delicious sexual folly.” The women they betray are brittle, vengeful and bitter. (“[S]he 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.”) Their entanglements are lonely things involving a “backyard or roof or basement or hallway or closet or bathroom as erotic locale; a limited repertory of sexual acts, dictated by the constraints of time, place, weather, clothing, and experience.” The ‘50s dream family collapses again and again, like a Douglas Sirk melodrama fed to David Mamet.

Sorrentino couldn’t help nodding to Melville’s “The Confidence-Man,” a text to which “A Strange Commonplace” clearly owes a great deal. But where Melville’s oddest novel employed a similar range of trickery as part of a formal inquisition into truth, appearance and identity’s infinite masquerade, here the rancor overwhelms. Sorrentino, always in control, was aware of the risk he ran. Just at the point that the narration of another generically squalid affair begins to feel unbearable, the author mugs: “To rehearse the ups and downs of this shabby amour ... would be tedious for me, and for you as well.” A few chapters later, detailing yet another iteration, he winks, sadistically: “It was especially boring and tiresome to hear him tell the story, again and yet again.”

Bless him and curse him -- it was. But Sorrentino more than earned his pleasures, cruel though they may sometimes have been. Even here, amid the wreckage, he offered up a glimpse: the tenderness of a few stolen morning hours. Snow falls outside. The lovers dress. Their misery swells. They try not to fight. A Jeri Southern record plays, “Remind me / Not to mention that I love you.”