Xmas As in Merry

Robert Duncan tells the story of a professor at Berkeley who began his lecture on Melville's Moby-Dick with the rather provocative announcement, "You've heard a lot about this novel's being symbolic of this and that, but to me it's nothing but a whopping good sea story . . ." Shyly, in part, I'd like to make the same pronouncement about Gilbert Sorrentino's novels, which begin, years ago, with The Sky Changes , the classic first novel of young love, its occasions, persons, and ultimate despairs. Knowing its author, I knew how specific in fact this book was to his life, and that moved me, rightly or wrongly. There is, for example, a Christmas Eve scene which I've never forgotten. It's a bleak night in a barren apartment. The kid's mother has gone out with one of a multiplicity of "uncles." Under the terrifying tree, if you can call such a meager collection of shedding sticks that, is the single small present, which, after some bemused consideration, the kid opens. It is a tin, mechanical, wind-up pig. And the kid's question, which echoes through all time and space for me, is, who would want it?

That pig comes back in the latest of Mr. Sorrentino's novels, Aberration of Starlight , although he's mentioned only in passing, simply an instance among many of the ex-father's sleazy presents as noted by the boy's mother—recalling that the pig had a little drum it beat when wound. So the question had been, who would want a little tin pig that beat a drum . . .

What briefly I'd like to emphasize is the moral disposition of

Gilbert Sorrentino's writing, both prose and poetry—and the fact that an initial detailing of the world, as his first two novels, The Sky Changes and Steelwork introduce the persons and place significantly his own, emphasizes his explicit concern as to why the human world suffers so remarkably and so stupidly its persistent inabilities of judgment and perception. There are moments of intense anger, contempt, compassionately ironic sympathy, even a yearning disposition to save something, in Mr. Sorrentino's narratives. One can hardly not recognize how much this writer cares about the qualities of feeling and act in the human world he shares with others. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (the title itself a quotation from an equally moral writer, and a significant model for Mr. Sorrentino, William Carlos Williams) is an intensive judgment of the specific world of artists and writers of the New York sixties, say, Max's Kansas City Before the Fall. It engages its various subjects most intentionally—real details from real lives—so that two thus, feeling themselves maliciously parodied, will not speak to him ever again, etc. But this is a risk the writer presumes to take, in this case with full responsibility. The necessity to make judgment, to define value, is always primary in this writer, no matter the formal means employed or the technical pattern.

In short, I feel Gilbert Sorrentino's continuing preoccupations as a writer have insistently to do with factors of relationship, really of the most usefully obvious kind (mother to son, husband to wife, friend to friend), and with the senses of place qualified as a time , that is, lived in and remembered. He will run a great many changes upon these possibilities—often wryly, nostalgically, with wit and a secure invention. Splendide-Hôtel is, in this way, not only a tour de force upon the possible categories of alphabetic 'order' and language but also a whimsical self-invention and recall including heroic "models." (Myself there, for example, in the reference to Mr Blue , I came upon much as an old photograph, and deeply enjoyed the permission.) We all make ourselves up, if that's the point. Mr. Sorrentino's competence in respect of his technical resources is part and parcel with his long time admiration of Louis Zukofsky's abilities as a poet—which, characteristically, he made most emphatically public in the NY Times Book Review . (Here one should check out all the critical writing he has done—for Kulchur , for example. Note that he always writes in the imagination of an active responsibility of anyone apropos the kind of world humans do make in which to live. He puts his values very unequivocally out front .)

Therefore one distraction for me, as reader and fellow writer, was to come upon this in the jacket blurb for Aberration of Starlight: " . . . stories that Mr. Sorrentino further enriches by using a variety of literary methods . . ."—which fact, somehow, is none of the publisher's or reader's business, dumb as that sounds. Or it was disappointing to find this same novel reviewed in the NY Review of Books from the same 'point of view'—Sorrentino's resources as stylist (as we used to say). But I've not read Mulligan Stew , the novel which brings his work this location—but I will, and have the gall to presume I can accurately anticipate the nature of its pleasures—which will be terrific. And so . . .

It's most interesting that some of the most impressive moral writing ever was done by prose writers capable of exceptional 'stylistic' invention. E.g., Melville, Sterne, Joyce, Céline, Lewis, et al. Feeling, even more than necessity, may well prove the crucial 'mother.' Gilbert Sorrentino may not approve his general life's company very simply, but he markedly and persistently cares, and in that feeling makes language the instrument of response and judgment it must, of necessity, be. If he has demonstrated a master's skill in how a novel may be put together these days, you can be certain that what has to get said is still his point. It's still a possible Christmas somewhere, and there are still kids—and tin pigs.