« ONDAATJE PRIZE WINNER | Main | A WORD ON PUBLICISTS »

May 24, 2006

SORRENTINO IN L.A. TIMES

Kudos to the Los Angeles Times, which does a considerably better job of noting the passing of Gilbert Sorrentino than the so-called paper of record ...

Sorrentino's novels could be surreal, erotic and always humorous. His characters were surface-deep, the better to mock their motives, desires and dreams. As befitting a postmodernist, he chose forms that contrived to puncture expectations, leading readers into what one reviewer called "one hall of mirrors after another."

Sorrentino wrote eight volumes of poetry in addition to the novels, and also had worked as an editor. He founded a literary magazine called Neon in 1956 and was an editor at Kulchur magazine in the early 1960s before joining Grove Press, where he edited Alex Haley's "Autobiography of Malcolm X."

He eventually left publishing for academia, teaching at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University and the New School for Social Research in New York before Stanford hired him in 1982. "He had a sharp wit and did not suffer fools gladly," recalled Jonathan Mayhew, a student of Sorrentino in the mid-1980s who now is a professor at the University of Kansas.

Posted at 09:59 AM in Litlinks |

| | Pin It! | |

Comments

James

Lots of blogs seemed to notice Sorrentino's passing, but few if any devoted any attention to his work while he was alive (including this one ... the sole pre-death mention of him seems to have been a mistaken attribution of "Trance," the novel by his son Christopher, to Gilbert).

It's a spectacle I think is unseemly: people falling all over themselves to lament the passing of a writer, to whom they didn't really devote any meaningful attention while he was alive. Maybe it's a desire to seem "in the know"; perhaps it's explained by the fact that blogs favor "newsy" stuff, over reading old books that aren't newsworthy. How often do you see a blog posting of the sort where someone says, "I just read five of Gilbert Sorrentino's books from the seventies and eighties, and they were terrific"? Never, in my experience.

Maybe he got no attention because he didn't have any big splashy releases? Why are new books, that receive so much attention here and on other literary blogs, more interesting than good, old books that have been neglected?

Posted by: James | May 25, 2006 at 08:12 PM

TEV

James, I usually leave the comments box to my readers, but when one gets it as wrong as you have, it becomes hard not to step in here.

First, you're incorrect about having made only one mistaken mention. You haven't reviewed my archives very carefully, so do have your facts straight, please. I did make the mistake in question but I'm also reasonably sure I corrected it when it was pointed out, and I'm sure I'm scarcely the first person to make that slip. How harshly you judge.

I also think your old books/new books argument is a non-starter. It's a meaningless distinction - why must one chose at all between the old and the new? This blog has mentioned plenty of older titles, as have numerous others. So again, the facts contradict your apparently cursory impressions.

But the biggest canard here is the notion that because I haven't written extensively about Sorrentino's work, this somehow bars me from noting his death. That's a pretty churlish position, James, and by your account I can only note the eventual passing of John Banville. This blog links to news and reviews and it also provides original reviews, interviews and more. Its brief is not so narrow as you would make out, and if I restricted myself to writing about things I have deep firsthand experience, well, the pickings would be slim, indeed. I provide a service to my readers of noting the literary news of the day, and one needn't have read all of Sorrentino's work to acknowledge his standing and his passing.

The real unseemliness is that you had an opportunity, clearly, to weigh in with some considered thoughts about his body of work, to spark a meaningful conversation, and instead opted for the mean spirited approach. Opportunity missed.

Posted by: TEV | May 25, 2006 at 09:26 PM

The comments to this entry are closed.

TEV DEFINED


  • The Elegant Variation is "Fowler’s (1926, 1965) term for the inept writer’s overstrained efforts at freshness or vividness of expression. Prose guilty of elegant variation calls attention to itself and doesn’t permit its ideas to seem naturally clear. It typically seeks fancy new words for familiar things, and it scrambles for synonyms in order to avoid at all costs repeating a word, even though repetition might be the natural, normal thing to do: The audience had a certain bovine placidity, instead of The audience was as placid as cows. Elegant variation is often the rock, and a stereotype, a cliché, or a tired metaphor the hard place between which inexperienced or foolish writers come to grief. The familiar middle ground in treating these homely topics is almost always the safest. In untrained or unrestrained hands, a thesaurus can be dangerous."

SECOND LOOK

  • The Bookshop by Penelope Fitzgerald

    Bs

    Penelope Fitzgerald's second novel is the tale of Florence Green, a widow who seeks, in the late 1950s, to bring a bookstore to an isolated British town, encountering all manner of obstacles, including incompetent builders, vindictive gentry, small minded bankers, an irritable poltergeist, but, above all, a town that might not, in fact, want a bookshop. Fitzgerald's prose is spare but evocative – there's no wasted effort and her work reminds one of Hemingway's dictum that every word should fight for its right to be on the page. Florence is an engaging creation, stubbornly committed to her plan even as uncertainty regarding the wisdom of the enterprise gnaws at her. But The Bookshop concerns itself, finally, with the astonishing vindictiveness of which provincials are capable, and, as so much English fiction must, it grapples with the inevitabilities of class. It's a dense marvel at 123 pages, a book you won't want to – or be able to – rush through.
  • The Rider by Tim Krabbe

    Rider_4

    Tim Krabbé's superb 1978 memoir-cum-novel is the single best book we've read about cycling, a book that will come closer to bringing you inside a grueling road race than anything else out there. A kilometer-by-kilometer look at just what is required to endure some of the most grueling terrain in the world, Krabbé explains the tactics, the choices and – above all – the grinding, endless, excruciating pain that every cyclist faces and makes it heart-pounding rather than expository or tedious. No writer has better captured both the agony and the determination to ride through the agony. He's an elegant stylist (ably served by Sam Garrett's fine translation) and The Rider manages to be that rarest hybrid – an authentic, accurate book about cycling that's a pleasure to read. "Non-racers," he writes. "The emptiness of those lives shocks me."

Categories

Subscribe to this blog's feed