Gilbert Sorrentino on Little Casino

Interviewed by Andrew Palmer

AP: One interesting aspect of the novel Little Casino is that while the voices of the primary texts change from chapter to chapter, the several voices of the commentaries (i.e. the skeptical reader, the annotator, the editor, etc.) seem to remain more or less constant despite their somewhat chaotic coexistence. What determined (a) the particular voices used in the primary texts from chapter to chapter and (b) the selection of voices used from paragraph to paragraph in the commentaries?

GS: The voices of the primary texts were determined by the work that they had to do.  For instance, some sections are hortatory, some nostalgic, some dryly descriptive, etc.  There are, too, as is obvious, sections that "should" be rendered in a certain kind of voice, but that are given a different coloration by what might be seen as the "wrong" voice. Or to make an analogy: imagine the Declaration of Independence as hip-hop doggerel—same "ideas," wholly different Idea. As for the commentaries, the very nature of a commentary, no matter who is doing the commenting, is that it mask assertions about the subject under review, and commentary's first law, it seems to me, is to praise itself by revealing the wonderment and brilliance of its intellect. No matter that it all sounds the same; that's, in a way, the point. The book review is a perfect case in point, i.e., one sounds exactly like another, so that after one reads through an issue of The New York Times Book Review—a feat, I admit, of great courage—one has the odd and unsettling feeling of having read one reviewer spread thin. The rhetoric of comment is almost always the same from one voice to another.

AP: Many reviewers praised Little Casino for being occasionally "poignant." I felt that the overt artificiality as well as the perverse humor of the novel superseded any poignancy that may lie in the narrative. Is it contradictory to laugh at the characters, realize they are not real, and retain an emotional connection to them?

GS: I can't answer this question other than to say that I learned, some thirty-five years ago, that a writer has no control over his reader's responses to his work. They may laugh at King Lear, cry over Tristam Shandy, and become sexually aroused by The Wind in the Willows.

AP: Does it surprise you that so many readers have reacted to Little Casino in this way?  Does it indicate a warped propensity of reviewers to seek out the "touching" (in the same way, maybe, that a practitioner of bestiality might have a warped propensity to seek out the sexually arousing in The Wind and the Willows)?

GS: As far as I'm concerned, reviewers' propensities are almost always "warped."  This is because of the fact that the vast bulk of them come to the books under review knowing just what a novel or poem or play or essay should be! If the work under review does not fit this model, good night, nurse! Of course, they also willfully misread books, which may be what you're getting at. Reviewers adore books in which somebody or everybody or the flawed hero or the whore with the heart, etc., is redeemed! And redemption comes in many forms, even patented UN-happy endings (the hero is rueful, the hero sees his best friend get eaten by a crocodile but saves his helpless baby from Satan, etc.). This is Hollywoodland transcribed as literature (that is, "literature"). For a perfect example of how it works, watch the Swedish Insomnia, then watch the one with Al Pacino. The former is bleak and unforgiving and honest; the latter is mush—Al dies, but what a death! What a guy! Why, the world is O.K. after all, serial killers be damned.

AP: The characters in Little Casino are pathetic and/or repulsive, usually without realizing it. Their lives, or what you allow us to see of them, are full of loss and frustration. Should the reader conclude that they are devoid of moments of genuine happiness or even sustained contentment that is not self-delusional? You seem to select the ugliest aspects of American life to present in your fiction. Insofar as this is true, would it be unfair to classify your work as cynical?

GS: There isn't much cynicism left in American life, its place having been taken by the sort of two-bit irony that laughs, rather warmly, at George Bush's fabled dumbness. I can't quite see that all the characters in the book are "pathetic and/or repulsive." Many of them are just in love, many are poor, many are ignorant, many are lost in the shuffle. If the book is cynical, it is, I hope, cynical about a society in which these people are seen as somehow not quite good enough to catch the brass ring.

AP: In your criticism you have pointed to the distinction between transparent and opaque prose.  Little Casino seems in some sense to be a struggle between these two extremes: the primary texts tell a story, speak of "real" things happening to "real" people, and yet the artificiality, the fiction of these "events" is repeatedly highlighted in the commentaries. The primary texts seem to reveal the hopeless desolation of the lives of the characters it invents, while the commentaries deny us the satisfaction of this revelation. Should the writer (and reader) trust the transparency of a language that reveals to us that which it purports to reveal, or should he rather acknowledge language's opacity? How do you see this struggle manifest itself in Little Casino?

GS: I can answer these questions rather badly and inadequately. Language instantaneously falsifies the real, yet the writer has only language to work with.  He can be perfectly abstract, i.e., "ighy fullhjto allyr, ghje?" but what's the point? And to say, for instance, "ball, cow, bomb, custard, skirt," makes a list that the reader almost helplessly tries to "narratize." Or to paraphrase Blanchot, one can call a cat a cat, but we all know that the cat is not a cat. All I do know, for certain, after 53 years in this business, is that writers who sincerely think that their language can represent reality ought to be plumbers.

AP (follow-up): Is Little Casino, then, an attempt to have it both ways, to use language in a way that is both referential and abstract, to play the writer and the should-be plumber?

GS: Language is always referential and abstract, and there is no help for it. And we all have it right in our pockets. Many many many people think they can write, have a novel inside aching to get out, etc. Few sit down at the piano and play Bach. How come? These are the people, their other literary inadequacies and failings assumed to be in place, who think that language, since it orders them a hamburger and says "I love you" to a partner, is referential and nothing but. Many of them finally do write books. Well, it keeps them off the street.

AP: You have said "Writing is very hard work, often absolute drudgery," but Little Casino feels like a very playful book. Was it fun to write? Were there particular chapters that you enjoyed writing more than others?

GS: The chapters that are catalogue-like are those I had the most pleasure in writing.  And I did like writing the book.