| A Strange Commonplace
Reviews
Los Angeles Times :
"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. . . . [In A Strange Commonplace] the ’50s dream family collapses again and again, like a Douglas Sirk melodrama fed to David Mamet."
New Yorker:
"One never expects traditional plots from Sorrentino, who has published poetry and fiction since the nineteen-sixties, but one can usually count on wit, vigorous prose, and an unflinchingly bleak take on life. His new novel (the title is taken from a William Carlos Williams poem) is a series of vignettes that present men and women obsessed by the missteps of love, betrayal, and desire. . . . Despite the bleakness, Sorrentino regards his characters with tenderness: ‘He wished that he could chafe his barely breathing nostalgia into a delicious, a self-satisfied sadness.’ The novel is divided into fifty-two discrete parts—a dazzlingly original deck of cards."
Time Out New York:
"A Strange Commonplace is a veritable whirligig of iniquity . . . [Sorrentino’s] linguistic gaming and gallows humor should impress hardy avant-gardists."
Review of Contemporary Fiction :
"A Strange Commonplace is, like Little Casino and Lunar Follies before it, a compact, episodic novel; but where Casino tended towards grim comedy, and Follies towards mercurial satire, this book gives Sorrentino’s prickly pessimism full play. . . . [it] is a book of the dead: a worst-case scenario for the hope we nurture that what’s best in us will endure and one day find a voice. Somehow, Sorrentino’s impatience with the betrayals of life, his ruthlessness in depicting its casualties, radiates a sympathy far more satisfying than compassion. His every book—as the phrase goes—is a gift."
Jacket :
"A Strange Commonplace offer[s] the same pleasures to be found in all of Sorrentino’s work: mordant humor, a delight in exploring formal conceits as far as they will go, a prose style that, although entirely free of affectation and ornamental flourishes, is both energetic and inventive . . . ultimately all of [Sorrentino’s] books are aesthetically provocative efforts to get at the prevailing features of postwar American life. . . . This new book will probably strike readers less familiar with Sorrentino’s work (for whom it would make a perfectly good introduction) as especially concerned with depicting these prevailing features, most of them disturbing if not actively repugnant, as well as the ways in which its characters attempt to cope with their circumstances."
NewPages :
"A vibrant and ghostly rumination."
Altar Magazine :
"We can look at the toxic proceedings in this book with a mixture of morbid curiosity, horror, and delectation. Sorrentino incites all three of these propensities with such sure-fire power that the reader is almost certain to want to start the book over immediately."
Daily Cardinal :
"Harrowing and poignant . . . As Sorrentino’s final work, A Strange Commonplace is like the last bite of an exotic dessert—not suited for every palate, but for those who acquire a taste for it indescribably delicious."
Whistling Shade :
"A quick lively read . . . a caustic, engrossing exploration of desire and regret and stoic doomed resolve."
MakInkBeard :
"Another example of Sorrentino’s prodigous skill with variation."
Booklist:
"Sorrentino riffs on other writers, movies, music, art, and games of chance. . . . The book itself resembles a deck of cards, what with its 52 tales imprinted with repeating patterns and emblems, and sly Sorrentino shuffling the cards, cutting the deck, and dealing some tough hands."
Publishers Weekly :
"Strange, striking, and unsettling."
Kirkus Reviews :
"Savage, baffling, and beguiling."
Also Available by this Author:
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