The Moon in Its Flight

by Gilbert Sorrentino

"Gilbert Sorrentino has long been one of our most intelligent and daring writers. But he is also one of our funniest writers, given to Joycean flights of wordplay, punning, list-making, vulgarity and relentless self-commentary."--"The New York Times""Sorrentino's ear for dialects and metaphor is his creations, however brief their presence, are vivid, and much of his writing is very funny and clever, piled with allusions."--"The Washington Post Book World"Bearing his trademark balance between exquisitely detailed narration, ground-breaking form, and sharp insight into modern life, Gilbert Sorrentino's first-ever collection of stories spans 35 years of his writing career and contains both new stories and those that expanded and transformed the landscape of American fiction when they first appeared in such magazines and anthologies as "Harper's," "Esquire," and "The Best American Short Stories."In these grimly comic, unsentimental tales, the always-memorable characters dive headlong into the wasteland of urban culture, seeking out banal perversions, confusing art with the art scene, mistaking lust for love, and letting petty aspirations get the best of them. This is a world where the American dream is embodied in the moonlit cocktail hour and innocence passes at a breakneck speed, swiftly becoming a nostalgia-ridden cliche. As Sorrentino says in the title story, "art cannot rescue anybody from anything," but his stories do offer some salvation to each of us by locating hope, humor, and beauty amidst a prevailing wind of cynical despair.Gilbert Sorrentino has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry, including the classic "Mulligan Stew" and his latest novel, "Little Casino," which was shortlisted for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. After two decades on the faculty at Stanford University, he recently returned to his native Brooklyn.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, The United States Of America, 21st Century, American, Literature

300 pages, ebook

Published November 15, 2012

About the author

Gilbert Sorrentino was one of the founders (1956, together with Hubert Selby Jr.) and the editor (1956-1960) of the literary magazine Neon, the editor for Kulchur (1961-1963), and an editor at Grove Press (1965-1970). Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X are among his editorial projects. Later he took up positions at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, the University of Scranton and the New School for Social Research in New York and then was a professor of English at Stanford University (1982-1999). The novelists Jeffrey Eugenides and Nicole Krauss were among his students, and his son, Christopher Sorrentino, is the author of the novels Sound on Sound and Trance.

Mulligan Stew is considered Sorrentino's masterpiece.

Obituary from The Guardian

Interview 2006

Reviews

[Garima · Rating 4 out of 5]

I couldn’t write because I so wanted to impress people with the fact that my writing revealed knowledge of writing. I was, I think, unaware of this.

Words give voice to our thoughts, our emotions and to the perpetual intangibility of our being but occasionally they fail us too. At times they are simply not enough for what we want to convey and even if they are, we find ourselves incapable to form a definite expression which complements the myriad voices in our heads in an accomplished way. So in the wake of such failure, on our part or on that of words one resorts to the loose arrangement of fragments which facilitate the process of communication and the narration of our story. Whether that story is of any importance or not can be determined by capturing the message which exists between the lines along with numerous metaphors, puns and similes which are employed to create some sort of analogue and an attempt to throw some subtle hints about things and facts which are unspeakable. The idea is to render some sort of significance to the life one has lived so far.

A nearly perfect compendium carried out with a humble ambition of Storytelling, The Moon in its Flight is yet another example in novelty brought forth by Sorrentino’s genius mind. With 20 stories based on some common themes, this book demonstrates his talent as a writer in a more refined way which besides from his signature style, have something for everyone to ruminate and enjoy. Published over a period of some three decades in various literary magazines, these stories were compiled in a single book to makes us witness that apart from being a great novelist, Sorrentino is equally good when it comes to short fiction.

What’s not to like about the title story which states almost immediately at the start:

The late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything.

This line can be ascribed to one main theme which constitutes the narration of various pieces in the book, i.e. a poignant commentary on American way of life and the numerous virtues and vices it inhabits as a part of its culture. Some of the stories carry some autobiographical elements too and gives us an insight into Sorrentino’s life which is made all the more interesting by way of dark humor which has an underlying presence in most of his works. Then of course there are pieces about writing in Sample Writing Sample which tells us about, umm..writing.

Writing takes many drafts, usually, to emerge victorious—well, not precisely victorious—unless the writer is Proust, who was satisfied with one draft, and that a rough one.

It’s time to Call it a day is based on one of the preferred subjects of Sorrentino: the onslaught of conventional publishing practices.

It’s a guess, one that pleases me, that as Clifford read the proofs of this fourth novel, as he battered his way through its dreary lines of prose, a prose that seemed manufactured by a language contraption with decorative abilities, he was relieved, even pleased. This is the McCoy! I’ll have him say, or something like it, Oh boy! perhaps. Maybe this book would do it. “Scintillating,” even “wise.” And with a pronounced “attention to scenes and their riveting details, not to mention their dialogue, that is almost cinematic.” You never know.

Sad, funny and ironic. One of my favorite stories. Then there are few stories which reminded me of Roberto Bolano’s work from Last Evenings on Earth, especially Life and Letters but by the time we reach at the end of all these narratives, we notice how easily Sorrentino leaves his personal impression through his writing on his readers and declares the ownership of his creativity. And since we're talking about Sorrentino here, the presence of metafiction and experimentation is inevitable. If one story is written only in interrogatives, there is another whose sentences are on loan from other works (some his and some from different authors). Also, the self-reflexive technique is recurrent throughout the book, whose existence although doesn’t hamper the narration but at times looks a bit forced and quite unnecessary.

The last two stories In Loveland and Things that have stopped moving made me glad that I read this book. Perfect in their imperfection and reflect the reality we live in today, these stories are the true representation of flaws, contradictions and inconsistencies of living a life which has its share of regrets and lost opportunities. The endless rambling I have done in the first para is the result of getting emotional (Ha!) after reading these final stories only.

On the whole, a must read book, which would have been flawless sans few stories which were not that great but merely OK. Other than that the depiction of love, lust, the art of writing and execution of the said art in an evocative manner makes this book a pure pleasure to read. One thing I can say with complete confidence that Sorrentino is one writer I'll visit time and again since his writing carry the brilliant combination of being funny, intelligent, bittersweet, melancholic and hopeful at the same time.

Recently, I have come to see that I had been waiting, all those many years ago, waiting for I really don’t know how long, for an invisible door I’d yearned to discover, to open, so that I could walk through it and away from life, for good and all.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title tale The Moon in Its Flight, opening an anthology, is a story of the first love, enchantment of youth and the disappointments the coming of age brings. The time is the beat era and an aura of the narration is nostalgic.
The second story Decades also begins in the epoch of beatniks but it continues into the time of flower children and the story is outright sarcastic, probably even a little bit cynical.

…in the fifties, Ben was a member of a large minority of young people that thought that life was somehow nonexistent outside of the academy, that is, life within the university was real life – outside were those strange folk who spoke ungrammatical English and worshiped the hydrogen bomb.

The Dignity of Labor is a somewhat Kafkian parable about slaving for the system. Then comes a series of highly abstract and abstruse stories that haven’t made me any wiser.

In the midst of its opening meeting on the subject of punishment for the transient, one member made it embarrassingly clear that he believed that the color of decay, disease, shit, piss, vomit, paralysis, and death is a color that one can’t help but see each and every day, right on the quiet, but rather sticky streets.

After these Gilbert Sorrentino returns to the period of beatniks once again and becomes vaguely autobiographical. I liked all the tales belonging to the beat generation and especially the first two.

Somewhere in the building a young man is singing a song, accompanying himself on the guitar. I can’t make out the words, but I know that they are about freedom and love and peace – perfect peace, in this dark world of sin.

It takes just one false step to make one’s life turn into an indescribable mess. It seems easy to avoid these fatal steps but we continue to take them again and again and again…

[Mala · Rating 4 out of 5]

The moon is the most changeable body in the visible universe, and the most regular in its complicated habits: it never fails to show up for an appointment, and you can always wait for it at the appointed spot; but if you leave it in one place, you always find it next in another, and if you recall its face turned in a certain way, you see it has already changed its pose, a little or a lot. In any case, following it steadily, you do not realize that it is imperceptibly eluding you. Only the clouds intervene to create the illusion of a rapid dash and rapid metamorphoses, or, rather, to underline vividly what would otherwise escape the eye.
—Italo Calvino (Mr. Palomar, P. 22)

In the process of trying out books by (new to me) writers, I prefer starting with their nonfiction in that it provides me with a broad sense of their aesthetics, theory & all. You could say great fiction should be able to provide that on its own & rightly so but when it comes to a short story collection; the variety in content & techniques could throw you off balance– like a blind date, it could well turn out to be a case of hits & misses.
But overall, The Moon in its flight, is as charming as its captivating poetic title! The title sealed the deal for me- it's something William Gass would've been proud to have owned!

This collection, comprising of twenty stories, could well signify the different phases of the moon– from the "liquid moonlight" flooding the euphoria of first love to the hopeless darkness of the new moonish titular, The Moon in its Flight, to the full moon madness of In Loveland, & Things That Have Stopped Moving, the winking crescentish moon of The Dignity of Labour, to the varying ebbs & tides of the various stories like the phases of the waning & waxing moon e.g., The Decade, captures the '60s vibe of communes, free love, drugs, dissipation– characters aimlessly float from one affair to another. Also : Life and Letters, Gorgias, Facts and Their Manifestations, etc, the lunar follies of his characters leading to the abyss of human illusions. Am I stretching the analogy? I don't know—I share Sorrentino's moon fixation.

Most stories here are variations on the themes of lost love, failed marriages, adulteries, failed artistic careers; dealing with talentless writers-artists, their oversexed wives & girlfriends, pretentious wannabes; in the New York-San Francisco setup; all lost in the musical chairs' game of booze, sex, & glory, ultimately settling for the comfortably numb mediocrity; such is their ennui !

There are aberrations (Gil's fav word) from this common thread & some stories branch out into experimental areas: A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles, is written entirely in the interrogative form, the hilarious essayish metafictional tale, Sample Writing Sample, shows Sorrentino at his caustic, comic best, & Times Without Numbers, is a brilliant reprise of the title story, whereby, adding lines from external texts & altering the sequence of original sentences, a new narration takes place.
Then there are some weird stories e.g., The Pastilles, & Allegories of Innocence, that seem to be written in a coded language, so heavy are they in insider references. These might turn most readers off but Sorrentino's curious blend of mirthless laughter & aching sadness will keep you turning the pages.
The stories here aren't stories in the conventional sense in that they dispense with the formulaic setting, character, & plot development. I'd especially like to highlight the absolute masterpiece of an opening act, The Moon in Its Flight—it could be called a signature story as it contains most of Sorrentino's authorial bag of tricks:
( A poignant evocation of the 1950s America
( A mourning on the loss of innocence, love corrupted by lust
( Autobiographical elements
( A heady cocktail of the comic & the tragic: "life is a conspiracy of defeat, a sophisticated joke, endless."
( Characters trapped by the times & literary conventions
( Absence of conventional setting & plot development: "A girl named Sheila whose father owned a fleet of taxis gave a reunion party in her parents’ apartment in Forest Hills. Where else would it be? I will insist on purchased elegance or nothing. None of your warm and cluttered apartments in this story, cats on the stacks of books, and so on."
( Lack of authorial control
( Exposure of the fictional artifice
Calling it a "summer romance," Sorrentino foreshows the doomed nature of this relationship when he uses the word "forgive" in this achingly beautiful line: "This was in 1948.(...) The late June night so soft one can, in retrospect, forgive America for everything." The narrator wouldn't help out his young lovers with the cliched devices of popular fiction: "Isn’t there anyone, any magazine writer or avant-garde filmmaker, any lover of life or dedicated optimist out there who will move them toward a cottage, already closed for the season, in whose split log exterior they will find an unlocked door? Inside there will be a bed, whiskey, an electric heater. Or better, a fireplace. White lamps, soft lights. Sweet music.(...) This was in America, in 1948. Not even fake art or the wearisome tricks of movies can assist them."
Sorrentino tacks on a happy (?) ending :"Now I come to the literary part of this story, and the reader may prefer to let it go and watch her profile against the slick tiles of the IRT stairwell, since she has gone out of the reality of narrative, however splintered. This postscript offers something different, something finely artificial and discrete, one of the designer sweaters her father makes now, white and stylish as a sailor’s summer bells. I grant you it will be unbelievable."
Well, that's a love story Sorrentino style!

Sorrentino is big on nostalgia—as they say, a cynic is a person who was a romantic once, it's just that life beat all the romance out of him.
Just like Crystal Vision, here too is the wistfulness of "might have been", "could have been"—a lingering regret for moments gone, magical moments that perhaps held the key to a different future, a different self, & all that the protagonists are left with are sepia-tone memories.
This book is a wry, bittersweet, ironic, & at times cynical look at middle-aged couples' old romantic histories—the naiveté & passion of earlier times contrasted with the safe, convenience bound, circumscribed middle-class existence now. Materially comfortable yet soulless living. Sex as a perfunctory act in casual relationships/chance encounters, indulged in to exorcise the ghosts of the past, but it provides no closure or new beginnings, rather leaves a raw, gaping wound.

The author figure frequents these pages often:
"Of course, if one’s mind is too free while working a punch press, one can part with a finger or two. But I was caught in the mythology of the struggling writer in America; in retrospect, I see that I contributed some small part to the myth myself. It is not a comfort—but then, what is? At night, I was slogging through a gigantic and unwieldy novel, From Partial Fires, which had long before got completely out of control, but which I persisted in thinking would make my name." ( P. 22, from the story The Decade)

In story after story, Sorrentino pulls the veils of hypocrisy, chicanery, mendacities of everyday life that people indulge in so thoughtlessly as to be their second skin :

"He moved in a world of fakes like himself, so that their mutual interest lay in interdependent lying." (P. 37)
And:
"I don’t think that I thought of myself as a failure; not that I do now, of course. But I have come to realize that there are certain options, let us say, that are closed to me. The fashionably grubby artistic circles in New York are filled with people like me, people who are kind enough to lie about one’s chances in the unmentioned certitude that one will lie to them about theirs. Indeed, if everyone told the truth, for just one day, in all these bars and lofts, at all these parties and openings, almost all of downtown Manhattan would disappear in a terrifying flash of hatred, revulsion, and self-loathing." (P. 29)
And:
"It is emotionally numbing for me to acknowledge, to admit, that I never thought of these perpetual visitors as anything other than legitimate, as the cream of the tottering fifties. We made fun, we actually, good Christ, made fun of other people! How we waited for things to happen, successful things, adventures and journeys and relocations to exotic locales, events that would soon metamorphose us into the glittering figures that we knew we were beneath our unfashionable and superior shabbiness. We were, certainly, but deadbeats, impotent, arrogant, lazy, and headed toward peripherally creative jobs in public relations and advertising and publishing, we were perfect American clichés, too good for mere work. Some, assuredly, would become hip assistant professors, bored and jaded and ticketed for the limbo of a hundred committees and MLA meetings." ( P. 174 )

The book is heavy in author presence i.e. autobiographical elements. You could ask who is this author figure to judge others—is he himself above infidelities, pettiness, & sponging off on others?
To answer that, I'd need to go through Sorrentino's entire body of works, then perhaps many critical works on him, & I'd still be unsure—who am I to judge the writer? I can only judge this work & it is excellent.
To be fair to Sorrentino, he is just as harsh on himself—there's no attempt to look back on his past deeds with detached irony—oh look, I was so stupid/crazy/cute back then! (Hence I'm not responsible for what I did.) It's the same stand he maintains in Something Said, whatever positions he held at whatever point in time, are presented without facelifts. I admire this man.
* * *
Sorrentino never disappoints: just when I was beginning to miss Robert Frost & co, he made his inevitable (!) guest appearance:
"His current poems were about freedom and adobe and white sand, mesas and mountains, in the way that Robert Frost’s poems are about America—that is, these concepts were laid on like high-gloss enamel." (P. 32)
And yes, Marianne Moore, Saul Bellow, and John Updike also find (un)honourable mentions! And there's a new name: Wallace Stegner.

[Geoff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since a concise, working definition of Life might be "the linear temporal accumulation of experienced disappointments shot through with aching stupidity and the tedious banalities of unrelentingly meaningless routine" the less suicidally-inclined of us might seek our pittance of solace and meaning in Love, Art, Books, and Music. Well, bad news, sister! - the closer we get to these hopeful lights the better they prove somehow even more facile, shallow, and ultimately embarrassing than the million pinpricks of shame we endure every day wasting the best hours of our lives "earning a living." (Hey academics, can you explain to me why I have to "earn" something I didn't even ask for?) Anyway, recently during a bout of insomnia I read an article in which a man claimed that rivers all have a particular musical pitch to them, and that removing or adding one stone changes the tuning of that pitch, and that a river, over time, organizes the debris it carries along - the stones and sticks and mud and all the detritus - in a kind of act of fine tuning, just to eventually achieve its own specific, beautiful, musical pitch. That each river and stream is singing to us in its own individual voice, and that we could be audience to this fluvial chorus if only we stole some moments from our hectic work-a-day lives, left the din of the city, sought out a silent spot by the water's edge, and intently listened... Okay. Nice thought. This book by Gilbert Sorrentino? It addresses some of these concerns in short, inventive, fictive forms. (Not the bullshit about the rivers, however.) What this might accomplish for you, specifically, is beyond my ken to tell - I suppose it depends on how deep your need of beauty goes, or how much it's been already uprooted and spoiled, etc.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Short stories from Gilbert Sorrentino! Hurrah! They are erotic, neurotic, demotic and quixotic.

Some of his more straightforward stories of love, despair and tortured artists are here — “Decades” and “In Loveland” — and the striking and pitch-black “Things That Have Stopped Moving” — a look at the deep, grinding sorrow of the, uh, pretentious Brooklyn artist.

Metafiction is represented in the hilarious “Sample Writing Sample,” which contains some ruthless writing advice from the master, and “The Dignity of Labor” demonstrates a remarkable range of moods and voices, plus some scabrous social comment.

Oulipian techniques are present too: “Times Without Number” is a story written entirely from sentences pinched from other stories, and “A Beehive Arranged on Humane Principles” (a line from Ulysses) is written entirely in questions, à la his 1999 novel Gold Fools.

Less successful are the more po-faced pieces such as the ponderous, poetic “Pastilles,” and “The Psychopathology of Everyday Life” shows Sorrentino is at his best when taking apart the conventional narrative, not participating in it.

I recommend these stories to anyone with eyes. But I doubt they’ll find many readers. Which is a great shame. A good starting point for newcomers this — Sorrentino’s range (minus, perhaps, the Brooklyn dialects) is represented well.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amantes de David Foster Wallace, CORRED a por TODO Sorrentino.

[Josh Boardman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wouldn't have thought this book very good if I didn't get all the way through. The narratives, intentionally, are cluttered, and every single story leaves you... not exactly wanting more, but, puzzled, I guess? Not to mention, the whole book is a fucking DOWNER. Nevertheless, I persevered, and boy am I glad I did. The final story in this collection is one of the best I've ever read, and I don't say that lightly. By itself, I don't think it would be much, but in the context of the entire collection, oh man. I suggest anybody read this, if not for a little taste of "experimental" literature, whatever that means, then at least for the sickening hope it displays that things could be better than they are, except that they aren't.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 3 out of 5]

Satirical, witty, erotic, retrospective without being nostalgic, ironic, absurd, humorous and sometimes sad stories – many dealing with the agonies of being a writer – told by unreliable and often intrusive narrators left me feeling exhausted, occasionally disgusted, and yet wanting to read more by Sorrentino. Of the 20 stories I was reminded alternately of Anton Pavlovich Chekhov, Nikolai Gogol, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Kazuo Ishiguro and Ian Frazier. My favorite stories were Dignity of Labor, Sample Writing Sample, Lost in the Stars and Psychopathology of Everyday Life.

[Sasha · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sometimes, less is more. I feel like this entire story could've been 3 sentences: Two shallow a*holes meet and turn each other on. She can't commit and he hates not being Jewish. Many infidelities and years later, they make the same mistakes.

[Samantha]

“The Moon is in Flight”

[Lee Thompson · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a collection that can both an entertain (it's often quite humourous) and teach (he uses a variety of styles, narrative approaches), Sorrentino shows a master's touch. Somehow he is able to step outside of stories while pulling you in, if he wants to. His dialogue and observation -- almost all of which focus on the interaction of couples, sometimes multiple couples (and the multiple narratives that every relationship can take) -- are spot on, but it's the element of play that excited me most. An author very much in control of his subject matter. Recommended if you're looking for something with just a bit more than 'nice' stories.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't even know where to begin with Sorrentino. And I haven't finished this magnificent book of stories yet. Every page is a revelation -- poetic, clear and evocative. Haunting.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a full review, go here:

http://www.jeffbursey.com/downloads/B...

[Gwen - Chew & Digest Books - · Rating 1 out of 5]

I liked the first part and then fell off of the bus for the last bit, confused and in a virtual half melted snowy dirty muck.

[Ken Moraff · Rating 4 out of 5]

the title story is great, the others range from good to very good