Aberration of Starlight

by Gilbert Sorrentino

In a rural New Jersey boardinghouse, in 1939, ten-year-old Billy Recco, his divorced mother, her bitter, widowed father, and philanderer Tom Thebus are caught up in familial and sexual strife

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, Literature, 20th Century, American, United States

211 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1980

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Aberration of Starlight is a cynical postmodernistic love story: a mix of drab reality and crazy fantasies… A single story told by four participants from different vantage points:
A ten-year-old postmodern boy seeing a grownup world distorted in his mind, a lonely child dreaming to have a father.
An inexperienced and romantic catholic woman, boy’s divorced mother cherishing hopes to find a new love and a perfect new spouse.
An unscrupulous petty lecher loaded with dirty dreams and cheap lewdness…

Then, through the still-open door enter, in various stages of undress, Tom’s eighth-grade English teacher, Greta Garbo, a typist currently employed by Uneek Metal Parts, Inc., a woman in powdered wig and domino, and Tillie the Toiler. Their eyes are bright with sexual frenzy.

A woman’s old father – a miser and widower, a former pussy-whipped husband, disappointed in people and life.
This world isn’t exactly a garden of earthly delights.

[Garima · Rating 4 out of 5]

After reading Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino had both my curiosity and attention, and I knew that I had to read his other works without much delay. The reason to pick Aberration of Starlight (Fantastic Title!) was to read something conventional (according to Gil’s standards, of course) within the realms of story-telling and with this book, I’m convinced of his inimitable style which solely belongs to him because only he had the talent to make it work.

Nothing much is going on here plot wise: Summer of 1939, New Jersey, A boardinghouse, 4 main characters, 4 different narratives, 4 Unreliable narrators. Events of Thirty six hours is described individually through the eyes of an innocent 10 year old kid, Billy; his divorcee mother, Marie; Tom Thebus, Marie’s suitor and a travelling salesman and a filthy womanizer; and Marie’s Father, John, a widower. All these characters are not essentially special in any way but they are memorable nonetheless, which I believe was the purpose of creating them at first place i.e. to present a somewhat normal set of characters and then carrying out the task of fitting them into various literary devices which Sorrentino employed in this book, which is undoubtedly the biggest strength of AOS. Those who have already read Mulligan Stew won’t be much surprised by all these techniques like letters, series of questions and answers, footnotes, stream of consciousness etc which when used all at once, renders this novel postmodern but their usage here is a bit humble and a lot more controlled in an unfair comparison to MS.

The idea here is to work run-of-the-mill characters and storyline while exploring various layers of human nature and circumstances that govern such nature and in this process to bring the reader closer in understanding various elements of the narration with a distinguished clarity. Each character is given equal footage; 50 page each and the same techniques are used in re-telling the story 4 times. A sense of nostalgia is the main essence common to each story and almost every part containing stream of consciousness is aesthetically done. A glimpse into the psyche of Billy, Marie, Tom and John makes a reader experience different emotions and in a way place us at a position from where one can easily make sense of their respective intentions and to put on display an ironic reflection of their past as well as present. It has humor to make you laugh, sadness to make you cry, vulgarity to make you cringe and fragments of thoughts to make you ponder:

Q. What was the one truth in his life that he would not face?
A. That he had energetically conspired in his own defeat.

Sorrentino was known to be biased towards form and therefore it plays an important role in his books. The purpose is to bare the device and laying down the extent to which these devices can be implemented in producing something powerful notwithstanding the content. Perhaps it’s not wrong to say that in his works ‘How you write’ always had an upper hand than ‘What you write’ , and still have the desired effect on readers which can be easily witnessed and enjoyed by reading Aberration of Starlight. Why one star less? It could have been a bit longer. I’m spoiled, I know!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorrentino’s sixth work of fiction plants an unexpected but apt quotation from Brian O’Nolan after the final page: “The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.”

Aberration of Starlight is one of Sorrentino’s most bitter, scathing and unflinching novels (and perhaps the closest he came to ‘realism’ in content only) in his hefty canon. Split between four characters—a son, his mother, her lover and a father—the book probes into the “psychopathology of everyday life” (Freud ref but also a short story by Gilb) with a series of structural scalpels and stylistic callipers. Making use of letters, fantasies, internal monologue, question-and-answer, dialogue and memory fragments (all this is on the blurb—don’t panic), Gilb summons up the burning contempt, sexual repression and overall heartbreak at the heart of this painfully “real family.” Billy, the “cockeyed” child, hopes that Tom, her mother’s philandering lover, will replace his absent father, while their poisonous old prick of a grandfather can’t stand to imagine his daughter as a sexual being or having his virility challenged by a younger man. The story is beautiful, painful, darkly humorous and melancholy. And tough, damn tough:

“He wasn’t prepared for her anger and spunk in talking back to him, and what did Bridget being sick all that time have to do with her letting this man be her escort, he’d like to know that, and could she tell him that? With a pair of high-heeled shoes meant for a girl of eighteen, not a mother who’d been married in the church at a high nuptial mass and in the eyes of God was still married. She sailed right by that and tore into Helga, that backbiting dutchie she called her, can’t you see what’s as plain as the nose on your face? That sauerkraut-eater has, oh don’t deny it, she has grand plans for you, oh my, grand. Why, you talk about people, pardon me, the antiques here, think about Tom and me, Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Don’t you think they can all see that woman setting her cap for you? And she’d say anything to play up to you, anything she thinks you want to hear, by God, she’ll say it, in spades. He didn’t mean to—maybe he didn’t actually say it—but he forebade her to go out with that sly article and her face got as white as her shoes. She said she’d do as she damn well pleased! With a bleached blonde of a tramp he was seen, a whore! he said, and blushed. That’s the kind of man who’s taking you dancing! Worse than that greaseball of a husband of yours, and bejesus he doesn’t even have a bit of ass on him! By God, it’s one of the wonders of the world that the man can manage to sit down. She was holding the door open for him and wiping tears from her eyes. Oh Poppa, she said, what a spiteful thing to say, what a spiteful, mean thing to say to your own daughter.” (p192-3)

[Mariel · Rating 3 out of 5]

aberration of starlight... The true path of light from a star to an observer is along the straight line from the star to the observer; but, because of the component of the observer's velocity in a direction perpendicular to the direction to the star, the light appears to be traveling along a path at an angle to the true direction to the star. - The New Columbia Encyclopedia

Did I like Aberration of Starlight? Kind of. Sorrentino uses different instruments to record the expectations from light years away of the four people. I mean ants. Stars and plasma and held in orbit by the gravity of the expectations of others. I mean the dead sun. Set up some charts and a telescope and get disappointed when the broadcasted phenomenon is a blip. It's probably a red plane light like the "Santa Claus" I spotted when four years old. I didn't get to keep the illusion for long. I don't think some illusions burn hot enough to be worth eating off of anyway. Dancing shoes, pornographic post cards, "fathers". I never wanted to pluck these stars out of the skies and put them in my eyes. I wanted to be moved and instead I was wearing a lab coat and holding a pencil and putting things in baggies with tweezers.

I was going to do a question and answer type of thing like some parts of "Abberration". I've already forgotten about doing it. (Liar! You just said you were going to do it.) Those were the least affecting parts, for me. The letters, the diarrhea memories, the bleeding with sarcasm hopes and dreams. No one is ever happy. If I were them and '50s sitcoms had been invented yet (we're in the great depression) I would have cried. They would have offered no solace. I remember when I first acknowledged to myself that I craved escapism when confronted with swallowing shit instead of doing what I wanted to do. It was in elementary school and the teacher was scaring us kids with how "Everything is going to change" when we got to middle school (it was exactly the same). I thought about how I wished I could go home and watch The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and not think about not getting to do what I wanted to do (probably reading). I didn't even really like The Fresh Prince (except for Carlton when he did something humiliating). They had rich people problems that were solved in under thirty minutes. Who wants to compete with that? The distraction is no good. Every happy thought they ever utter is utterly useless.

I read the never lasts that long self deceptions as oozing between the lines sarcasm. The toes would have gunky yolks in between them from walking on shells. Sorrentino interrupts to ask questions and answers. It was a lot like reading a journalistic account of some people who could be just like some other people somewhere else. Maybe it's syndicated people. What are they doing here? What am I doing here? If there's a star I could never get close to it because of this. He freaking tells me that Marie's mother Bridget was jealous that her daughter and former son-in-law broke the bed. When he doesn't just tell it's great. I got all on my own that Bridget left Marie 5,000 in her will so that her husband could decide on his own not to even tell her about it (maybe I'm not right but I don't mind that as long as I get to wonder). Their problem is that problem. The telling without knowing what the real questions are. Does Tom just wanna fuck Marie, maybe pretend to love her a little bit if that's what it takes? Yes, of course. The of course is what bored me a little. I would need another television show to watch to distract me from the tv show of the adults who want to fuck each other, who are afraid that it's not the right thing to do, that maybe they aren't getting what they are supposed to get. It's like never having any peace and quiet in your own soul.

From a distance Tom is the aw shucks, gee whiz that sure is a purty dress you got on shyster (what do they call those kinds of guys?). It's not so copacetic when you move a little closer. Someone is putting on a show. His show would be to check his teeth in the car mirror. Someone has gotta be in on it. Marie's show is all of the things that she thought she should have. I kind of felt sorry for her that her husband was screwing his secretary down on the mission. Not because she thought she had it made but more like being rejected and set on a pile and not mustering what it takes to get yourself off it. I wish more that Sorrentino hadn't just told me that her little son Billy was spoiled for when the mistress got along with the kid and the dad without her. It would have meant more to me to earn that. If I'm gonna be on one end of the star I want some light. It is telling when someone repeats to themselves the same kind of lies and sometimes the routine cracks up. That's Marie and her father, John. Sometimes she hates John. Sometimes he's on her side, sometimes he's on Bridget's bed side. That's death bed, praying to God or pretending she is. The wrong side of it, that's what.
I really had the feel of a fake kind of sitcom because of all the how things should be juxtaposed with how they weren't. I wish Sorrentino had cut some of the style out and hadn't expected to see so much out of it. I was worn down by my head in the sand. Dammit, don't just tell me all of this stuff in the questions and answers part! Aberration of Starlight would have been so much better without it. It's not much life living in these kinds of dreams. These aren't the dreams people have on their own. They get them on post cards, in church and under mama's cruel belt. I can't live on post cards. What you tell yourself is interesting. I liked that part. Do I want to know the distance between the journalist and its subject like that? Uh...

Will I read more Gilbert Sorrentino? Oh yes. This one just wasn't a favorite.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

Flashes of brilliance. A highly unpleasant reading experience, but nonetheless rewarding. My first step into Sorrentino's version of the world. It interested me enough that I know I will have to read his other novels. Aside from Mulligan Stew, they are relatively short, therefore his ceaseless experimentation is digestible.

The characters in this novel are mean-spirited, nasty, filthy, sloppy and above all, honest. The author splashes their naked thoughts on the page, unfiltered and unrestrained. I could have done without many of the repetitive, almost childish, expletives, but the language quickly establishes deep rhythms and will remain compulsively readable for most adventurous readers.

The heartbreaks and dalliances of the main players in this bawdy work are alternately sad, laughable, charming, and genuinely moving. Sorrentino captures voices expertly, whether he is composing in the guise of a naive child, a ranting lunatic, or a feverish woman. In any case, despite the excessive inanity and gruesome lasciviousness, it's mightily convincing. I got the sense that Sorrentino tuned directly into the thoughts of living people, channeling them without judgment, and I came to appreciate the fact that I am not a telepath in every day life. There is a reason we keep these thoughts inside. It is because no one wants to hear them. However, they reveal much about us, which our words and actions conceal.

Everyone interprets reality differently, and seeing the world through another's eyes is valuable. Likely, this book will take you out of your comfort zone, and leave you eager for more.

[Zadignose]

A truly excellent family nightmare. There's cynicism and viciousness in it, but also heartfelt sincerity. The book is quite a surprise coming from the author of the far more outrageous and facetious Mulligan Stew. This has formal-experimental qualities which are familiarly Sorrentino-style: lists, linguistic quirks, written correspondence (whether it was "actually" written, or just imagined, or whether such a distinction can be made, I can't say), the intrusion of fantasy, etc. But it's not an Antony Lamont book. It's a book designed more to hurt you emotionally than intellectually, while not being so over-the-top absurd.

The book has a time, place, and culture to it, and it gave me the strong impression that no one could write this book today. There's a bitter nostalgia to it, but the culture it reflects is well behind us now, and perhaps only accessible through rare gems of books like this one. And, while it trades in fixed-phrases and idioms galore, there is something deeply personal about it that saves it from being either a parody or an archetypal construct. The characters' minds and mouths have been stuffed full of inherited thoughts and utterances, but their hearts are their own, and their struggles and hurt are real.

This book's a winner.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think, as I am one of those who prefer a little more Mo and a little less Po in my PoMo, this was rather a perfect selection for my second GS book (the Stew was great, but some of the play left me a little cold), and it has encouraged me to continue with his work.

In many ways this is quite a traditional text, the subject matter being that which thousands of writers have considered thousands of times before. What elevates this is both the quality of the prose itself, and the intelligent and controlled use of non-traditional textual techniques to further the exploration of the characters, and their distorted view of events. Each player is blind to any truth of the others, and exists solely within a script of their own making and the structure of the novel reflects this fact.

So, yes, this gets a hearty recommendation from me, not least to those of you who are curious about this writer, but wary of the more “experimental” (and I use that term simply for simplicities sake, and do not intend it to have any specific meaning) of his works.

[Brad Lyerla · Rating 5 out of 5]

John, Marie and her ten year old son Billy are summering at a boarding house in New Jersey. It is 1939. Tom Thebus is vacationing at the boarding house too. Marie and Tom strike up a flirtatious relationship. Billy hopes that Marie and Tom will marry and Tom will become his dad. John fears being alone and opposes his daughter's growing relationship with Tom, who John dislikes as glib and insincere.

Sorrentino makes this simple story complex by telling it four times, giving us each character's private perspective. He offers us little narrative. Mostly, we read dialogue, letters and stream of conscious impressions. When published in 1980, this may have been considered experimental literature. Perhaps, but it is also masterly story telling.

John and his late wife, Bridget, suffered a long and unhappy marriage undone by Bridget's repressed sexuality and John's ignorance. Marie, the child of this stunted marriage, inherited much of her parents' backwardness, which doomed her marriage to Billy's father. Having no other option, she and her son now live with her rigid, widowed father.

But Tom Thebus is not the knight in shining armour that Marie hopes for. He is, as John suspects, a shallow and selfish womanizer.

This is sad stuff. It reminds us that happiness is often fragile and rare. I wish that I could tell you that there is a message behind the story, but I do not believe there is. It is hard, but very good literature.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lite postmodern-spun multipart domestic entanglement circa 1939, a rehashing of but a few scenes viewed from different character perspectives, bolstered in between with letters, daydreams, interviews, dialogues—all replete with the requisite ethnic slurs and patriarchal attitudes common to the period—and set in the little-known region where I grew up, for which the constant mention of area placenames left me staring in a weirdly nostalgic fugue state across a gulf of 25+ years.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

In his review of David Markson's Wittgenstein’s Mistress, reviewer Adam says, "It is a bit insulting to consider this work “experimental”, as it is well, so successful." Great minds may disagree as to whether 'experimental' is a pejorative and 'insulting' descriptor, but in the case of Gilbert Sorrentino it is simply incorrect, as it is also incorrect in the case of David Markson.

Aberration of Starlight is a beautiful family story which takes place over the course of a few days at a summer vacation house. It is a story about Marie and Tom attending a dance at the Wigwam. The story is presented four times, each telling presenting the perspective of a different character--10 year old Billy, his mother Marie, her father John, and the rather charming Tom Thebus. Each telling of the story circulates through eleven narrative techniques--portraiture, epistolary, unattributed dialogue, interview, fantasy, etc. There will be those who might say that this 211 page book could have been trimmed by 153 pages because who needs to hear the same story more than once? Couldn't Sorrentino have gotten the whole thing done on the first go round, with little innocent Billy's perspective? In response, we should say that Aberration of Starlight may easily have been 106 pages longer, with a perspective each from John's flame, Helga Schmidt, that Nazi hag, and perhaps from one of the Stellkamps who operate the vacation house. In these 211 pages we have only the beginning of a novel.

What, here, is experimental? The story works, and brilliantly. We have full blooded characterization, we have plot, we have setting, we even have tea. Nothing familiar to us from childhood fairy tales is missing--there is even the thing about the glass slipper! To speak of a novel as 'experimental' is of course to build a metaphor, and at the very most what can be taken from this metaphor is the question whether this novel, qua experimental, does what a novel ought to do. And one thing that a novel ought to do is precisely to ask what a novel ought to do. But not many novels go quite so far down to the constitutive elements of a novel (as Finnegans Wake does). The other task an experimental novel may have is to produce the commonly understood 'novelistic effects' by uncommon means. Possibly, in 1980 when Aberration of Starlight was publish, it may have had to do with creating novelistic effects in novel ways, but 32 years later (if not in 1980 already) this is simply the way novels are written. The experimenting is over; Sorrentino is successful.


postcriptum
A word re: bigotry, racism, misogyny, anti-Semitism. I seem to be unable to avoid novels in which the protagonist or major characters (severally) are really mean and nasty, monstrous human beings. In addition to Aberration of Starlight we should include Take Five, Laura Warholic: Or the Sexual Intellectual, The Tunnel, Lolita (and which else?) My guess is that this series is at the heart of the debate between 'moral' fiction (John Gardner) and 'aesthetic' fiction (Gass, Nabakov). As with all distinctions, nothing mutually exclusive here. But these books will offend some folks and my thesis is that such taking of offense is the death of the novel.

[Vendedor de rápida · Rating 4 out of 5]

“Las fotografías, por excluirlo todo salvo la décima de segundo en que se toman, mienten siempre”.
.En eso las fotos se parecen a la literatura, aunque, como en esta novela faulkneriana y aberrante de Gilbert Sorrentino, la narración multiplique sus puntos de vista. Pero la literatura miente mucho para poder contar unas cuantas verdades. Esta novela puede leerse como una alegoría del autoritarismo político que amenazaba al mundo en 1939, pero más allá de eso es un retrato cáustico de la vida familiar y de la pulsión erótica que la amenaza precisamente porque la fundamenta.

[Geoff]

Did y'all know this was one of DFW's favorite books? That right there's some trivia you can use to get the conversation loose at your next cocktail social. In a lull say "Did y'all know Sorrentino's "Aberration of Starlight" was one of David Foster Wallace's favorite books?" and watch the crowd gawk and slobber. Guaranteed to make you up to 60% more interesting to the opposite sex.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sorrentino’s conceit is deceptively simple here: the same events told from 4 perspectives, a single-digit number of scenes viewed from all angles, plundered for all emotional complexity.

In some ways it is a quotidian Rashomon, the story of a brief summer dalliance between two divorcees, viewed with hope from below by her son, and with disdain from above by her father. What makes Sorrentino so much greater than the majority of his contemporary “postmodernists” is his ability to tell a realistic, no-frills-about-it story when he feels like it. If reassembled or told from a single perspective, this novel would read like something we’d expect from a Richard Yates, a quaint domestic tragedy with vivid, multifaceted characters. Thing is, Sorrentino isn’t content with emotional mastery; no, he’s here for dissection.

Dispersed among the more traditional narrative sections are Gil’s usual little experiments: chapters revealing biographical information about each character as a Q&A; passages of unattributed dialogue between characters; a series of letters, some of which don’t seem to have ever been sent; Joycean stream of consciousness fragments of memories from everyone’s lives. It all seems simple enough in the moment, but taken together, it’s a wonder what this author is able to accomplish in terms of gradually revealing information, and building such narrative and intimate complexity without ever letting things get convoluted.

Despite having adored all 5 of his novels I read prior to this one, I haven’t awarded any of Sorrentino’s books a perfect score until now. Any less than 5 stars would be a misunderstanding of literature’s purpose, as Aberration of Starlight sets itself on a single task and accomplishes it as well as has ever been done before.

[Aditya Watts · Rating 4 out of 5]

With a fancy title as such I expected a fancy convoluted high-falutin story full of pomo experimentation but instead I got breathless interior dia(mono)logue sans much purpling. Easy, addictive and satisfying. Loved the first part the best - specially can't forget Billy's letter to Daddy.

"Dear Daddy,
...Well how are you? I don't know why, I ask, because I don't really care because I hate you.
...I hope Tom Theboss will marry Mom, ad I Really hope so. Because I am sick of thinking about you and wishing that you would come and say Hello. You came and see me about twice in many years and I allways hoped that you would say Hello on my Birthday or Christmas but, you never did. What a pain you are, what a Louse. Tom can do anything. And reads books all the time, I even think Gramp likes him, anyway..."

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

So the obvious thing one does in discussing Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1980 masterpiece ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT is hasten to invoke RASHOMON, both the 1950 Akira Kurosawa film and the 1922 Ryūnosuke Akutagawa short story upon which it is based, perhaps the most famous parallax narrative of them all. Folks probably have some cursory knowledge of RASHOMON and its basic engineering at the very least. The story focuses on a single event, backing up multiple times to come at that event from the disparate vantages of the various characters who participate in it from the standpoints of their own individual position within its schematics, informed as these are by contrasting conditions. The word “parallax” refers to differences in the perception of an object conditional to the location of the observer. This concern with variations in perception, in fact with the fundamentally illusory character of things as they are perceived, is already foregrounded in the title of ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT and the epigraph at the beginning of the novel which explains its, informing us that light traveling from a star appears to be “traveling along a path at an angle to the true direction of the star” because of “the component of the observer’s velocity in a direction perpendicular to the direction of the star.” If what we perceive is illusory it is because it is contingent. We know from Einstein that the laws of physics only work when placed within the parameter of a particular reference frame, a set of specific relations operating contingently. The parallax narrative naturally brings to the fore epistemological considerations—questions of what it might mean to know and the limitations inherent to such knowing. Whereas RASHOMON is interested in how chaotic events happening in space-time may be perceived with substantive differences as regards what actually happened by various parties distinctly situated, ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT is less concerned with perceptions and misperceptions of its central event as event, but rather how the event registers in each of the four central characters’ narrative construction of his or her own overarching reality. It is not simply that the characters perceive an event differently, its basic encompassing facts, but rather that each character inhabits a resolutely individual world or world-model that, though running up against those of the others, ontologically isolates them, and causes the event to be variously assimilated by each. We are presented with something like the fraught proximity of regimes of alienation, though all of this does fundamentally hinge on a single event involving the four key parties. I have said recently of Sorrentino, here on Goodreads, that each of his novels “seems to have demanded fidelity to its own protocols,” and we might well think of him as an especially cerebral writer to whom formal considerations are paramount and who in each work confronts a unique set of logistics. It seems telling to me that in a recent article on the Oulipo group for HARPER’S magazine, Luc Sante discussed his admiration for ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT, though he also mentions of course that Sorrentino was not a member of Oulipo, merely something like a kind of cousin off to the periphery. The idea behind Oulipo was to consolidate a group of artists whose mandate, focusing on a literature of generative constraints, was to use mathematical and other formula to produce literary compositions. Sorrentino has much in common with Harry Mathews, America’s best known Ouplipo member, and ABERRATION may be the former’s most demonstrative work in this respect, at least as concerns the five of his novels I have read thus far. People also frequently mention Sorrentino in relation to the so-called “post-modernist” American novelists, and it certainly easy to think of Robert Coover when assessing a kind of RASHOMON variation set in and around a boardinghouse in 1939 New Jersey, especially if we consider that there is much here that is profane and baroque in its salaciousness. Not only is the novel broken into four sections each hewing close to one of the four central characters, the book moving from the youngest character to the oldest, but each of the four sections is divided into a number of disparate literary approaches, all of them repurposed for each of the four sections. There is a kind of instigating tableau, mysterious interrogatory interlocutions, dialogues between characters more of less intelligible in terms of their occurrence in relation to narrative events, letters, fantasy projection, past memories, and each individual’s description of the novel’s central event, with each section capped off by a kaleidoscopic stream-of-consciousness encapsulating the constituting fabric of the individual’s psychic world-model. If the novel has commonalities with some of the Harry Mathews', this multiplicity of literary approaches, variations of which are employed in each of the four sections, may also cause us to think of Oulipo Grand Poobah Raymond Queneau’s EXERCISES IN STYLE. If this is a cerebral literature speaking to games and of game theory, ABERRATION, like much of Sorrentino’s early work, would also seems to express a harrowing species of soul-sickness. This is a novel that becomes increasingly grim. There is a spreading sense of psychospritual desolation and devouring moral rot. It is telling that its mounting nastiness coincides with the novel, in its final two sections, focusing on the inner lives of its two adult males, two spectacularly malign individuals, first Tom Thebus, a recently divorced womanizer, and second John McGrath, father of Marie, also recently separated from her spouse (a man targeted with a great many epithets reserved for those of Italian heritage), and the woman Tom is cravenly pursuing. The first section of the book focuses on Billy Recco, Marie’s ten-year-old son. He is innocent and guileless, and we are left with the sense that childhood is fundamentally the beginning of a fall. The second section focuses on Marie. She is a deeply sad figure, her yearning and wary circumspection, no less her Catholic values, setting her up for exploitation and misery. If Billy and Marie seem sad, brittle, nothing good coming to them, in Tom and Mr. McGrath the sadness mutates into two modes of pathetic, callow monstrosity. Tom is heedless libido, a born user. In one of the novel’s most striking bits of business, during the mysterious interrogatory interlocution in the section relating to him (we don’t know either who is asking the questions in these interrogations nor who is answering them), a question posed regarding Tom's motives, relating to whether he is fraudulent in his pursuit of Marie, is answered as follows: “Perhaps not an absolute fraud.” This single sentence profoundly deepens our sense of epistemological indeterminacy ("perhaps") while also suggesting that there may be some genuine feeling in the suitor’s pursuit of his quarry, though it is all too clear that any such feeling is utterly subordinate to an obsessive focus on sexual conquest. The novel's central event, in which an enraged John McGrath berates and humiliates the aspirant couple whilst grandson Billy looks on, is indeed preceded by a pitifully coerced handjob performed in a context bordering on date rape. McGrath is another case altogether. He is not a predator nor much of a lech, at least not at the level of his actions, but he represents reactivity and ressentiment, those eminently unattractive Nietzschean characteristics regularly bestowed unflatteringly on men in the bleaker Sorrentino novels (see also his debut, THE SKY CHANGES, which I just reviewed). McGrath’s ressentiment is in large part born of emasculation, an emasculation exacerbated by decades of marriage to his domineering and spiteful wife Bridget, who has recently died. John is one of many characters in the novel who spouts racist vitriol or generalized disdain for those of different ethnicity, a behaviour the novel routinely ties to impotence and self-hatred. McGrath is enamoured of a recently widowed German woman at the boardinghouse who herself expresses sympathy for Hitler, and we cannot help remain mindful of the fact that the Second World War lies on the immediate horizon. Tom may come off as an overconfident if fumbling cocksman, but he too struggles with emasculation. As to the “one outstanding flaw in the otherwise carefully composed whole” as far as Tom Thebus is concerned: this is the fact that the man’s “trousers hung from his waist to his thighs with no readily distinguishable evidence that he possessed buttocks.” This is especially interesting to me, having just read THE SKY CHANGES, a novel in which a character very much modeled on Sorrentino himself likewise experiences repeated and crushing shame as regards his general asslessness. It is not a shortcoming you see men in novels regularly ruminating upon and it is interesting that Sorrentino, a chameleonic novelist who can seem like a completely different writer from one book to the next, returns to it here. The novel ends with an epigraph from Brian O’Nolan (AKA Flann O’Brien): “The meanest bloody thing in hell made this world.” Flann O’Brien, something of a “post-modernist” avant la lettre, was a humorous and playful novelist as Sorrentino himself often is. Without having yet read ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT you might expect that epigraph to register as ironic and jokey. It doesn't once you have read the book, or it no longer ultimately can. It would in all actual fact seem, the prosecution having rested its case, an entirely fitting epitaph for the world Sorrentino has just conjured for us, recognizably kin to our own. Yes. This is a brilliant experiment with form, a radical assertion of the novel’s living potential, but it is also a matter of very real soul-sickness. It is in some sense a comic novel. It can be antic and even ebullient. Surely. But there can be no doubt that this caustic epitaph of an epigraph, the very gall in it, sits there nakedly apt. Sorrentino prepares you to read those words. He brings you to them ready to assent. Still, we cannot afford to forget the novel’s more fundamental lesson, one insisting that the world is something we to a large extent individually impose on the phenomena we encounter.

[Schuyler · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is my first Sorrentino book and I have to say, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. I usually have a hard time getting into period novels (this story taking place in 1939 New Jersey) but this one didn't feel like a period novel. Well, it did and it didn't.

Mostly, Sorrentino is just a master storyteller, employing all the tricks of the trade, but not in a hokey or gimmickry way. The story is told through letters, bits of question and answer type exposition, inner dialogue, and other modes that might feel disingenious but I never once felt like his techniques were interfering with the narrative. I think that Sorrentino wanted to tell the lives of these four characters and he felt the best way to do that would be from these multiple angles. And he succeeded.

This quote below is great mostly because his father ends up leaving the mother for his secretary and throughout most of the book, you come to understand how much that affected both Billy and the mother, and they pretty much hate the father beyond all measure and this one scene seems to be the only happy moment Billy can manage to conjure up regarding the way things used to be.

"His mother and father turned toward him as he entered and his mother said, 'Your father broke the bed.' At this she began to laugh, putting her hand over her mouth. His father, wagging his finger at her, got up, grabbed Billy in his arms and sat down again with him on his lap. 'Don't believe Mama,' he said. 'She's the one who broke the bed!' Then he began to laugh. Then he shouted, in mock anger that made Billy giggle, 'Pancakes! Bacon! Gallons of coffee! Eggs! Rolls!' His mother reacher over and put her hand on his father's shoulder with a tenderness that gave Billy a chill of intense delight. There was, he considered, nothing more wonderful and funny than breaking a bed if you were a mother and father." pg. 17

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

In this novel, Sorrentino explores the different ways in which a story can be told. There are four main characters in the story, and the text is in four parts, each of which focuses on a different character. Moreover, each of the four parts is in several sections, and in each of these latter Sorrentino deploys a different narrative technique to represent the character’s experiences. Thus, in one section he employs third person narration, in another he employs interior monologue, in another he employs the epistolary form (letter writing), in another he employs dialogue, and in another he employs free indirect discourse (look it up). Because the text is organized in this way, the reader learns about the characters by interacting with the text; in interacting with the text, the reader gets more information about the characters, not only in terms of the style of their speech, but also in the way that each character’s perspective of the events in the stories contrasts with the perspectives of the other characters.

Acquired Jun 28, 2004
City Lights Book Shop, London, Ontario

[Piesito · Rating 5 out of 5]

Divertidísimo de leer, por su ironía y su forma de estar escrito. Necesitamos más libros de Gilbert Sorrentino en españooool

[Jon Adcock · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great character study that uses a variety of different techniques to tell it's story. The story, itself, is fairly simple and takes place during 36 hours at a small, vacation boardinghouse on the shores of a lake in New Jersey and focuses on four charaters: a 10 year old boy, his divorced mom, his grandfather, and a male guest who has set his sights on seducing the mom. The book is divided into four sections and the events are told and retold from the perspective of each character and Sorrentino uses multiple techniques, including stream of consciousness, letters, fantasies, and a narrative question and answer session to delve into each character and make them fully alive. Set in 1939, the novel does a great job of recreating a time and a place and presenting flawed, well drawn characters.

[Nati Korn · Rating 4 out of 5]

כדוגמא לספרות פוסטמודרנית הספר הזה ניצב איפשהו באמצע בין "תרגילים בסגנון" של קנו ובין "שעון חול" של דנילו קיש או משהו משל קאלווינו – ומדובר בדוגמא לא רעה במיוחד. שרשרת מצבים מסופרת כל פעם מנקודת מבטו של אחד מארבעת הגיבורים העיקריים – ילד המחפש דמות אב, אם חד הורית, ספק גרושה, נבגדת וממורמרת, טיפוס מפוקפק המנסה להשכיב אותה וסב/אב מסרס ונוקשה – ולא רק תוך החלפת מספר ונקודות מבט אלא גם תוך שימוש באינספור סגנונות ודרכי הבעה שונים: מכתבים, זרמי תודעה, פנטזיות, פנטזיות מיניות, תקוות וכו... כל קטע מוסיף קצת הבנה וקצת עומק להתרחשויות ולדמויות המתוארות. סורנטינו הוא מספר מוכשר וכל הקטעים כתובים בצורה אמינה ומהוקצעת. גם התרגום של רון מצויין. למרות החזרות הרבות הספר אינו משעמם והוא אפילו נוגע ללב ומשעשע לפרקים. בכל זאת ברגעים נדירים יש לך תחושה שאתה קורא תרגיל בכתיבה, אך כאמור הם אינם רבים, על כך הורדתי חצי כוכב. אז 4.5 מבחינתי.

[🐴 🍖]

holds up on the millionth read as i'm sure it will on the two millionth. lol i remember coming across a copy at urbana free library and thinking that b/w the title and the fact that the epigraphs are in three languages that it'd be the most pretentious thing ever when in reality, dang, would that every novel had this kinda grasp of humanity and the way ppl wound themselves and others, the fantasies that set us up for disappointment, and the ones we apply after the fact as balm... something that jumped out at me this go-round was a consideration of how idiom shapes perception -- e.g., when you talk about "working [your] fingers to the bone," as peeps are wont to do in this narrative, how does that alter the way you experience the world? trippy stuff mayne

[Javier Avilés · Rating 4 out of 5]

Rashomon en New Jersey. Una historia mínima, un romance con gran carga sexual, en una casa de verano, desde cuatro puntos de vista. Fragmentos de una narración que se intuye mayor, segmentada e inconclusa deliberadamente.
Gilbert Sorrentino ni siquiera tiene entrada en la Wikipedia en español. Esta es la primera novela que se traduce de él y nos preguntamos ¡por qué!.
Gracias a Underwood por traernos esta pequeña, concisa y versátil maravilla.

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

The story of a vacation romance told from four different perspectives. The first is told by Billy a ten year old who is hoping the romance between his mother and Tom will develop into a marriage so Tom will be his new dad. The second is told by Billy's mother, Marie, whose marriage is failing and is separated from her husband, she is smitten by Tom but tries to repulse his sexual advances. The third is told by Tom who at first seemed to be a nice guy but was really only looking for a sexual conquest. The fourth perspective was Marie's father, a widower with whom Billy and his mother are living who is very opposed to the romance and sees Tom as the shyster he is.

[isa · Rating 3 out of 5]

El libro me ha gustado bastante. Al principio me costaba un poco entenderlo, ya que el estilo de narrar del autor no es un estilo al que esté muy acostumbrada, pero una veces que lo pillas te lees el libro enseguida.
Al principio del libro el autor hacía como sus propias notas con lo que el pensaba y luego no siguió haciendo eso, una pena porque si no hubiera parado de poner notas de las suyas el libro hubiera mejorado un montón.

[JennyB · Rating 3 out of 5]

Normally, the term "experimental literature" would strike fear and trepidation into my linear-narrative-loving heart, but I actually found Sorrentino's "Aberration of Starlight" pretty enjoyable.

Essentially, it is the same event, as depicted from the perspective of four different characters. The depictions themselves are portrayed through letters, Q&A sections, recounting of the characters' dreams and fantasies, and even the occasional straightforward narrative by the author. It all comes together, and somehow -- unexpectedly -- works. In fact, it's funny and spry, and very good at revealing the hypocrisies so often thinly camouflaged behind observing convention.

Some of the book's repeated phrases seem dated and anachronistic, but the character types are ones with enduring relevance (Lothario, crotchety old man, woman struggling to be virtuous) as is the time-honored central theme: sex.

The book hardly lives up to the poetry of its title, but it's nevertheless a quick, fun read, "experimental" or not!

[sean · Rating 4 out of 5]

pretty much perfect. kind of a change of pace from imaginative qualities and mulligan stew, though still written with that same sorrentino fury. i think i like gilbert so much because despite his love of formal manipulation he still writes to be read, with total clarity and unerring sense of purpose. and despite selling millions more books bellow or updike never charted the small horrors of time and family life as unflinchingly as he does in this supposedly postmodern/metanovel of the domestic sphere. amazing look at the way human fantasy disguises and transforms emotional trauma.

[Erik Wirfs-Brock · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting novel that uses a variety of techniques to write sensitively about how four different people see the same event, and in general they have sort of sad, repressed lives, but the ground trod is so minor that finishing one section didn't really make me that interested to read the next, which is why it took me a few months to read a pretty short book.

[Janet · Rating 5 out of 5]

ONe of a kind, top of the game, inventive beyond all imagining, a real writer's writer, and I think this is his best book. So funny, so human, four varied voices, all not to be trusted. High modernism with a sense of humor that's like an American Joyce, but more swingin'.

[Lynne Wright · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its 1939. A young divorcee is on vacation in the country with her cranky old dad and her son. She goes on a date with a skeevy skirt-chaser. That's it... that's all that happens. But its a beautiful read.

[knig]

No star