Pack of Lies: A Trilogy

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most accomplished innovators in twentieth-century fiction, a position that is everywhere confirmed in this trilogy of novels, Odd Number, Rose Theatre, and Misterioso. Beginning with a series of interrogations (we never do find out why they are being conducted) about characters drawn from other Sorrentino novels and concluding with the reappearance of the same characters, Pack of Lies is Gilbert Sorrentino's testament to the supremacy of the imagination, a critique of the state of art and society, and a vicious comedy portraying a world of fraud and mayhem.

Genres: Fiction, American, Novels

564 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1997

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

[Scribble Orca · Rating 5 out of 5]

[A space. Two occupied and spotlit chairs.]

...but the book is brilliant

[Audience seated below, script in comments]

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

This impressive tome contains three volumes from Sorrentino’s “representation” period: Odd Number, Rose Theatre & Misterioso. The first two are short novels interrogating the activities of characters in other Sorrentino novels. They push back the boundaries of how characters are represented in novels, performing the most audacious and successful experimentation I’ve ever seen. Misterioso is the sound of Sorrentino letting loose in a hilarious performance of wit, invention and breathtakingly gorgeous prose. It is an exhausting trawl through the meta-lit territory explored in Mulligan Stew. Essential. “Pretty much the high point of experimental fiction in this country.” – Davide Frowster Wallops

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gilbert Sorrentino’s PACK OF LIES is a trilogy comprising three novels written in sequence, originally published between 1985 and 1989, each having appeared two years subsequent to the previous. I have regularly written of Sorrentino as a chameleonic writer who alters his approach substantively from one book to the next, style and form adapting themselves radically to each new undertaking. The first two novels here, ODD NUMBER and ROSE THEATRE, are wildly heterogeneous throughout, changing modes and methods as they lay waste with ribald mischief and maniacal invention, while MISTERIOSO, by some measure the longest of the three novels, is the most stylistically-formally homogeneous, which is not to say that it is not a brash and dazzling work of fundamentally experimental mien. I am compelled to invoke William Gaddis and THE RECOGNITIONS, that peerless work of American modernism at a frontier. The title PACK OF LIES suggests themes relating to those of THE RECOGNITIONS, concerned as that hallowed masterpiece was with forgery and modes of deception, but whereas Gaddis engineered an unprecedented stylistic-formal modal operation, Sorrentino tends to move from one such operation to the next with fervid abandon, suggesting a plural, protean author, one unable to abide by fidelity to a single methadology. If we think of this writing as experimental, as many understandably have, it is advisable to frame these experiments as pursuits of diverse lines of development that out of the unformed chaos of pure potentia exploit a seemingly inexhaustible supply of alternatives. This is a literature in which synapses are firing redoubtably and new, radical neural connections are being routinely established. The write-up on the back of the Dalkey Archive edition of PACK OF LIES tells us that the first of the three novels, ODD NUMBER, presents us with a large cast of characters already carried over from other Sorrentino novels. Interestingly, though I have read five of the Sorrentino novels that precede ODD NUMBER, I was not able to place most of these characters. Well, Tom Thebus from ABERRATION OF STARLIGHT does show up in ROSE THEATRE and MYSTERIOSO. We might also have cause for suspicion that the claim in ROSE THEATRE that modernism died in Hackettstown, New Jersey is veiled aggrandizement of that same earlier novel featuring Mr. Thebus. I also recognize the blue movie HELLIONS IN HOSIERY, mentioned (with predictable contextual mutations) in all three of the PACK OF LIES novels, from the author’s earlier BLUE PASTORAL. MUSIQUE ET LES MAUVAISES HERBES likewise. But I don’t recognize the vast majority of the great many characters, introduced en masse in ODD NUMBER. First we meet Lou Henry and his wife Sheila. They are in a car with Guy Lewis. It is twighlight or just after. A very decisive time of day in PACK OF LIES, suggestive as it is of the nebulous, the not quite clear, the occluded, the neither here nor there. Guy Lewis is married to Joanne (known also as Bunny). There is a party at Mr. Rosette’s. Bart Kahane walks in on Sheila Henry in a bathroom at said party. Or does he? Lolita Kahane slaps a woman named Conchita. Or so it would perhaps seem. “Why did Bart Kahane tell Leo Kaufman that he had surprised Anne Kaufman and Biff Page on Horace Rosette’s bed?” What of Anette Lorpailleur? She is “at the center of everything” but everything concerning her is “indecisive inconclusive all bits and pieces she’s not quite there.” Is she also Miss Lacruseille? Is she also also Miss Flammard? We meet the wonderfully named couple Dick and April Detective and learn of a certain morsel of gossip that it is “something that Mrs. Detective said that Miss Lorpailleur told her and that Miss Lorpailleur had overheard Mr. Lewis saying that he had been told this by Mr. Kahane I mean this was hearsay in spades.” I see! It is not certain, but there would appear to be reason to suspect that Sheila Henry has at some point performed fellatio on Bart Kahane in Mr Rosette’s study. But I wouldn’t advise that you place a bet on it. The party at Mr. Rosette’s seems to be for a forthcoming movie adaptation of a novel entitled LA SOIRÉE INTIME. The adaptation is going to be called THE PARTY. The novel just so happens to appear to be about a party very much like the party at Mr Rosette’s. Soirée Intime will also come to appear to be the name of a boutique specializing in women’s garments of an intimate nature. The Rosette party comes back to bear, or perhaps it doesn’t quite exactly, though it certainly damn well does, near the end of MISTERIOSO: “There is, however, a film still available in videocassette called THE PARTY, but it is amateur pornography filmed in and around the bowling alley adjacent to the Naughty Nightie boutique, and has nothing to do with the aborted THE PARTY, the potential THE PARTY, the French novel, or PARTS OF THE GANGS. Or so we have been led to believe. There is, too, the one-act play THE PARTY, by Craig Garf, but this is an utterly obscure item.” Getting the picture? Well, I should hope not! The picture is a melting clock of the kind of which Dalí was so fond. At first I imagined how complex a diagram of the characters and action in ODD NUMBER would be. Very quickly, once I began to realize that everything was both contested as to factuality and perpetually morphing, I understood that only a shameless conman would presume to be able to diagram this divine hysteria. Adding to the mechanics of obfuscation and underlying questions pertaining to epistemology (and the human being’s consummate, decisive dumbness) is the fact that ODD NUMBER is made up of three sections, each of which is an interrogation and/or a debriefing (and each in a distinct style), neither party engaged in the interlocution known to us, what they in fact themselves know perhaps not adding up to all that much itself. The fact that there appear to be depositions and dossiers suggests that something quasi-judicial is afoot. Unto what the fuck exactly? you may ask. Well, precisely. While neither ROSE THEATRE nor MISTERIOSO are composed of theses interrogation-debriefings, ideally the reader will be in on the joke by the time he, she, or what-have-you reads the following deadpan admition in the middle novel: there is a matter of “certain insistent discrepancies among the data.” Heh heh. Indeed! What purposes this all serves is already eloquently addressed near the end of ODD NUMBER: “If the catalogue, or any catalogue or list, is understood to be a system, its entropy is the measure of the unavailability of its energy for conversion into useful work.” This almost seems like Gilbert Sorrentino telling us that he has chosen a vocation that involves the renunciation of useful work, the triumph of entropy. I can definitely get behind these ethics of thermodynamics! A beautiful fragment: “people can know people who know people that they don’t know, you know what I what?” A relationship with berserk lists and morphing catalogues, all in the guise of a kind of metafiction, is indeed at the heart of what Sorrentino does. You can certainly see that already in BLUE PASTORAL. He reaches a new level of ingenuity in the PACK OF LIES trilogy if only because of dizzying incorporations and genuine revolution at the level of form. A list of the fictional literary works and movies and academic texts referenced, and altered or re-situated with each reference, would itself make for a fun read: inscrutable talismans like LA BOUCHE MÉTALLIQUE, ISOLATE FLECKS, BLACKJACK, and the titles ODD NUMBER and PACK OF LIES which take on entirely different form inside the world of the trilogy. There is also an occult character to this whole sinister conjuring. ODD NUMBER ends with a call-out to demons we should perhaps thank: BAAL, SEERE, HAGENTI, OSE, PHOENIX, PAIMON, SYTRY, a goddamned (hardy har har) roll call. Later in the trilogy we come across Gaap, He Who Makes Insensible! We come across the demon Shax, Destroyer of the Understanding! Are these guys Sorrentino’s secret co-pilots? I have my suspicions. In 2019 I very much see myself living in a world in which Insensibility reigns over the corpse of Understanding! To be sure! I actually see all sorts of weird prophesies in PACK OF LIES, and I am nearly prepared to call the trilogy properly occult. When in MISTERIOSO we hear about the interesting matter of Guy Lewis’s “death by misadventure” having been apparently foreseen years earlier is Elizabeth Reese’s undergraduate poem “Starry Night, Bronxville: With Orgasm,” I had a chilling sense of sinister forces at work in the book I was holding, forces inherent to the text’s capacities at a cosmic level. Yes, I see prophecies here. I hope you will excuse me. Demons and prophecy … so, naturally, numerology. Of course. How about that title of ODD NUMBER, a novel in which we note a brief peripheral event of the kind perceived in passing at a party (which is literally what it is): “And Tony is sitting there with a book open saying, Thirty-three times three, thirty-three times three, you goddamn idiot, thirty-three times three! Oh it was really a moonlight-and-roses night.” Not much later we are told about a sculpture named 99, and in MISTERIOSO 99 reappears, happening to be “one of the 687 ‘best downtown restaurants.’” Okay, okay. There is also the fact that the purest law of relationships is that three is a crowd. All kinds of trouble follows from the crowd of three. I am aware that I want all of this to be sinister when it is in all probability only brilliant and funny. But still: what is going on in PACK OF LIES is consonant with stuff related to the occult, conspiracy lore, and exploration of higher consciousness, fields in which eerie Jungian coincidences are known to abound. In ROSE THEATRE we learn that April’s memoirs are to be called STRANGE COINCIDENCES. Delicious. The epistemology may be ontology. There is the sense that phenomenal reality, not just literature, not just the workaday deception, is a crazed con and we are pulling the wool over our own eyes. Think of the concept of māyā, add mischievous demons. There are so many other things here. I could go on and on. I love how the floor plans of Horace Rosette’s and Harlan Pungoe’s apartments shown near the end of ODD NUMBER would appear to be exactly identical. I love the following extremely Sorrentino riff in ROSE THEATRE, whose title ODD NUMBER prepares us to understand should have something to do with pornography and orgies: “Young people must, uh, avoid these occasions of sin, girls, uh, no less than boys. Abjure that, uh, lewd bottle of Prell! Discard that concupiscent, uh, candle! Jettison, oh jettison that, uh, suggestive cucumber!” Then finally MISTERIOSO. I want to end talking a bit about MISTERIOSO. I have already said that it is by some measure the longest and also the most stylistically-formally homogeneous of the the three novels. Well, I would also like to be on the record as saying that I think it is probably the most absolutely outstanding of the eight Sorrentino novels I have read up until now. It is wild, degenerate, prodigiously brainy, completely out on its own limb, and has to ultimately be appreciated as simply a bravura performance from a genius writer at his avant-garde jazzman best, soloing like a motherfucker. It is all over the place but continuing finds absolutely brilliant ways to integrate its elements and relocate itself in terms of itself. The “lambent Xanadu” of Aspen, Colorado. The A&M grocer with ABSALOM, ABSALOM! amidst the lettuce. All the various delightful flight attendants named Karen, each with an eminently Sorrentino-type surname. The return of Sol Blanc and Saul Blanche (familiar from ODD NUMBER). The repeated presence of meerschaum pipes, favourite of Hitler, his emissary Himmler routinely demanding characters produce their papers, and fan letters from Herbert Hoover to cowboy star Tom Mix, perhaps “apocryphal, if not maliciously spurious.” There is the assertion that that the Northern Lights may be a result of of outdoor cooking at unusual Norwegian celebrations. We keep coming back, one of the many ways in which we are not entirely lost, to the adventures of Dick and Buddy, who are maybe kinda like Jack London’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, Buddy the erudite one, both “impudent, nondescript rubes!” according to one nonplussed literary eminence. A cow falls down. Many, many pages later it remains in the same position. We have the arsonist at the end, an evil kid named after his Zippo who seems a kind of Gilbert Sorrentino surrogate. We end, of course, at twilight or thereabouts. There is a joke about “the cannonballs of the idlers of Zion.” And we have Durga. From Gaap and the demon Shax now onto or back to or any-which-way-to Durga. Durga, the Destroyer, the Serene, the Inaccessible. Oh, Durga. I love you, Durga.

[Katrinka · Rating 4 out of 5]

Not a clue how to rate this. Did I get it? Is there anything to get? I have no idea– but I never felt burdened, and often cheered on Sorrentino's frequent jabs at a variety of cultural/academic/societal/publishing world/literary practices.