Lunar Follies

by Gilbert Sorrentino

“For decades, Gilbert Sorrentino has remained a unique figure in our literature. He reminds us that fiction lives because artists make it. . . . To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition and relentless passion.”—Don DeLillo “Possessing both the grace of James Joyce and the snap and crackle of Tom Wolfe, [Sorrentino] is a must-read for those who fancy fiction served on wry.”— Booklist “Far from being overly highbrow, Sorrentino manages to be thrillingly disorienting and, at the same time, quite accessible.”— BookSense.com “Sorrentino has shown himself a perfect mimic of the information age, an era when all is revealed and no one can quite remember who appeared on the cover of last week’s People .”— The Washington Post A boyhood friend of the late Hubert Selby, Jr., teacher of Jeffrey Eugenides and two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, Gilbert Sorrentino is an elder statesman of American literature who continues to transgress artistic boundaries. In Lunar Follies , a bitingly satiric, imaginative tour of gallery, museum and performance art exhibitions, Sorrentino skewers the pretensions of the contemporary art world and its flailing attempts at relevance in a society whose attentions have strayed to the immediacy of pop culture. With precise comedic timing and an eye toward lascivious detail, Sorrentino is the perfect guide through this deliciously absurd world. Gilbert Sorrentino has published over 20 books of fiction and poetry, including the story collection, The Moon in Its Flight , and the recent novel, Little Casino , which was shortlisted for the 2003 PEN/Faulkner Award. After two decades on the faculty at Stanford University, he now lives in his native Brooklyn, New York.

Genres: Short Stories, Fiction, American, United States

145 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lunar Follies is Sorrentino’s last comic extravagance: an unhinged, snarling, list-saturated send-up of the pretentions and wrongheadednesses of poseurs in the art world in a series of titlunar vignettes. At times outrageous, at times inscrutable, at times wielding the obscure reference like a violent weapon, this novel is perhaps the strangest in the Gilbert oeuvre, with a splendid selection of lists, most snark-ridden and crank-cranked, and parodies of an art world that at times borders on the entirely imaginary. A pleasure to read late-period Sorro cutting loose and flexing his formidable humour muscle amid the more melancholic tone of his other novels of the period. Enriched appreciation on a second read.

[Old Man JP · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the third book by Sorrentino I've read that is broken into very short vignettes on a variety of subjects. Most of the vignettes are less than one page while a few are a little longer, up to about 5 pages. Most of the vignettes in this book are satirical looks at art related subjects but a few were fairly abstract and it was difficult to determine exactly what they were about. A few of the vignettes I will mention are:
Eratosthenes - About a map that Eratosthenes drew in about 240 BC.
Fra Mauro - A long list of peoples names with a short, often insulting, description of the person.
J. Herschel - Two pages of very short sentences each starting with the name J. Herschel and then saying something he has done.
Pythagoras - A five page list of a series of exhibits in the Iconocult Museum. Each exhibit features a famous musician or artist.
Sorrentino was a very unique writer who wrote some strange books but books that I find rather entertaining.

[Jeff Bursey · Rating 5 out of 5]

For a full review, go here:

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

[David]

A parody of the pretentiousness of a great deal of art marketing, it is very funny but also a kind of one-note joke. Any one or two of the entries read in any order will convey the author's theme. geographical features of the moon may count for the naming of all the chapters in this lunar excursion, but there is nothing obvious important about that in the text itself; that unifying future is something most relevant to the book jacket. Sorrentino overuses repetition and simple crude vulgarity. In short, kind of an escaped short story, not without humour or logical purpose, but incredibly self-indulgent.

[D · Rating 3 out of 5]

One of the interesting things about Gilbert Sorrentino's Lunar Follies is how little I can say about it, despite its formal structure, without departing for the subjective.

It consists of 53 brief pieces, few more than a handful of pages long, named after features of the moon, ordered alphabetically. (In fact, its formalism and almost total abandonment of conventional narrative seem as much like experimental film - early Greenaway, say - as anything I've read. It's fiction mostly by virtue of not being nonfiction (or poetry or drama).

Broadly, the pieces concern art. Some mimic text from an exhibition catalogue, some adopt marketing rhetoric, some are framed as pseudo-academic criticism. Some of the art described could well exist, and some of it is fanciful unless the description of it is understood to be metaphorical, e.g., sculptures incorporating intangible elements. One piece unambiguously parodies Jenny Holzer's work, which gave me license to wonder whether Sorrentino intended to specifically evoke Sarah Sze's intricate assemblages, or whether that was something I brought to the table. Much of the art is kinda dirty, in a male-centric way, which for me raises questions about the difficulty of commenting on objectification of women without perpetuating it.

One or two of the pieces might be read as essays placing the artist's work in a particular context; then again they could almost be read as something like short stories. But mostly these prompted the realization that if you follow conceptual art to its logical extreme (or reduce ad absurdum, as you like) virtually any narrative could be construed as a description of a conceptual installation.

Some of the language in the vignettes is beautiful (Sorrentino also writes poetry, and presumably applies a poet's care to his prose). Several of the pieces are quite funny (one including a list of imaginary football positions in particular made me snort). Some of the language is perhaps intended to be shocking or transgressive, but I just found it crass (both of the "c" words make several appearances).

Similarly, some of the art described sounds thrilling, and some of it sounds like baloney.
I think it's also worth mentioning that repetitive references (to artistic types mostly, but also other public figures) occur throughout the book, suggesting some personal taxonomy. There are also some obvious errors of fact, like misidentifying the director of The Big Sleep as Robert Altman.

The title Lunar Follies and the dismissive tone of some (but by no means all) if the pieces might suggest a satirical reading, but I suspect an element of misdirection in the title. I reject a priori the notion that Sorrentino intends to say anything as simplistic as "artists are pretentious," "modern art is hogwash," or "art criticism is pointless." I refuse to accept that a mind responsible for anything as willfully abstruse as this would dismiss other challenging forms of art, and likewise it seems unlikely to me that any writer would subscribe to the unsuitability of words to communicate about a specific nonverbal domain. I also think that too much work went into the book for it to be "just" a joke.

I'm inclined to think that it's fundamentally about the difficulty of communication in a much broader sense: that my interpretation of Sorrentino's meaning can never match his actual intent. And perhaps it's also about the allure and elusiveness of the ineffable. But quite possibly that's just me.

Regardless of what it does or doesn't mean, I certainly found it thought-provoking, and I'm decidedly glad I read it.

[Printable Tire]

I chuckled a couple times (and only at the crudest jokes) but this book really wasn't worth the effort. Fortunately I am not overly familiar with the haughtiness of performance art Sorrentino lampoons, nor do I wish to be. Satirizing pompous art critiques is inherently pompous, and Sorrentino can't escape the grasp of nothing making sense.

This reminded me of the usual post-mod crap they publish in the College Hill Independent at Brown.

[M · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's not quite accurate to say I've finished this book. I have read all fifty-three items, but I've only read them once. Like poetry, this is the sort of thing-if one likes this sort of thing-to reread. It is, so to speak, a parody of parody. A spoof on almost everything: art, sports, personal names, critics and criticism, writing, itself, four-letter words, and (I suspect) readers of books like this.

It seems oddly appropriate that I got this book in a ten dollar blind grab-bag purchase from the publisher. I also liked the other books in the bag, but this one was the most fun.

[Daisÿ · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5

[Money Shaw · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gilbert Sorrentino’s Lunar Follies, a satiric collection of modern art reflections, is gimmicky, tedious, and unfunny. Sorrentino lists lots of made-up things—like erotica titles, painting titles, utilitarian ephemera, and objets d’arte—while throwing around dirty words. Slavic and semi-obscure ethnicities seem to be a favorite adjective, as if racial categorization automatically meant richer visualization. Lunar Follies has nothing to say about art, art criticism, or the moon. Instead, it is simply self-indulgent, boring crap.

[William · Rating 3 out of 5]

Lunar Follies was not my most favorite Sorrentino novel. I enjoyed his acerbic wit, and the creativity in mocking the art establishment, but the unity of Lunar Follies is tangential at best, for me, lacks the drive necessary to have any cohesive sense of purpose.

[Kasa Cotugno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Unlike any other. Lunar Follies consists of "reviews" of pretentious art installations that are hilarious and get funnier with each reading.