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A Strange Commonplace
“Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.”—Jeffrey Eugenides “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 Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. Ensnared in a jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities from the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with their children, as writers struggle for credibility, as wives walk out, and an old man plays Russian roulette with a deck of cards, their stories resonate with poignancy and savage humor—familiar, tragic, and cathartic. Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of more than 30 books, including Little Casino , finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award. A critical and influential figure in postmodern American literature, he is the recipient of two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award. His frequent appearances on Michael Silverblatt’s Bookworm can be heard at www.kcrw.org . Once an editor at Grove Press, Sorrentino is professor emeritus at Stanford University and lives in Brooklyn.
154 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2006
10 people are currently reading
105 people want to read
About the author
Gilbert Sorrentino
45 books132 followersGilbert 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
Mulligan Stew is considered Sorrentino's masterpiece.
Obituary from The Guardian
Interview 2006
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
December 29, 2019
Another late, short "novel" from the late, well-known, perpetually raunchy, Gil Sorrentino.
I'm beginning to get that dirty old man vibe. At least the writing is slick. He was a skilled vignette-ist, who compiled disparate scenes into love-starved accounts of loneliness in the modern age. After reading The Abyss of Human Illusion and Aberration of Starlight, I've gained a sense of his style, and the books are starting to run together in my mind.
If it weren't for the fact that some of his other novels do not follow the trend of his breaking up the characters and events into slightly altered segments that convey an air of desperate congruity, I'd probably stop reading. I will press on with Mulligan Stew and his other works, believing that his modus operandi was not always rinse and repeat. He excels at voice and subtlety when he isn't ranting. He displayed verbal virtuosity in Aberration, and the frolickers he follows through modern disappointments and psychological upheavals are frequently interesting. I find myself asking questions about their situations, even if I despise them.
If you are new to Sorrentino, this is as good a place to start as any. Less offensive than Aberration of Starlight, but also less moving than Abyss of Human Illusion, A Strange Commonplace is a mix of racy dialogues, apt satire and beautiful descriptions. I can't really call it memorable - for instance, try to remember any of the characters' names... But what the characters do and what they overcome is often surprising and lovely. Taken abstractly, Sorrentino's storytelling is well-crafted, literary, and refined. Taken literally, his storytelling is creepy.
I wonder if I will plow through all of the author's novels without picking up even a shred of heartfelt joy. If there is any joy it is usually sarcastic or crass. Who knows? Only way to tell is to experience them and judge for yourself.
I'm beginning to get that dirty old man vibe. At least the writing is slick. He was a skilled vignette-ist, who compiled disparate scenes into love-starved accounts of loneliness in the modern age. After reading The Abyss of Human Illusion and Aberration of Starlight, I've gained a sense of his style, and the books are starting to run together in my mind.
If it weren't for the fact that some of his other novels do not follow the trend of his breaking up the characters and events into slightly altered segments that convey an air of desperate congruity, I'd probably stop reading. I will press on with Mulligan Stew and his other works, believing that his modus operandi was not always rinse and repeat. He excels at voice and subtlety when he isn't ranting. He displayed verbal virtuosity in Aberration, and the frolickers he follows through modern disappointments and psychological upheavals are frequently interesting. I find myself asking questions about their situations, even if I despise them.
If you are new to Sorrentino, this is as good a place to start as any. Less offensive than Aberration of Starlight, but also less moving than Abyss of Human Illusion, A Strange Commonplace is a mix of racy dialogues, apt satire and beautiful descriptions. I can't really call it memorable - for instance, try to remember any of the characters' names... But what the characters do and what they overcome is often surprising and lovely. Taken abstractly, Sorrentino's storytelling is well-crafted, literary, and refined. Taken literally, his storytelling is creepy.
I wonder if I will plow through all of the author's novels without picking up even a shred of heartfelt joy. If there is any joy it is usually sarcastic or crass. Who knows? Only way to tell is to experience them and judge for yourself.
August 11, 2025
Read 2013; rereading 2025
A sad, grim, magnificent, woeful little book -- a masterpiece...!
A sad, grim, magnificent, woeful little book -- a masterpiece...!
July 8, 2010
Jesus. You'd think that just once, even if only by oversight, maybe one of the sad-sack characters that populate A Strange Commonplace might experience a moment of joy, however fleeting. But no*. It's not that kind of book. It's got a cast of characters who are mostly a bit lost, beaten down by life, struggling to connect meaningfully and failing miserably. It's hard to feel sorry for Sorrentino's procession of losers, as their typical response to life's vicissitudes is a mixture of self-pity, pettiness, resentment, revenge, and cruelty towards others. There's not a likeable one in the bunch.
The book's structure is relevant, so let me describe it here. It's a
collection of 52 stories, each about 2 to 3 pages long. Each story
sketches an incident in the lives of the protagonists; there is some
overlap among the characters across different chapters, though it's not always easy to figure out who's who. This seems to be deliberate, as Sorrentino often fails to tell us a character's name, using some kind of character tic or clothing item as an identifier instead. Geography is another unifying factor, most of the characters grew up in Brooklyn; the sketches range from the 1940s to the 1990s, suggesting that Sorrentino is writing about his own cohort. There is one further nominal degree of structure; for each of the first 26 chapters, there is a story with the same name in the second half of the book. In some cases, there is an obvious connection between stories that share a name. More often than not there is no discernible connection, so the reader is left wondering.
With a structure of 52 chapters, most of which are only 2 pages long, this book is not given over the the major emotions. You won't find raging passions, towering rage, soul-consuming jealousy (more's the pity). Instead, the reader is suffocated by the slow accumulation of repeated acts of self-destruction, meanness and cruelty, fueled by resentment and petty jealousy, leading to alienation and quiet desperation.
What does this pack of losers get up to? Pretty much the same dreary
smorgasbord of predictable bad behavior that any gritty account of the
mean streets is expected to deliver (gritty realism, and a predilection for messing with form and structure, seem to be Sorrentino's thing). The younger protagonists pick on the weak and worry about their status within the pack before graduating to date rape and adultery. Nameless wives sit around and hit the bottle while waiting for their philandering husbands to come home. Dentists take advantage of their anesthetized female patients; brothers engage in mutual cuckoldry. The older characters sit in run-down apartments, alienated from their children and former friends, hoarding sleeping pills as a fallback. It's not exactly what you might call a laff riot.
Things looked pretty bleak at the 30-page mark, and I almost gave up at that point. But every time I was tempted to do so, Sorrentino would
serve up a chapter so good that it kept me reading. For years, Gilbert Sorrentino occupied a peculiar spot on my mental literary map - just at the edge of the dark deep impenetrable Unread Forest. I knew of him, had never read any of his work, but had somehow acquired the impression that he was hip before anyone else was hip. I was a little bit scared of him, to be honest. So reading "A Strange Commonplace" was an effort to fill a gap. I suspect it may not have been the best place to start -- the relentlessly gloomy view it presents, as well
as the limitations imposed by the structure made it a hard book to like.
And you can scoff at my 19th century views all you want, but there is
absolutely no f---ing way that this book can reasonably be classified as a novel. Even though that's exactly what the back jacket proclaims it to be, don't fall for it. It's a collection of profoundly dreary mini-stories, sharing only a very tenuous link, about a bunch of unsympathetic losers engaged in a variety of obnoxious behaviors, both self-destructive and mutually damaging.
I give it 2 stars, and resolve to give Sorrentino another try. Suggestions are welcome.
*: edited July 7th to remark that there is actually one moment of joy that's described in the book - the first half of one of the stories called "Snow" describes the joy and wonder that a young boy experiences as he caroms down a snow tunnel his father has made. He slides into his Dad's arms as his mother cheers him on. Let's see how the story ends:
The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.
That scarf shows up again in other stories that detail the bitter disintegration of a marriage.
These stories were written at the end of Sorrentino's life, about which I know nothing. But I certainly hope that when my time comes, I exit with a less jaundiced view of human nature.
A Strange Commonplace might make an excellent gift for the bitter, disillusioned loser in your life.
The book's structure is relevant, so let me describe it here. It's a
collection of 52 stories, each about 2 to 3 pages long. Each story
sketches an incident in the lives of the protagonists; there is some
overlap among the characters across different chapters, though it's not always easy to figure out who's who. This seems to be deliberate, as Sorrentino often fails to tell us a character's name, using some kind of character tic or clothing item as an identifier instead. Geography is another unifying factor, most of the characters grew up in Brooklyn; the sketches range from the 1940s to the 1990s, suggesting that Sorrentino is writing about his own cohort. There is one further nominal degree of structure; for each of the first 26 chapters, there is a story with the same name in the second half of the book. In some cases, there is an obvious connection between stories that share a name. More often than not there is no discernible connection, so the reader is left wondering.
With a structure of 52 chapters, most of which are only 2 pages long, this book is not given over the the major emotions. You won't find raging passions, towering rage, soul-consuming jealousy (more's the pity). Instead, the reader is suffocated by the slow accumulation of repeated acts of self-destruction, meanness and cruelty, fueled by resentment and petty jealousy, leading to alienation and quiet desperation.
What does this pack of losers get up to? Pretty much the same dreary
smorgasbord of predictable bad behavior that any gritty account of the
mean streets is expected to deliver (gritty realism, and a predilection for messing with form and structure, seem to be Sorrentino's thing). The younger protagonists pick on the weak and worry about their status within the pack before graduating to date rape and adultery. Nameless wives sit around and hit the bottle while waiting for their philandering husbands to come home. Dentists take advantage of their anesthetized female patients; brothers engage in mutual cuckoldry. The older characters sit in run-down apartments, alienated from their children and former friends, hoarding sleeping pills as a fallback. It's not exactly what you might call a laff riot.
Things looked pretty bleak at the 30-page mark, and I almost gave up at that point. But every time I was tempted to do so, Sorrentino would
serve up a chapter so good that it kept me reading. For years, Gilbert Sorrentino occupied a peculiar spot on my mental literary map - just at the edge of the dark deep impenetrable Unread Forest. I knew of him, had never read any of his work, but had somehow acquired the impression that he was hip before anyone else was hip. I was a little bit scared of him, to be honest. So reading "A Strange Commonplace" was an effort to fill a gap. I suspect it may not have been the best place to start -- the relentlessly gloomy view it presents, as well
as the limitations imposed by the structure made it a hard book to like.
And you can scoff at my 19th century views all you want, but there is
absolutely no f---ing way that this book can reasonably be classified as a novel. Even though that's exactly what the back jacket proclaims it to be, don't fall for it. It's a collection of profoundly dreary mini-stories, sharing only a very tenuous link, about a bunch of unsympathetic losers engaged in a variety of obnoxious behaviors, both self-destructive and mutually damaging.
I give it 2 stars, and resolve to give Sorrentino another try. Suggestions are welcome.
*: edited July 7th to remark that there is actually one moment of joy that's described in the book - the first half of one of the stories called "Snow" describes the joy and wonder that a young boy experiences as he caroms down a snow tunnel his father has made. He slides into his Dad's arms as his mother cheers him on. Let's see how the story ends:
The child begins to laugh joyously in the crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing since he does not know, nor do his mother and father, in their youth and beauty and strength, that this will never happen again, and that the family is almost finished and done with. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.
That scarf shows up again in other stories that detail the bitter disintegration of a marriage.
These stories were written at the end of Sorrentino's life, about which I know nothing. But I certainly hope that when my time comes, I exit with a less jaundiced view of human nature.
A Strange Commonplace might make an excellent gift for the bitter, disillusioned loser in your life.
September 19, 2010
A dark, snarky triumph. This novel bristles with a brutal energy, a violent sexual malice. These vignettes are more overtly carnal in content than in Sorrentino's other "fragment" novels, and each entry is stark and bleak.
This was the last work Sorrentino saw published in his lifetime, and it acts as a lighter coda to The Abyss of Human Illusion, which isn't saying much, as these stories are painful, moving and sad in their desperation.
One for the midnight hour.
This was the last work Sorrentino saw published in his lifetime, and it acts as a lighter coda to The Abyss of Human Illusion, which isn't saying much, as these stories are painful, moving and sad in their desperation.
One for the midnight hour.
September 8, 2020
In 1980 avant-garde musical weirdos the Residents released "Commercial Album", which seems to be an attempt to deconstruct pop songs by writing a series of one minute songs, with the theory being that if any particular song was played three times in a row that would approximate what they understood as an actual pop song (depending on how seriously you want to take this, coming from people wearing giant eyeballs as masks). The idea of paring a form of creativity down to its basest form wasn't exactly a new idea (Wire's "Pink Flag", a few years earlier, is probably the artsy-punk version of this) but having heard various stabs at musical forms of minimalism, I did wonder how many literary examples have come to exist over the years, and more importantly, how many are actually readable.
Breaking things down to their core elements is easy enough . . . you can repeat a note in a song over and over again, you can paint giant blocks of a single color on a canvas, I guess you could even write a story using only punctuation but the real trick is making someone care about it as more than a strange academic exercise to prove some esoteric point. People will always appreciate clever things (or be jealous we didn't think of it first) but its slightly more difficult if you can't convince them there's some kind of point to it. Its not necessarily easier to do this with a song or a painting but with the time investment so much less than a story you may find people more willing to indulge you. Stories, on the other hand, aren't always barbed arrows aimed directly at your heart or brain . . . even the shortest stories have to create a world of sorts (or recreate ours), give us a couple characters we can relate to or hate (or feeling something about) and give it all a reason for existing. To do that in a couple of pages is not exactly easy. To do it repeatedly is, to say the least, somewhat impressive.
Gilbert Sorrentino was, as far as I can tell, never a super-famous or high-selling writer but he was one of those that authors and critics admired mostly because he kept trying to do different things and often pulled them. And while postmodern experiments in language and structure aren't general crowd-pleasers, he has a decently lengthy bibliography and quite a few admirers ("Mulligans Stew" is the big one, if you're the kind of person who starts with the greatest hits). I unfortunately first heard of him when he passed away in 2006, the same year he released this novel (one more posthumous work would arrive in 2010) and after reading what people said about his books, I realized he sounded like someone up my alley and I wound up acquiring most of his better known works, with this one coming up first because of the weird way I sometimes stack things (its thin and probably was slotted in when I was trying to maximize space).
I don't know if this is the best introduction to his works, but its definitely not a bad one. Structured sort of like a novel (two parts of twenty-six chapters apiece, adding up to, yes, a deck of cards) but with one enormous quirk . . . each chapter is basically its own short story of a couple pages each, none of them seem to have any direct connection to the ones around it and all the chapter titles used in Part One get reused again in Part Two, So its essentially a short story collection that is wearing the clothes of a novel, but without any central plot or standout continuing characters. Its just stories about people, over and over and over until the book itself is over.
Yet its not some staid and dry academic exercise. Each of the stories seems to inhabit its own distinctive space, as Sorrentino unspools tale after tale of people generally failing to get what they want, or coming to the understanding that getting what they want is never going to be an item on their particular menu. All are extremely short (a couple top a relatively gargantuan five pages), which does help the concept go down a bit easier in the manner of the best punk albums . . . if there's one story that really isn't to your liking, just wait a few pages and another will be along shortly.
Giving himself only a couple pages of rope means he only has a small chance to make an impact and just writing short tales on their own isn't a recipe for reader satisfaction (says the guy currently reading a book of Hemingway short stories . . . I'll let you know if it has the baby shoes one) if you don't craft them for maximum impact in the space you've given. Which he generally does.
Its honestly impressive how he manages to hit the mark again and again over the course of this. Most of the stories are carved from the same vein . . . what feels like a mid-century setting generally in the NY/NJ area (though one story makes a reference to Holsten's in Bloomfield and then takes about a character going to the waterfront which . . . doesn't exist in Bloomfield so maybe he meant something else) and featuring men and woman repeatedly failing to come to terms with each other and themselves. Most of the stories are relatively downbeat scenarios (sometimes extremely downbeat, as there are at least two tales dealing with a sexual assault) but are so specific and detailed even at a page or two that it doesn't feel like a litany of depressing things but a tour through lives that are still in the process of not turning out the way they planned. Throughout we see failed attempts at connection from parents to children, from wives to husbands, we see people lamenting their life choices, we see people actively making things worse, either intentionally or otherwise.
Is it all connected? Sometimes the stories proximity to each other suggests they might be . . . there are moments when a character in another story seemed to get a mention in another (or a similar name) but its hard to tell if its really the same person. The repetition of titles should be another hint but there's no obvious links in the stories themselves, which can sometimes leave you skimming the tale for tossed off lines as more than coincidence, for a name to be more than a reused name, for one story to bump even tangentially into another and send it spiraling into its own new orbit.
Maybe they are. Chances are, they aren't and even if they were it hardly seems to matter. There's no overarching plot here, no grand string of events pulling all these people together into some grand finale, anymore than your funeral may be the first time that a lot of people you've known for years finally get the chance to meet each other. Instead its fine sketches, single page stories where the weight of every word and line means something, where some of the fun is watching Sorrentino inch his way out onto a highwire and pull off the act, then dust himself off and try it again. Its an exercise that feels strangely intimate, a glimpse into lives that is uncomfortably close as we witness people in their lowest moments, or in the moment before their lowest moment (not every story is depressing . . . a wife-swap tale is actually kind of funny in how it shakes out), the final stop of a downward trajectory or the point where the parabola starts to inexorably curve. Its a book you can read in an hour or two (I didn't, but that wasn't because of a lack of trying) but slow or quickly the stories accumulate, asking questions the book isn't going to spell out the answer to. Flip through, and they stick. Linger on them and they settle in further. it’s the feelings that struck most of all when reading, the sense of what happens in the stray sad glance of someone we pass on the sidewalk, what happens when we see the light go out in the slit under the apartment door, what two people can mean in how close or far apart they stand from each other. Sorrentino has an ear for language, and an eye for people, and the combination here, played out fifty-two times, feels exhilarating in spots, somber in others, and penetrating nearly every time out.
As I said, I don't know if this is the best place to start with Sorrentino but to me it seems as good a place as any. Even with its length its still not for everyone but because of the length it shouldn't take you long to figure out if this style is for you. And by the end you'll either be glad you quickly figured out it wasn't to your taste, or in my case, excited to see where else he was able to take his talents.
Breaking things down to their core elements is easy enough . . . you can repeat a note in a song over and over again, you can paint giant blocks of a single color on a canvas, I guess you could even write a story using only punctuation but the real trick is making someone care about it as more than a strange academic exercise to prove some esoteric point. People will always appreciate clever things (or be jealous we didn't think of it first) but its slightly more difficult if you can't convince them there's some kind of point to it. Its not necessarily easier to do this with a song or a painting but with the time investment so much less than a story you may find people more willing to indulge you. Stories, on the other hand, aren't always barbed arrows aimed directly at your heart or brain . . . even the shortest stories have to create a world of sorts (or recreate ours), give us a couple characters we can relate to or hate (or feeling something about) and give it all a reason for existing. To do that in a couple of pages is not exactly easy. To do it repeatedly is, to say the least, somewhat impressive.
Gilbert Sorrentino was, as far as I can tell, never a super-famous or high-selling writer but he was one of those that authors and critics admired mostly because he kept trying to do different things and often pulled them. And while postmodern experiments in language and structure aren't general crowd-pleasers, he has a decently lengthy bibliography and quite a few admirers ("Mulligans Stew" is the big one, if you're the kind of person who starts with the greatest hits). I unfortunately first heard of him when he passed away in 2006, the same year he released this novel (one more posthumous work would arrive in 2010) and after reading what people said about his books, I realized he sounded like someone up my alley and I wound up acquiring most of his better known works, with this one coming up first because of the weird way I sometimes stack things (its thin and probably was slotted in when I was trying to maximize space).
I don't know if this is the best introduction to his works, but its definitely not a bad one. Structured sort of like a novel (two parts of twenty-six chapters apiece, adding up to, yes, a deck of cards) but with one enormous quirk . . . each chapter is basically its own short story of a couple pages each, none of them seem to have any direct connection to the ones around it and all the chapter titles used in Part One get reused again in Part Two, So its essentially a short story collection that is wearing the clothes of a novel, but without any central plot or standout continuing characters. Its just stories about people, over and over and over until the book itself is over.
Yet its not some staid and dry academic exercise. Each of the stories seems to inhabit its own distinctive space, as Sorrentino unspools tale after tale of people generally failing to get what they want, or coming to the understanding that getting what they want is never going to be an item on their particular menu. All are extremely short (a couple top a relatively gargantuan five pages), which does help the concept go down a bit easier in the manner of the best punk albums . . . if there's one story that really isn't to your liking, just wait a few pages and another will be along shortly.
Giving himself only a couple pages of rope means he only has a small chance to make an impact and just writing short tales on their own isn't a recipe for reader satisfaction (says the guy currently reading a book of Hemingway short stories . . . I'll let you know if it has the baby shoes one) if you don't craft them for maximum impact in the space you've given. Which he generally does.
Its honestly impressive how he manages to hit the mark again and again over the course of this. Most of the stories are carved from the same vein . . . what feels like a mid-century setting generally in the NY/NJ area (though one story makes a reference to Holsten's in Bloomfield and then takes about a character going to the waterfront which . . . doesn't exist in Bloomfield so maybe he meant something else) and featuring men and woman repeatedly failing to come to terms with each other and themselves. Most of the stories are relatively downbeat scenarios (sometimes extremely downbeat, as there are at least two tales dealing with a sexual assault) but are so specific and detailed even at a page or two that it doesn't feel like a litany of depressing things but a tour through lives that are still in the process of not turning out the way they planned. Throughout we see failed attempts at connection from parents to children, from wives to husbands, we see people lamenting their life choices, we see people actively making things worse, either intentionally or otherwise.
Is it all connected? Sometimes the stories proximity to each other suggests they might be . . . there are moments when a character in another story seemed to get a mention in another (or a similar name) but its hard to tell if its really the same person. The repetition of titles should be another hint but there's no obvious links in the stories themselves, which can sometimes leave you skimming the tale for tossed off lines as more than coincidence, for a name to be more than a reused name, for one story to bump even tangentially into another and send it spiraling into its own new orbit.
Maybe they are. Chances are, they aren't and even if they were it hardly seems to matter. There's no overarching plot here, no grand string of events pulling all these people together into some grand finale, anymore than your funeral may be the first time that a lot of people you've known for years finally get the chance to meet each other. Instead its fine sketches, single page stories where the weight of every word and line means something, where some of the fun is watching Sorrentino inch his way out onto a highwire and pull off the act, then dust himself off and try it again. Its an exercise that feels strangely intimate, a glimpse into lives that is uncomfortably close as we witness people in their lowest moments, or in the moment before their lowest moment (not every story is depressing . . . a wife-swap tale is actually kind of funny in how it shakes out), the final stop of a downward trajectory or the point where the parabola starts to inexorably curve. Its a book you can read in an hour or two (I didn't, but that wasn't because of a lack of trying) but slow or quickly the stories accumulate, asking questions the book isn't going to spell out the answer to. Flip through, and they stick. Linger on them and they settle in further. it’s the feelings that struck most of all when reading, the sense of what happens in the stray sad glance of someone we pass on the sidewalk, what happens when we see the light go out in the slit under the apartment door, what two people can mean in how close or far apart they stand from each other. Sorrentino has an ear for language, and an eye for people, and the combination here, played out fifty-two times, feels exhilarating in spots, somber in others, and penetrating nearly every time out.
As I said, I don't know if this is the best place to start with Sorrentino but to me it seems as good a place as any. Even with its length its still not for everyone but because of the length it shouldn't take you long to figure out if this style is for you. And by the end you'll either be glad you quickly figured out it wasn't to your taste, or in my case, excited to see where else he was able to take his talents.
March 2, 2025
Out of all of Sorrentino's fragmentary novels, this was easily the hardest to swallow. Like the others, I thought this would be a series of piquant vignettes that made me laugh, cry, and other such emotes. Instead, we have a cesspool of bitter contempt for human beings, cold-blooded infidelity, and aberrant sexual violence. A brutal 150 pages that made me reexamine the extent to which substance can interfere with my appreciation for execution. I see a lot of other reviewers reducing this to the level of "dirty old man" drivel, but GS's ability to capture the intricate facets of human behavior in such short, emphatic bursts is hard to overlook. Being the last work published before his death, this one just happens to be largely shaped by the misanthropic disdain of a 97 year old New Yorker at the end of his life. A nonessential supplement for hardcore fans of Gil.
May 4, 2017
My first Sorrentino and will not be my last (I hate in when fuckers say that...like OOOh boy, not my last Sorrentino you can bet your bottom dollar on that, you ol' son of a bitch..)...fantastic fuck around about throughout, fucking, drinking, suburban malaise (you know that...shit), but played with perfectly (play being key...a deck of cards being key)...sometimes for pathos, laughs, stop in your tracks, and then the structure, the repetitive character names...a great book, a sad book, a true book, I think, in a lot of way...kindness too...seriously, kindness and warmth (people miss that often in stuff like this and say Barthelme...but, for me, it's there)... they call me the grade-inflator (The Evenings got a million stars though...)
January 8, 2019
Vignettes of re!ationships, sexual and otherwise, meaty but not uplifting
An odd assortment of stories, many with the same characters at different times in their lives. Most of the tales were a little too graphic and alcohol filled for my taste--pretty depressing. It is definitely worth reading though,
An odd assortment of stories, many with the same characters at different times in their lives. Most of the tales were a little too graphic and alcohol filled for my taste--pretty depressing. It is definitely worth reading though,
May 23, 2020
darker than the other Sorrentino I read. maybe he had a bad life experience or something.
July 1, 2015
Initially this book sounded compelling but the curiosity that it managed to generate in me quickly dissipated with each page read. "A Strange Commonplace" is merely a collection of loosely connected stories that are narrated in a couple of pages at best. There are a couple that manage to stand out but most are just dribble, generic and bleak everyday narratives told by characters who are unable to convey a personality or a "voice". I was unable to put this book down but this was due to some sort of unspoken commitment from within me for having purchased the book and not sure to it's literary merits or for the experience that it offered. I'm willing to give the author another go but I've had more than I can stand with this so called novel.
September 6, 2013
For a full review, go here:
http://www.jeffbursey.com/downloads/B...
http://www.jeffbursey.com/downloads/B...
July 17, 2011
PEYTON PLACE as told by the furniture and fashion accessories present.
Folks into David Lynch and Steve Erickson will dig this.
Cheers.
Folks into David Lynch and Steve Erickson will dig this.
Cheers.
May 27, 2018
Actually DNF 3/4 of the way through... NO NO NO!
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