The Sky Changes

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the unimaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged through the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work.

Genres: Novels, Fiction, American, Literature

139 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1966

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 5 out of 5]

This guy changes . . . his mind. In 2010, I described this devastating novel as a “slab of poetic miserablism”, which is accurate apart from the word ‘slab’ (139pp), then I went on to describe the structure as “interesting” (is that all, young me?), and dismiss the novel as “banal” and “repetitive”, which is wrong and foolish. Sorrentino’s first novel is a captivating road trip chronicling a failing marriage, and with its inventive state-hopping road-trip-in-hell structure, summons up the heartbreak and frustration and desperation of a couple making a futile attempt to make their marriage work. There are many lonely, pathetic, embittered and spot-on scenes here, narrated in Sorrentino’s detached and razor-sharp prose, and the sparse and beautiful descriptions are among the finest and most sincere in the Gil oeuvre. I experienced heartbreak between the first reading and the second, which also helped. Sometimes, readers have to admit they were callow slobs with their teensy minds closed. For six years, I misled potential readers of this novel with a feeble two-star review, for which I apologise. An essential first novel.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've only read one road-trip book before. Quirky, girl-gets-over-old-love, meets-new-love, feel-good but-not-too-good, lots of asides about those bits of the US y'all laugh at. Not my cup of tea, though it sold lots of copies and it won't surprise me if the movie version pops up on your (sic) netflix menu.

I didn't realise, when I opened this that it was a road-trip novel. For a start, it takes some pages to figure out what's going on. And I found the poetry of it stopped any flow. It has an Under Milkwood beguiling sense that it should be read aloud. I would read a couple of pages and then go back and read it aloud in my head. Maybe half way through the book I stopped doing that, and I'm not sure if that was just taking for granted what earlier distracted me, or if the style of writing somewhat changes. I should note that I read the 1986 edition, a revision of the 1966 edition, itself the author's first novel.

Feel good (but not too good), girly lit this is not. I'm not surprised to see that he takes on the mantle and the cause of William Carlos Williams: the similarities are obvious. For more on Sorrentino's work and his relationship with WCW, see Ken Bolton's article in Jacket Magazine.

It you read Sorrentino's wiki page, you are immediately hit by 'post-modernist' and 'meta-fiction' and that makes you go to goodreads with a sneaking feeling....yes, the only one of your friends to have reviewed this is MJ. Fortunately I only did this after finishing the book. Post-modern? Meta-fiction? Absolutely not - and perhaps that's why MJ excoriated it after his first reading. It's just a straightforward tale of the breakdown of social relations at a time we now remember fondly for the social devastation wreaked. I wonder if you needed to be closer in generation to that period in order to feel the heat of this book? Sorrentino muses on the nature of memory. I love this:

If they hadn't built that fucking house we would have stayed, he thought, we would have stayed and everything would have been OK. What he meant by OK was that everything would have remained in its long-ago attained state of rot, but it would have been submerged rot. He needed, however, the monumentally trite fable of the good old days to avoid their drab truth, in his heart he suspected, even, that the time would come when he would speak, and perhaps even think, of this trip as fun, as adventure, this very moment would become part of the good old days.

This book is incredibly dense, it's short but has so much in it. His inept relationship with his kids, the false nature of friendship. The pissing away of life - through alcohol in particular - that was integral to the scene he is part of. The changing geography and social fabric of the America they pass through as they head from NY to Mexico. The North South divide. Lying and denial as the basis of relationships. It's quite misleading to talk of this as a book about divorce. It is about relationships of all sorts and their fraught, dishonest bases.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpre...

[Tony · Rating 1 out of 5]

Often when I read a writer I like I will go back to read the author's earlier works to get a sense of the progression. In this instance, however, I began with Gilbert Sorrentino's first novel. It would take a helluva lot of progression to get me to read anything that followed.

Here's the plot set-up:

The husband (that's his name in the book) and his wife (her name) and his son (his) and his daughter (hers) go on a road trip from Brooklyn to maybe Mexico, maybe San Francisco, with the driver (his name, too), while husband and wife carry a marriage that is beyond repair. Maybe it's wife's serial adulteries; maybe it's husband's serial drunkenness. Wife will sleep with all husband's friends and mere acquaintances, but will not have sex with husband when he asks her to wear high heels and stockings because it makes her feel like a whore, she says. Husband drinks every day, every night, until he vomits, gets beaten up, or just runs out.

Here's the structural set-up:

This is written in short chapters titled by the town or state (Brooklyn, New York; Louisiana; Grand Canyon, Arizona; etc.). Events occur through the eyes and mind of the husband except for the brief first chapter which oddly seems to be in the voice of the driver.

Here's a sense of the writing chops and tone of the novel:

They get ready to go out, walk the town, he wants to do no more than hide from the time that crushes him, he wants his wife so fiercely that he locks himself in the bathroom and masturbates, his children explore the closet, the beds are made up. Maybe we can get a drink, he thinks, maybe we can get a drink.

Not exactly the Griswolds.

Hipper, presumably smarter reviewers liked this much more than me. Admired it, actually. So don't go by me. Ted marked it as Maybe. I'd rate it Maybe Not.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

An imaginatively episodic road narrative charting the dissolution of a marriage. So much booze, so many cities, and each serving as the geographic equivalent of Stations of the Cross. The children along for the ride are the heartbreakers, innocent observers given barely a thought by their parents wending like a compass to the familial Calvary.

Gorgeous, but damn painful stuff from my perspective as a father. Suffer little children was not meant in the modern, more common definition, but is so often the case.

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was really surprised to learn that this was Sorrentino's first novel. Surprised because it's one of the bleaker mid-life novels I'd ever read, the Sorrentino closest to his friend Hubert "Cubby" Selby Jr.'s art of presenting human suffering in all of its bare naked purity. Punches are not pulled here as the indirect third person but all in the head of a husband narrator takes a road trip across the country from NYC to San Francisco ostensibly to bring his wife and children to a promised land in Mexico that his mother's death and an inheritance have made possible, but really to force some sort of final separation from a marriage long lost to indifference, alcohol, and mutual betrayal and disgust.

Not fun or pleasant, but hard-hitting and good for the empathy. We can love others and feel for them no matter how deeply flawed they are--as all of Selby's novels teach us.

[Adam Floridia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very confusing pronoun/antecedent use. Inconsistent point-of-view. Myriad sentence fragments. Countless comma splices. Unclear transitions in time and place. In English 101: Freshman Comp, this gets an F.

For good ol' Gil Sorrentino, this is an A+. In my ENG 101 class, I constantly tell students that they need to learn the rules of grammar and syntax before they can break them. That way, that can break them intentionally and for effect without coming across as semi-literate. This book is a masterful example how all those rules can go right out the window for an astounding effect. With his fragments, Sorrentino paints some beautiful scenes/images. With his run-ons, he captures the frantic pace of the character's thoughts. With his unclear pronoun use and seemingly changing point-of-view, he crafts a puzzle for the reader to solve, forcing him to really think and read actively; plus, this semi-anonymity (there are nearly no names in the book) makes this a story about American family dynamics rather than just this family's dynamics.

Moreover, this really packs quite a poignant punch as it is teeming with pathos. Kurt Vonnegut once wrote of literature: "Many people need desperately to receive this message: 'I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.'" I can't help but apply this quotation to Sorrentino's book, but in a much darker sense. Sure it's great to realize that someone else out there has the same thoughts, feelings, internal conflicts--just not when those represent the worst part of you. A great character is often one we find relatable; when these characters hold a mirror up to some of the things we most dislike about ourselves, it's none too pleasant.


Since I didn't fit this in anywhere else, I'll tack it on here: Sorrentino's depictions of the South are both incredibly described and extremely critical. VERY well-written!

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Molten word gold poured down the throat of husbandly fear. A bleak, scathing, lucid, and cathartic composition of marital dissonance, the clangor of two untuned instruments so frustrated by the failure to sustain beauty that sadness and anger are the only notes still clear. The intervals are not restful silence but dumbstruck confusion and suffocating apathy. Truly, le ciel est... mort.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read my first Sorrentino (Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things) earlier this year while on my honeymoon, so it feels appropriately inappropriate to have followed it up with his divorce novel a few months later. Mostly I just wanted to work backwards in his catalogue to avoid the hefty Mulligan Stew, which despite bearing my name and most likely being a masterpiece, is not the type of book I’m in the mood for right now.

The Sky Changes is one of the more interesting debuts I can think of. In a sense, it’s a very lowkey novel - it’s only 140 pages and focuses on a small cast of characters - but the self-assuredness with which it is written reads more like a master in the twilight of their career than a novice. Having only read the author once before, I had mistakenly pegged him as being a bit cold and detached, but this isn’t true here at all; he is a bluntly realistic observer of human behavior and emotion, someone smart enough to contemplate his characters’ actions and feelings and reveal them in all their ugliness. And ugliness abounds, as we follow a couple at their marriage’s end, with all the messiness that entails - lingering desire, regrets about their children, suspicions of infidelity, false glimpses of hope at rekindling the old flame, anger, confusion, love, pain, etc. etc. etc. These themes are far from fresh, but Sorrentino manages to conjure them in a way that penetrates more deeply than others who have tried their hand at the breakup novel, and every emotion is felt to the bitter end, with a complexity that a lesser writer would need twice as many pages to render.

The cherry on top of this brilliant thing is that it’s a road trip book. Our almost-broken family sets out on a trek from New York to Mexico to repair (or deal the death blow to) the marriage, and the narrative is broken up into small sections, each of which are titled after the city they occur in. This structure allows Sorrentino to play with time, intermingling memories of the burgeoning relationship back in New York with the present-day ups and downs of days spent in Texas, California, New Mexico, Mississippi, and more (sadly no mention of my home state of Pennsylvania, which I would have loved to see get Gilberted). The reflections on American culture and history, specifically when it comes to racial injustice in the southern states or the desolation of the western landscape, are equally as exciting as the breakup story, and sometimes these detours steal the show so much that I hardly cared about the story, I just wanted to bask in Sorrentino’s commentary for pages on end. Having personally traveled to many of the places the novel visits, I was able to picture each stretch of the journey so vividly, and by the end, the setting became a main character in its own right.

In short, Sorrentino began his career fully-formed and even his earliest work is worth reading. I can’t wait to read the rest chronologically and see what his style evolves into.

[Joseph · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The meal was finally served after the children were in bed, and the sauce that he had manufactured out of the dull ingredients was, as he knew it would be, terrible. Everybody said it was great.”

“He lay on the adjoining bed and read a paperback for an hour or so, then got up, gagging, and threw up, bile, into the toilet. He read and smoked, tried not to think of anything, tried to concentrate on the book he was reading, but it was absurd, the story was taking place in some land so far off, the people were in misery, yet he read wrong, wrong, he found himself envying their misery. He checked his watch, woke up his daughter for her medicine, kissed her, and she went back to sleep. He lay down again and read, the envy upon him again—how lucky to be running away from spies, to be trapped in a yacht wired for destruction by the Communists, to be shadowed by the most notorious gunman in the world. . . he thought how fortunate these adventurous motherfuckers were, then he was asleep.”

“He wondered why the tree didn't have any lights, and he wondered why his mother had put the pig under the tree—he hadn't asked for a pig, that was for babies. And why was she crying? Well, Santa wasn't here yet. In the morning, the pig stared at him, and he picked it up, wound it with the key sticking out of its blue jumper. He put it down, and it bounced and clattered on the linoleum spastically, pounding on the tin drum. He couldn't understand why he had this pig, and why Santa hadn't come, after all…he hadn't come, because his mother had put the pig under the tree. And why was she crying? The pig skittered to a stop and fell over, and he saw his mother in the doorway, do you like your present, son? she said. Yes, he said, winding it up again. It would take him a long time to figure this out. Who wants a toy pig?”

[Joe Grantham · Rating 5 out of 5]

“ Outside the edge of the strained laughter, and the quick banter which followed it, there was a lurking, ominous silence, waiting to invade the car when the talk died …”

“He felt a fantastic freedom, but a sense of futility that negated any pleasure such a feeling bestowed.”

[Rick · Rating 4 out of 5]

World's saddest road trip had me laughing aloud at night.
Re-reading Gilbert makes me remember why I loved him.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Though I have at this point read only four of his novels, all of them from the first half of his career (1966-1983), I have a sense of Gilbert Sorrentino as a protean, chameleonic writer, adapting himself to the specific demands of each project, and imagine that like Georges Perec and Harry Mathews he was a connoisseur not only of puzzles but of disparate games with their corresponding rules. Each Sorrentino novel seems to have demanded fidelity to its own protocols. Each of us is multiple, a population, and Sorrentino represent this, he is several. If he would seem at times to be a fellow traveler of “post-modernists,” an ironist, dabbler in metatextuality, uncommonly attentive to form, often appearing to enjoy making play of his work, his debut novel, THE SKY CHANGES, published originally in 1966 and tinkered with a little by the author before Dalkey Archive would bring it back into circulation, impresses as representing a kind of necessary precursor to what follows. Some artists seem very clearly to start out by grappling with themselves, Heimlich-maneuvering a kind of puttering exorcism. Sorrentino would seem to have been very much such an artist. Believe it or not, “exorcism” may not even be strong enough. This seems practically to be a case of legitimate reanimation, the second life perhaps really a first life, the dead man from a world of the dead, a purgatory America, risen and moving his fingers as if to test them out, jumpstarted, mercifully, by his métier. Our author sees himself, it would seem, in his pre-life dead life, plunged by impertinence of birth into the company of people and “their impossibly cadaverous relations with the life surrounding them.” So then is THE SKY CHANGES some kind of earnest appointment with grim destiny? A necessary though probably painful procedure? Yes and no. Sorrentino would seem to grasp, well in advance of David Foster Wallace, that earnestness itself is but a refined form of irony meant to help mend and sustain. THE SKY CHANGES is perhaps above all else a remarkable work of covert irony, and this is testified to by its efforts to occlude, obscure, and obfuscate. We know that Sorrentino is writing about himself, about his own first marriage, how it caved devastatingly in on itself, and about his children, but we are also aware of a studied poetics of distancing, most especially apparent in the vertigo of pronouns and the slippery, almost disingenuous third person. We may think of the implicit toxicity of explicit self-mythologizers like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer, Sorrentino is clearly thinking of them, but those men in their transvaluation of values managed not to become violently ill with shame, something Sorrentino was unable to avoid doing. What we end up with is shame tableau, a pretty merciless bearing of defects like so many pieces of evidence for the prosecution. But we also have the dance, the parry, the squirming style avoiding the pins. This bearing witness against oneself and balking at having to do so, the broken window pane of the novel’s forensic voice, produces a certain kind of existentialist’s nausea and cosmological disequilibrium. THE SKY CHANGES ends up being a novel of disconsolation’s nth degree, and Sorrentino, not at all hidden behind ‘husband,’ ‘him,’ serves as the ultimate pathetic manifestation of Nietzsche’s reactive man, showcasing all the ressentiment of the students of the Old Testament and all the bad conscience of the students of the New, truly grotesque in his own hindsight, grotesque especially in his self-pity and his callow shameless mendacity. There is cruelty, in fact there is outright physical abuse. There is the worst kind of stupid unnecessary lying and deceit. The problem drinker’s regular suspension of all scruple and subsequent shuddering hangovers. The misogyny that materializes is a very clear extension of sexual desire and disgust of self spilling over and becoming disgust of All. Husband ejaculates and imagines he is ejaculating vinegar. A conviction “that the ugliness must surface as scum or else it poisons the innards, the very entrails.” It is my distinct impression that this is very often truly the case. THE SKY CHANGES has invested a lot in the probibility that this indeed is the proper recourse. From the first use of the word “cunt,” which could not possibly have been deployed more inelegantly (and knows it), I knew I was engaging an intentionally unpleasant book. This is not a novel engineered for reclining and for pleasure. It is a confrontation with self of the kind that probably lives and dies by its ability to provoke in the reader like reflection. I remember the final days of two long romantic relationships and how mentally, physically, and spiritually sick-making it all was. We come best to realize that we build our own worlds perhaps most especially when we are in a bad way and our worlds become overhung by clouds of poison. I know what it is to perform this magick because I have done so. THE SKY CHANGES charts the final sputterings of a marriage and a pervasive spiritual infirmity as husband, wife, children, and driver (emasculating freinemy) make their way West across America, and this becomes the ideal medium for revealing how our blighted spirits construct blighted terrain. “Hopper paintings, barred store fronts, an anonymity of evil, there is no life behind them, there is nothing on the streets, they are drowned in a glare of fluorescence, and nothing moves on them. At the very edge, the edges surrounding, the dead cornfields.” We are talking about people whose conduct is wretched, whose thinking is wretched, we are reading about people it would be ridiculous for us to believe we might like to know intimately, especially one man who “treasured up his misery carefully,” but we already know them as surely as we know the worst of ourselves, and at the same time they are not presented to us in a realist or naturalist mien, but rather in a novel of fortuitous poetic inspiration. I spent a lot of this novel judging somebody who was not me. When I was doing that, I was reading it wrong. It is hard not to regularly read this novel wrong just as it is hard not to regularly read life wrong. The mandate should be to identify rather than to compare. If you were omniscient you would not be able to judge anyone. The novel moves forwards in fragments. Across America. (You will note, if you have read Sorrentino’s BLUE PASTORAL, another road novel, that the frolicsome countercultural bonhomie of its visit to New Orleans, for example, could not be more different than our visit to that city in his debut.) Sometimes the novel leaps back in time. Moments stolen here and there. Buried and uncovered. The author’s Brooklyn. At its most trying, the novel might be too much like a dog lording over its own puke. The best passage may well be the one recounting a memory of a childhood Christmas in Brooklyn; it is beyond finely wrought, effortlessly heartbreaking, triumph of the exemplary detail. It is nice that this comes late in the book. It hit me pretty hard. Right, I suddenly remembered, practically out of breath, how dare I judge anyone. God knows I have learned over the years to be far easier on myself. I ought to spread the gift around. It’s not just a forgive-them-they-know-not-what-they-do trip. I wouldn’t want to be so patronizing. It’s just that even when we overcome our programming that shit is contingent on the programming. Not everybody gets to be reborn. Whether through novel writing or other means. Those that do know grace. Its triumph is in the general, nobody possesses their triumphs, their author the changing sky.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

An absolutely exhausting tour through the hell of America, marriage, and the male psyche. So dangerously close to being some sort of outright men's rights wallow of pity that its all the more astonishing that it toes that line without ever crossing over, instead portraying the protagonist as the absolute cretin that he is. Sorrentino does some interesting things mapping on the thrust of narrative to the thrust of westward expansion and manifest destiny, building on the reader's expectation that the history of America can be read in a straightforward way, from right to left.

[Noah Ringrose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was really really fun to read, also quite dark at points and touched on similar ‘philosophical’ twinges as Bukowski & Kerouac. Some really beautiful prose, will be looking out for more Sorrentino’s as his poetic use of language really scratched that insufferable itch I’ve got.

Bonus points because I had no idea what it was before I bought it and that is always a win

[Roman Leao · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crimony. What these people drink, how did they think it was going to turn out?

[Ava · Rating 2 out of 5]

Great writing but the book was a bit of a drag. Didn’t care for the characters and the family depressed me. I think that is the point

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Intimate observation of the excruciating decay of a romantic relationship is near impossible unless one is a party to said relationship. For those craving insight without the actual experience, there is this book to consider. The unnamed narrator, in third person limited POV, drags the reader through a mechanistic deconstruction of the male brain (one instance of it, at least) as it processes the slow motion failure of marriage.

The couple and their two children, accompanied by the husband's friend (known only as 'the driver') are traveling across the United States toward Mexico, where they intend to live for a year or so, in part as a final effort to save the marriage. The husband's mother has recently died, leaving him with a significant inheritance, enough to bankroll the trip and then some. Along the way, the group spends time with various acquaintances and family members. With the exception of the husband, most characters are either flat or gauzy, lacking in fixed detail and instead reflective of whatever passing feelings the husband projects onto them. Even the husband can be hard to pin down. His main characteristics are passivity and an intermittent sleaziness, as he is prone to getting drunk and pursuing whatever woman is close at hand, often with his wife nearby.

The story is told in alternating flashbacks, flash-forwards, and shifting present moments, chopped up into geographic chunks. The husband's present disillusionment is juxtaposed with his past youthful idealism and simplistic views of love and relationships. He feels guilt over his children and rage alternating with lust and futility toward his wife. His over-thinking of events and motivations in place of effective communication with his wife leads to assumptions that further corrode their relationship. He wants to make it work at times (though not obvious through his actions), while at other times he is looking forward to its ultimate destruction. Parallel to this exists his sensitivity to place, in perpetual flux as it is during the trip and acting on this insular New Yorker as either mood stimulant or depressant. Middle America impales him with its winter bleakness, while parts of the lush South open him to the possiblities of redemption, however illusory they may be.

So he smoked on, and gazed at the house across the street, mistaking the peace that this old city gave him with a peace that he could only have made solid through his own manufacture, his own mind.

This was Sorrentino's first novel and he revised it 20 years later for the Dalkey edition. I hadn't realized this until I started reading it about a month after I picked it up for free at The Book Thing. Generally I'm skeptical of such writerly practice due to the likelihood of disturbing the integrity of the original text, especially in a case like this where a first novel gets reconsidered 20 years later. I have to wonder at Sorrentino's motivation, especially given his claim that "it is not my practice to revise previously published writings."

[Paleofuture · Rating 5 out of 5]

Man, this is a difficult read, and not just because of the content but also the monotony of the action gets unbearable. The story consists of a a family taking a road trip with a friend of the husband/father as his marriage disintegrates with his wife. What makes the book difficult is the selfishness of these people, and yet I couldn't stop reading, mostly due to the moments when the husband acts as a father to his kids. I don't want to give away anything, and so I can only recommend it for those who want something heavy to read, and I don't mean that in any philosophical sense.

[Nancy Inotowok · Rating 2 out of 5]

God, this book is depressing.

I like his abstract style to a point, but the narrative doesn't reach out and grab you. Makes it difficult to care too much about any of the unnamed characters. Page 49 -- I quit.

[LeeLee · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book. Run-on sentences are the jam.

[Alexandra · Rating 2 out of 5]

2/3 of the way through I just couldn't care any more.

[Chris O'brien · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brutal

[Grady Ormsby]

Blue Pastoral (2000) by Gilbert Sorrentino is the odyssey of Serge “Blue” Gavotte who, along with his wife Helene and son Zimmerman, sets off on a journey across America in search of “The perfect musical phrase.” The Sky Changes (1966) is a similar odyssey in that it is also a journey across America, this time in search of redemption and the restoration of lost love. The characters are the husband, the wife and the children (a boy and a girl). Their namelessness to me implies a sort of everybody-anybody designation. Other characters in the story go by initials: S, C. P. F. Q. W. J. etc. They seem to be, like the reader, anonymous participants as well as onlookers. The “chapters” of the novel are sections labeled with geographic locations and are presented in a-chronological order. The “Drakestown, New Jersey,” sections refer to the husband’s troubled childhood. The “Brooklyn, New York,” sections take place in the early days of the husband and wife’s relationship. The “San Francisco, California” sections tell the tale of the journey’s tragic terminus. The “New York, New York” sections flash forward to the husbands’ sad journey home. In between there are stops all across America.
The family sets off on a journey with the ultimate destination of Mexico. There is the illusory dream that perhaps a new start can rescue their doomed marriage. Taking off with a friend, known only as “the Driver,” they head west in an unreliable car. There are many stops along the way as they visit with friends, former friends, relatives and acquaintances. All these people seem to have troubled and difficult lives of their own. Usually the difficulties are masked over by lies, illusions and excessive drinking.
Full of self-referential ironies the narrative is told from the third person point of view with an omniscient perspective from the husband’s mind. Sorrento presents the reader with a rather bleak portrayal of divorce in America. Sadly the children are incidental victims, casualties of “needs and desires so submerged and camouflaged.” Sorrento’s unconventional metafictional style makes it obvious that he is not telling a story as much as he is depicting a moral wasteland, a world of illusion and delusion.