R.I.P. Gilbert Sorrentino

I have learned via e-mail from his son Christopher that Gilbert Sorrentino died yesterday, May 18, from lung cancer. Readers of this blog know how much I admire Gilbert Sorrentino's work and can guess that I consider this a great loss for American literature. I reviewed his latest novel, A Strange Commonplace, only last month, and I can attest that it showed no dimunition in his talent and his literary imagination. Without Gilbert Sorrentino around to in some ways shine a beacon for what innovative fiction might accomplish, the future of non-traditional/ experimental fiction is necessarily a bleaker one.

In his message, Christopher remarks that he is hoping to spread the word of his father's death through blogs like this one "especially since it's not a 100% sure thing that the Times will pay him any more attention in death than they did in life." The only good thing about the relative neglect Gilbert Sorrentino suffered during his lifetime is that the next generation of readers will be able to discover his many excellent books with a feeling of astonishment that such a writer could be so unjustly ignored by those ostensibly charged with alerting us to the great writers in our midst.

UPDATE Saturday, May 20. Although today's obituary page does include a notice for an obscure federal judge and a former roadie for the Grateful Dead, The New York Times has yet to publish an obituary for Sorrentino. (And Sorrentino is a New Yorker!) We'll give them the benefit of the doubt and assume it will run in Sunday's paper.

UPDATE Sunday, May 21. Today's NYT obituary page does contain a notice for Jorce Porcel, "an Argentine comedian and television host known across Latin America for his portly size and bawdy humor," but there is no obituary for Gilbert Sorrentino.

UPDATE May 21. Jonathan Mayhew has a very good appreciation of Sorrentino at his weblog Bemsha Swing.

Comments

[Jonathan Mayhew]

I knew him pretty well as a student of his. I loved his ironic sense of humor in person--not that different from his writing style, really.

[Paul]

A little tribute and some great audio files of Gilbert Sorrentino reading and talking about his work:

http://paulsaxton2.blogspot.com

[Kate S.]

I have not yet read any of Sorrentino's work. Which of his books would you recommend as a good starting place?

[Dan Green]

Kate: You could start with his first and most conventional novel,*The Sky Changes*. Or you could begin with the first of what would turn out to be his more significant innovative works, *Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things*. Or you could go straight to his masterwork, *Mulligan Stew*.

[Paul]

I'd recommend his later books as excellent starting places. Things like Little Casino, Lunar Follies and his last, A Strange Commonplace. Mulligan Stew, while defintely a great book, is something of a one-off. Also try Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things and Steelwork. And then there's The Moon In Its Flight, the title story of which is regarded by a good few as one of the great American short stories.

[dan visel]

Page 39 of today's Metro Section in the print edition of today's New York Times carries this brief notice:

SORRENTINO--Gilbert. Died on May 18, in Brooklyn, at 77, of cancer. Novelist, poet, critic, and teacher, husband of Victoria, father of Jesse, Christopher, and the later Delia, grandfather of James, Violet & Penelope. A memorial service will be held later this years. In lieu of flowers, please make donations to the PEN Writer's Fund.

[Jonathan Mayhew]

Maybe they'll have the real obit in a few days. Some of the ones in today's times were for people who died on the 12th.

[Nick]

Bad news. Since I work at 'The World's Most Famous Bookshop' maybe I'll be able to get more of his stuff in (I should have done this anyway but it will help to have the strange phenomenon _Death=renewed/fresh interest_ on my side).

[Jonathan Mayhew]

Of more than 20 literary works, his most commercially successful was the novel "Mulligan Stew," which was named by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of 1979. A reviewer, Malcolm Bradbury, described it as a "neo-Joycean concoction" about a "failing, if not failed writer."

In 2001, David Andrews, in The Review of Contemporary Fiction, wrote, "There is no other American writer whose oeuvre remotely resembles that of Gilbert Sorrentino, and it is tempting to say that no other living American can match his artistic achievement."
Here's part of today's Times obit for GS:

Yet, Mr. Andrews added, "Sorrentino continues to have trouble publishing his work, and it is an almost trite sad-but-truism that his reputation remains smaller than his accomplishments would dictate."

Mr. Sorrentino had his detractors as well. Martin Seymour-Smith, writing in The Financial Times in 1984, wrote that Mr. Sorrentino had "attracted extravagant praise from a few but no notice from most critics or readers. This suggests that he might well be a writer of very high quality. But in my view he is not."

[Jonathan Mayhew]

That above is from the Times today, not from me. I meant to attribute it but somehow the first sentence was cut off my comment.

[SSavage]

The last sentence of Sorrentino's last work, A Strange Commonplace, is strangely appropriate to the silence that has greeted the news of his death: "He wants, even more than he wants to be alive again, to be dead with them, but he is dead with himself alone."