APF

ecause in the process it stimulates the reader to reflect on the conventions of reading—
conventions that might otherwise exclude novels like these as simply curiosities.
At the same time that Take It or Leave It attempts to undermine the authority of
conventional approaches to the writing and reading of fiction, it also evokes one of the first great
novels in the tradition, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy. Both are narratives about the
impossibility of producing a narrative that doesn't leave out everything that's important. Both
illustrate this dilemma by hilariously interrupting the narrative in progress through seemingly
endless diversions and divagations. Sterne's novel at the very beginning of the modern history of
fiction questioned the adequacy of "telling a story" as the justification of the form, and Take It
Or Leave It renews that effort as provocatively as any work of fiction since.
Gilbert Sorrentino
In Barry Alpert’s 1974 interview with him, Gilbert Sorrentino declares that he is “an
episodic and synthetic writer. . .I don’t like to take a subject and break it down into parts, I like to
take disparate parts and put them all together and see what happens.” In his late works Little
Casino, Lunar Follies, and A Strange Commonplace, Sorrentino demonstrates that he continues
to pursue this “synthetic” approach to the writing of fiction, if anything to even more deliberate
and concentrated effect. So dedicated are these books to the juxtaposing of “disparate parts,”
they seem to have brought Sorrentino to a point where all conventional expectations of
continuity and development in character or story are simply irrelevant, vestiges of a prior of
conception of fiction that no longer has much force.
Readers whose assumptions about the novel still depend on notions of plot and character
development are likely to have trouble identifying A Strange Commonplace as a novel at all.
Some might think of it as a collection of sketches and short tales, but even if we were to take the
“episodic” nature of the book as far as this, we would, of course, be privileging the “disparate
parts” over the effort “to put them all together” and would be missing the aesthetic point
altogether. This is a unified work of fiction, however much Sorrentino makes us participate in
the act of synthesizing its elements so that, along with the author, we readers can “see what
happens.”
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