APF

The tunnel in the snow leads to a warm kitchen, vinegary salad, ham and baloney
and American cheese, white bread from Bohack’s and tomato-rice soup and bottles of
ketchup and Worcestershire sauce, coffee. It leads to heaven. Who is the strange and
beautiful man at the far end of the tunnel he has just dug from the black Packard sedan to
the white door of the little frame house? And who is the woman, who smells of winter
and wool and perfume, of spearmint and whiskey and love? He gets out of the car and the
woman holds his arm as he starts down the thrilling tunnel, through the snow banked
above him on both sides, to the man in the navy blue overcoat and pearl gray homburg
who waits, down on one knee, his arms held out to him. This will never happen again,
nothing like it will ever happen again. The child begins to laugh joyously in the
crepuscular gray light of the magical tunnel, laughing in the middle of the knifing cold of
the January day, 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. His father wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.
Even this brief passage exhibits some of Sorrentino’s signature stylistic traits: the first sentence
with its list, the exposition-through-questions, the mock lyricism, in this instance leading us to
the sudden reckoning with reality: “. . .the family is almost finished and done with. His father
wears a white silk scarf with blue polka dots.”
As playful, even extravagant, as Sorrentino’s fiction can sometimes seem, his best work
always represents a reckoning with reality. Books like Steelwork and Red the Fiend perhaps
address hard-bitten realities somewhat more directly (but only somewhat) than books like
Mulligan Stew and Blue Pastoral, but ultimately all of his books are aesthetically provocative
efforts to get at the prevailing features of postwar American life, at what the title of one of his
best books calls the “imaginative qualities of actual things.” A Strange Commonplace indeed.
This book will probably strike readers less familiar with Sorrentino’s work (for whom it would
make a perfectly good introduction) as especially concerned with depicting these prevailing
features, most of them disturbing if not actively repugnant, as well as the ways in which its
characters attempt to cope with their circumstances. If the novel seems unfamiliar in its method
of portraying these characters, their mostly unsuccessful strategies will undoubtedly seem very
familiar, the kaleidoscopic picture of ourselves that emerges all too recognizable.
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