APF

The Moon in Its Flight is a book that fans of Sorrentino’s fiction will want to read, but it
is more interesting as a minor side attraction amid the greater pleasures of Sorrentino’s
carnivalesque novels. Curious readers would be better off to start with Imaginative Qualities of
Actual Things, a provocative but also compelling work of metafiction, perhaps then going on to
what is in my view Sorrentino’s masterwork, the sui generis Mulligan Stew. Those interested in
Sorrentino’s fictional depictions of Brooklyn (in which several of the stories in The Moon in Its
Flight are set) might also try Steelwork or Crystal Vision. The biggest problem with The Moon in
Its Flight is that unwary readers might take some of the more tepid and unfocused stories in this
book as representative of Gilbert Sorrentino’s achievements as a writer of fiction and might pass
on the more important novels. If they did so, they would be missing out on the opportunity to
read one of the most invigorating and audacious bodies of work in 20th century American
fiction.
Calibrated Iconoclasms:
Donald Barthelme
It was never clear why Donald Barthelme chose to re-publish his stories in collected,
compendium editions, first in Sixty Stories and then in Forty Stories. The very titles of these
books obscured the playful and distinctive signposts provided by the original volumes in which
these stories appeared, bearing as they did such colorful, and ultimately revealing, titles as Come
Back, Dr. Caligari and Unspeakable Practices, Unnatural Acts. (Some of the later titles—City
Life, Sadness—were more elegantly succinct, but they also signified a thematic association
among the included stories that is lost, and to some degree impoverishes the reader’s response,
when the stories are reprinted in an omnibus form.) More importantly, what encountering
Barthelme’s fiction in these collected volumes, the latest of which, Flying to America, includes
all of the stories not found in the first two, really threatens to de-emphasize—or even eliminate—
is the more carefully calibrated iconoclasm, the redoubled assault on convention, that one
experiences when reading Barthelme’s stories in their original book-bound form.
Presumably, Barthelme reprinted in Sixty Stories the stories he most wanted to highlight.
To this extent, these must have been what Barthelme (or Barthelme and his editor) considered
the “best” of what is now apparently his 145 short stories (forty-five are included in Flying to
America). Likewise, it must be presumed that the 40 stories of the second volume were second-
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