Blue Pastoral [Hardcover]

This is a great, sprawling, Rabelaisian , self-indulgent joke of a book, a wild carnival ride, a drunken festival of language, from ivory tower to gutter, and written by a polyglot prodigy who makes Thomas Pynchon, T.C. Boyle and David Foster Wallace all seem like tin-eared dullards. If Sorrentino were English he would be more famous than Julian Barnes; if he were French, better known than Georges Perec. As it is, being American and subject to our culture, Sorrentino has trouble staying in print. But his work is well worth finding, in whatever form.

I have to wonder how many readers who unabashedly relished this novel were hard put to recommend it to friends. It is a case of English 101 Meets Mad Magazine. Yes, it is a send-up of various literary modes, but hardly stuffy or bookish. Its precursors include Swift and early Beckett and Lawrence Sterne and maybe Machado de Assis. And Twain? Terry Southern? Its profligate literary variety--any given chapter might be different in style from the last, and a single sentence may morph from Spenser to Lenny Bruce--merely masquerades as authorial self-indulgence; its seeming logorrhea is in the hands of a precisionist, a miniaturist. Yet it is self-indulgent, of a kind that many authors must dream of allowing themselves, but precious few could carry off. It is testament to Sorrentino's craft and wit and discipline that it is a frolic from beginning to end, bawdy, profane, with laugh-out-loud passages, and with some trenchant social and philosophic points along its nihilistic way.

Its humor ranges from one-liner literary puns ( "I also serve who only stand and prate." "He e'en bared my seat and greeked me afore blushing nature, so that She stood up and said to all the world, 'This is a can!'" ) to convoluted running gags, as with what is presented as a horrendously, hysterically translated French primer, which descends into a bedroom farce. Self- reference abounds: at one point the characters curse the narrator; at another the narrator re-writes a passage, begging the reader's indulgence. A botanical compendium stretches from one end of the book to the other, listing supposedly local flora both real and fanciful. And as with other Sorrentino books I've read so far, there are manifold examples of decidedly heterosexual male proccupations (one meaning of "Blue" in the title); I, admittedly, was happy enough to be complicit in the author's fantasies.

But preeminently this is a cascade, an avalanche of words: an onrushing collision of sounds and textures as much for their own sake as for their place in the (loose) narrative. This prose is more poetic than most poems (even granting that many chapters take the form of poems), and should be read slowly enough to savor the rich, prolix cornucopia that is Sorrentino's wildly unfettered vocabulary.

Understandably, this book is a singularity, even within Sorrentino's decidedly variegated literary output. No one could sustain a career in this self-created genre; it is a testament to the author's erudition and love of his craft that he could finish a sizeable book in this overstuffed, over-the-top format. If you love anomolous Modernist or Postmoderist efforts, but dislike the affected, stingy approach of many, this may be for you. But best read a page or two. Some of the references are already dated, but in the main the adventures of Helene and "Blue" Serge Gavotte are still timely, and the topography they travel comically recognizable.