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By Root 905 0

friend Delmore Schwartz (who would become the subject of James Atlas’s moving biography); E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, a brilliant nickelodeon of a coup at the time, historical personages and fictional characters painted a bright enamel and set in pageant motion, but now something of a novelty item; William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice, a pretentiously sham Arthur Miller soap-opera exercise in moral breast-beating set in the Holocaust for maximum high-minded, grandstanding sensationalism; John Irving’s World According to Garp, that Rube Goldberg Grand Guignol contraption of castration, self-mutilation, brain damage, and radical gender reassignment that the literary establishment found life-ratifyingly uproarious (“We not only laugh at the world according to Garp, but we also accept it and love it,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times); even Norman Mailer’s Executioner’s Song, a half-great book that has the pared purity of a Japanese prose master such as Kawabata or Tanizaki in its mosaic account of the life of Gary Gilmore, but flabs up in the second half when it shifts to the media circus erected around Gilmore’s execution and includes a heap of special pleading for Mailer’s collaborator on the project, Lawrence Schiller.

No, the seventies novels that mean the most to me are the ones that expressed, distilled, and bottled a mood, mood being the most mysterious element in art, something beyond design and technique, the dark matter that permeates the grainy tilt of Robert Frank photographs, where roadside America seems viewed through skull sockets; the bleak winter of Robert Altman’s McCabe and Mrs. Miller and the rancid sunlight of Sam Peckinpah’s Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia; the sonic dislocation and embracing estrangement of David Bowie’s Low; the God-abandoned destitution of some of the best Twilight Zone episodes.

James Salter’s A Sport and a Pastime has that for me, an erotic novel unsurpassed at recapturing that godly, awakening sense of two young bodies in bed being a new world unto itself, sealed behind shuttered windows that silence and hide the long white afternoons. “Now they are lovers. The first, wild courses are ended. They have founded their domain. A satanic happiness follows.” Sorrentino’s Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, quoted above, crackles with caustic comedy steeped in a witches’ brew of coffee grounds, shed hair on the sofa, and grease spots of mediocrity, with a fine selection of impotence on tap (sexual, literary, you name it) and at least one wisecrack on every other page that will unstitch your scalp and brighten your doomy day, bitter apostrophes about the life of a poet in all its avenues to disappointment: “The real poet was obsessed with his poems, his life, an egoist, selfish, boorish, rude, crazy. A great, romantic thing, into the breach, kill me tomorrow let me live tonight! and so on. Long hair and flowing lips, falling on the thorns of life, tortured to death in stifling university jobs, the Great Soul Writhing Underneath. Swift, intense, and destructive affairs with female undergraduates, too many vodka martinis, Fuck the Dean! Fuck the Chairman! … Anything. Everything.” A frustration-driven novel, always glancing over its shoulder at the next nuisance to darken the doorway, with a mock lyricism that becomes the real impassioned thing by the end, as if it can’t help itself. Imaginative Qualities is the only metafictional novel I can read without feeling as if I’m moving furniture up flights of stairs, the only one most animated by animal human vitality instead of marching through a cerebral encyclopedia. Why Sorrentino orphaned this snaggled line of attack in so many of his later naturalistic-mode novels (which dug their naturalistic knuckles into the brow until the reader cried, “Uncle”) is one of those questions that, had it been posed to him, would have probably been met with a “gruff retort,” like provoking Nabokov by asking about all the damned doppelgängers in his emerald fiction. Be grateful for what we’re given, and don’t muddle criticism with backseat