BLUE PASTORAL

by Gilbert Sorrentino ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 30, 1983

Someone who's never read a Sorrentino novel before can find some nuggets of delight here. But steadier readers of his vaudevillian fiction may find themselves quickly lulled into torpor by the inevitably recycled devices (authorial stridor, black-outs, lists, one-liners)--and this finally seems the tiredest and most formulized of Sorrentino's bright prose instruments. ""Blue"" Serge Gavotte is a schlepper, a New York lens grinder and would-be pianist--who, in a sad grant proposal, details his wonder at discovering that the black keys of the instrument also make music, ""to play most of the wonderful old songs from Porgie and Bessie, All the Things That You Were, and, some of that other old favorite, Green Old Dolphin."" And Blue's mangling of English provides the novel's primary comedy, counterpointed with a genuinely hilarious French-into-pig-English erotic novel, ""Les Musiques et les mauvaises herbes"" (in which all the characters speak fractures akin to Steve Martin's wild-and-crazy-guy dialect). But the principal action is a cross-country trek: Blue, with alopecic wife Helene and lumpish son Zimmerman, takes off across America by pushcart (plus piano) in quest of a cosmic musical ""Phrase."" So, with Draytonian rhetoric and malapropisms galore, Sorrentino uses the journey format to demolish all varieties of Americana: out in exurbia, there are fanciful, medical-ized names for flowers (""the majestic whang pylorus,"" ""the cowpoke adenoma""); backwater academics are skewered; there are send-ups of nearly every regional/ ethnic/nostalgic clichÉ--from the South, New Mexico, and California to the Painted Desert. (""Beyond the same arroyo, candy red as the blush that ne'er suffuses the book reviewer's face and April pink as the stain at the bottom of a sputum cup."") But as the malapropisms mount, the tropes flutter, and the general literary confetti is strewn, there also comes an oppression: the novel is like a sophisticated lounge comic's routine gone the length of the Ring cycle. (It can also be read as a perverse reworking of Sorrentino's first novel, The Sky Changes.) A few sections are brilliant and wicked--Blue's braiding and styling of Helene's falling hair, a Jesuit's sex advice, a Beckettian description of the Petrified Forest--and they prove again how much of a stern dazzler Sorrentino can be. But to be trapped inside this book's shooting gallery--targets, guns, noise, but everything mechanical--is a very minor, ultimately enervating sort of entertainment.

Pub Date: May 30, 1983

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: North Point

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1983

Categories: FICTION