REAGAN YOUTH.
This innovative first novel deflates the same myths of rock and roll that it glorifies in a vivid exploration of pop culture and the battered society that emerged from the 1980s. On January 20, 1981, Hi-Fi, a third-rate New York bar band, plays another in a series of low-paying gigs as endless clips from Ronald Reagan's inaugural speech drone from a TV in the background. Equipment falters, band members flex their egos, and the sparse crowd shifts from boredom to borderline violence. What begins as a minimalist account of an inauspicious-seeming evening at a nightclub soon gives way to a kaleidoscopic series of narrative tracks that duplicate the layered effect of the music recording process: a catalog of seemingly irrelevant minutiae about the band. A virtuosic "solo" by a glibly omniscient but contemptuous "author." The wildly contradictory testimony of nine different witnesses to the band's infamous affairs. A would-be biographer who, from his 1990s vantage, is baffled in his attempts to trace the now famous Hi-Fi's tepid beginnings on Manhattan's Lower East Side. Gradually the events of the Inauguration Night performance expose varying degrees of madness, greed, violence and despair — an omen of the era to come. Sound on Sound brilliantly investigates the cynical business of creating myths, cracking the bulletproof glass of our media-generated culture.
“Sorrentino’s own music is like that of a Charles Ives who spent his time listening to Big Star or the Eagles rather than military marches. Every piece of this music is yammering loudly and incisively with every other part. Like Ives, Sorrentino is contemptuous of his sources, in love with their stupid appeal, and utterly transcendent to them.”
-- Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind and Memories of My Father Watching TV
“...a funny, funny novel. But just as the absurdity of giganticism makes it easy to dismiss a place like Las Vegas, the vulgar assumptions that make its glitz possible aren’t so funny once they become unstoppable...we, according to Sound on Sound, order bits and pieces according to celebrityhood, the trademark, the psychodrama, the pose, the attitude, the ink blot, the market share...what drives Sound on Sound is its judgment as to what constitutes a real novel as well as its expressed awareness of the link between the novel and its culture. Its politics lie in the death grin in a celebrity’s celestial teeth...”
-- Steve Tomasula, author of The Book of Portraiture and VAS: An Opera in Flatland
“Sorrentino has used the rock book format (and his superbly pompous ‘multitrack’ device) as a vehicle for a brilliant and complex novel about remembered truths and modern ennui...gasps of bright poetry...eloquent prose.”
— Patrick Barber, Los Angeles Reader
“...reading rock’n’roll has never been a particularly rewarding experience...but by handling submediocre musicians with cynical wit and an inventive kind of non-storytelling--and by being admirably unmindful of Spinal Tap--Sorrentino gives the rock novel some hope.”
-- Marc Weidenbaum, PULSE!
“Flawlessly executed...sheer virtuosity...funny, perceptive and dead-on the satirical mark.”
-- Publishers Weekly
"As a sardonic condemnation of the bloated egos of rock 'n' roll, it's a ten-minute drum solo with flaming cymbals."
-- LIT (Chicago)
“Sound On Sound gives the impression that its main concerns are satiric and metafictional, yet (paradoxically perhaps) it takes it material seriously. In his way, Sorrentino honours rock'n'roll...Sorrentino's kind of literary subversion also makes indirect contact with serious social and political issues. Themes of homophobia, mental illness, and junk culture are not silenced by Sorrentino's mass of irreverent white noise.”
-- Doug Harkness, VOX (Calgary, Alberta)
“Writers like Christopher Sorrentino bring us back to the pleasures of reading. And there is a lot of intelligent material to chew on here. This book works like a hypertext; the chapters can be read in any order. So in that way it's totally contemporary while continuing to converse with Modernism."
— Alexander Laurence, American Book Review
“...amusing and insightful...”
-- Anthony Miller, EBR
"A pharmaceutical precursor to Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Sound on Sound is, alternately, a rock novel, a critique of the eighties, an exercise in indeterminacy, a summary of modernist technique, a tour de force of narrative voice, and a virtuosic experiment in the stochastic recombination of the basic signifiers of an extended piece of prose. Composed when Sorrentino was 27 and working as an insurance claims adjuster, the book was published in 1995 by the Dalkey Archive Press (better known for their dedicated attention to bringing the work of Sorrentino's father, Gilbert, back into print) after having been turned down by 'twenty or thirty' trade publishers, according to Sorrentino. Savaged by Kirkus Reviews and roundly ignored by the mainstream press, Sound on Sound soon disappeared from view and remains a curiously obscure book to this day, despite the acclaim Sorrentino achieved after the 2005 publication of his Patty Hearst docunovel Trance. As recently as 2007, Sorrentino was complaining in an interview that 'I don't think anyone has ever asked me to discuss Sound on Sound.' The book deals with a day-in-the-life of a mediocre rock band, 'Hi-Fi,' a day that happens to be that of Ronald Reagan's inauguration as US President, an event that Sorrentino alludes to again and again as it becomes clear that the chaotic night on which the book's central events -- or are they motifs? -- take place is the symbol of the greedy and decadent era to come..."
— lightofday.com
“Sorrentino’s own music is like that of a Charles Ives who spent his time listening to Big Star or the Eagles rather than military marches. Every piece of this music is yammering loudly and incisively with every other part. Like Ives, Sorrentino is contemptuous of his sources, in love with their stupid appeal, and utterly transcendent to them.”
-- Curtis White, author of The Middle Mind and Memories of My Father Watching TV
“...a funny, funny novel. But just as the absurdity of giganticism makes it easy to dismiss a place like Las Vegas, the vulgar assumptions that make its glitz possible aren’t so funny once they become unstoppable...we, according to Sound on Sound, order bits and pieces according to celebrityhood, the trademark, the psychodrama, the pose, the attitude, the ink blot, the market share...what drives Sound on Sound is its judgment as to what constitutes a real novel as well as its expressed awareness of the link between the novel and its culture. Its politics lie in the death grin in a celebrity’s celestial teeth...”
-- Steve Tomasula, author of The Book of Portraiture and VAS: An Opera in Flatland
“Sorrentino has used the rock book format (and his superbly pompous ‘multitrack’ device) as a vehicle for a brilliant and complex novel about remembered truths and modern ennui...gasps of bright poetry...eloquent prose.”
— Patrick Barber, Los Angeles Reader
“...reading rock’n’roll has never been a particularly rewarding experience...but by handling submediocre musicians with cynical wit and an inventive kind of non-storytelling--and by being admirably unmindful of Spinal Tap--Sorrentino gives the rock novel some hope.”
-- Marc Weidenbaum, PULSE!
“Flawlessly executed...sheer virtuosity...funny, perceptive and dead-on the satirical mark.”
-- Publishers Weekly
"As a sardonic condemnation of the bloated egos of rock 'n' roll, it's a ten-minute drum solo with flaming cymbals."
-- LIT (Chicago)
“Sound On Sound gives the impression that its main concerns are satiric and metafictional, yet (paradoxically perhaps) it takes it material seriously. In his way, Sorrentino honours rock'n'roll...Sorrentino's kind of literary subversion also makes indirect contact with serious social and political issues. Themes of homophobia, mental illness, and junk culture are not silenced by Sorrentino's mass of irreverent white noise.”
-- Doug Harkness, VOX (Calgary, Alberta)
“Writers like Christopher Sorrentino bring us back to the pleasures of reading. And there is a lot of intelligent material to chew on here. This book works like a hypertext; the chapters can be read in any order. So in that way it's totally contemporary while continuing to converse with Modernism."
— Alexander Laurence, American Book Review
“...amusing and insightful...”
-- Anthony Miller, EBR
"A pharmaceutical precursor to Bolaño's The Savage Detectives, Sound on Sound is, alternately, a rock novel, a critique of the eighties, an exercise in indeterminacy, a summary of modernist technique, a tour de force of narrative voice, and a virtuosic experiment in the stochastic recombination of the basic signifiers of an extended piece of prose. Composed when Sorrentino was 27 and working as an insurance claims adjuster, the book was published in 1995 by the Dalkey Archive Press (better known for their dedicated attention to bringing the work of Sorrentino's father, Gilbert, back into print) after having been turned down by 'twenty or thirty' trade publishers, according to Sorrentino. Savaged by Kirkus Reviews and roundly ignored by the mainstream press, Sound on Sound soon disappeared from view and remains a curiously obscure book to this day, despite the acclaim Sorrentino achieved after the 2005 publication of his Patty Hearst docunovel Trance. As recently as 2007, Sorrentino was complaining in an interview that 'I don't think anyone has ever asked me to discuss Sound on Sound.' The book deals with a day-in-the-life of a mediocre rock band, 'Hi-Fi,' a day that happens to be that of Ronald Reagan's inauguration as US President, an event that Sorrentino alludes to again and again as it becomes clear that the chaotic night on which the book's central events -- or are they motifs? -- take place is the symbol of the greedy and decadent era to come..."
— lightofday.com
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