CHRISTOPHER SORRENTINO
BOOKS
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. What begins as a spare account of an inauspicious-seeming evening soon gives way to a kaleidoscopic series of narrative tracks: a catalog of seemingly irrelevant minutiae about the band. The sardonic remarks of the novel's glibly contemptuous "author." The wildly contradictory testimony of nine different witnesses to the band's infamous affairs. The travails of a would-be biographer who, as Operation Desert Storm erupts, is baffled in his attempts to trace the now-famous Hi-Fi's tepid beginnings years earlier in lower Manhattan. Gradually, this forensic examination of the events surrounding the Inauguration Night performance reveal varying degrees of madness, greed, chaos, and despair — an omen of the era to come.
“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...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 Ascension
“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
“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
“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
1974: A tiny band of self-styled urban guerrillas, calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army, abducts a newspaper heiress, who then abruptly announces that she has adopted the guerrilla name "Tania" and chosen to remain with her former captors. Has she been brainwashed? Coerced? Could she be sincere? Why would such a nice girl disavow her loving parents, her adoring fiancé, her comfortable home? Why would she suddenly adopt the SLA's cri de coeur, "Death to the Fascist Insect that Preys Upon the Life of the People"? Soon most of the SLA are dead, killed in a suicidal confrontation with police in Los Angeles, forcing Tania and her remaining comrades underground, where they will remain for the next sixteen months.Trance traces this fugitive period, leading the reader on a breathtaking, hilarious, and heartbreaking tour across a beleaguered America, in the company of scam artists, visionaries, cultists, and a mismatched gang of middle-class radicals who typify the guiding conceit of their time, that of self-renovation. Insightful, compassionate, scathingly funny, and moving, Trance is a virtuoso performance.
"Trance is a work of startling insight, marvelously and masterfully evoking the grim stuff of true American nightmares."
— Colson Whitehead, author of The Nickel Boys and The Underground Railroad
"An ambitious, intelligent, and kaleidoscopically opulent book, remarkably evocative of the textures and tones of the seventies. Sorrentino has a talent for creating authentic, microscopic moments that capture the spirit of the era."
— Lydia Millet, author of A Children's Bible
"Like Don DeLillo in Libra and Philip Roth in American Pastoral, Christopher Sorrentino has opened the pages of his fiction to the breadth of collective memory, and the result is one of the most humane and haunting novels I've read in years...Sorrentino possesses a searing gaze, a polymath's erudition, and a lover's ear for the frailities of human language."
— Jonathan Lethem, author of The Fortress of Solitude and Brooklyn Crime Novel
"Playful, scathing, gripping, and profound, this book is a meditation and a provocation, full of humor and menace. Sorrentino has broken new ground at the border of fiction and history."
— Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask and Home Land
"This sprawling work is so ambitious and irreverent that it doesn't fit easily into any genre...Full of descriptions sublime in their precision...Trance is a pleasure ot read -- delightful and often funny."
— Los Angeles Times
"[Sorrentino] remains a virtuoso, and much of the success of this book is due to his writing skill...[He] is an insightful, sensitive writer who makes you believe you're seeing what he's describing."
— Harvey Pekar, Baltimore Sun
"Big and ambitious...Its method and scope are breathtaking."
— Salon.com
"Sorrentino has something of Don DeLillo's ear for American white noise -- for the hiss and crackle that fills the country's derelict spaces."
— New York Times Book Review
"...a brilliant, hallucinatory fever dream of Americana, one that we have yet to wake up from."
— Seattle Weekly
"A full-blooded lampoon...hilarious, satiric...Trance's charming gift, among others, is respect for the reader's acuity in deciding whether it was a pretty picture. Or not."
— San Francisco Chronicle
"One of the year's most surprising works of fiction...amazing...context vibrates out of the sentences, rather than being foisted on the action from above...It takes novels like this one to bring us back to the moment, to return our icons to us as flesh and blood, almost."
— John Freeman, The Boston Globe
"Sorrentino's vision here is kaleidoscopic, eliding fluidly from individual to individual, taking on a wide array of points of view."
— David L. Ulin, Newsday
"Transcendent...By using the skeleton of what is known to portray people whose minds no one will ever truly understand, Sorrentino gives us a new understanding of our past and future, and a fresh way to consider the ideological movement that can appear so confident in their control or resistance."
— Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Trance is a tour-de-force, announcing a mature and ambitious talent."
— Publishers Weekly
"[A] masterfully omniscent and suspenseful novel. Braiding history with invention, devilish humor with psychological veracity, telling detail with a big-picture perspective, bursts of rapid dialogue with gorgeous description and arresting inner monologues, Sorrentino satirizes with a light yet penetrating touch."
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"A demanding, raw, and fascinating epic."
— Details
"Even more than DeLillo's Libra and Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, Trance works to strip the 'event' of its historical cover, to not only humanize it but reduce it to the mundane and everyday...Trance doggedly dismantles the pedestal of celebrity and myth."
— The Village Voice
"A skeptical, occasionally corrosive perspective...Sorrentino's writing is smart and vibrant, slangy when necessary, and always appropriately allusive. Jammed with acute observations and a good deal of humor."
—The Times Literary Supplement
"Substantial...Cleverly reinvents this story with a handsome helping of historical and contemporary satire."
—The Times (London)
"A tour de force...Trance is a bravura epic that unfolds cinematically yet with linguistic brilliance...Tackles unfolding events from a multiplicity of perspectives with intelligence, insight, and a darkly comic flair."
— Metro (London)
"A powerful satire of American myth-making and of the hidden forces that work against our attempts to discover a true history."
— John Burnside, The Scotsman
"Particularly impressive is Sorrentino's protean writing...the comprehensive arc of humanity astounds. Trance is an epic, epoch-defining achievement, up there with the finest works by Don DeLillo."
— The Sunday Telegraph
"Magnificent...funnier than anything so serious has a right to be. Sorrentino hits the key notes of the era perfectly...Sorrentino's solid-gold satire, a contender for Great American Novel status, is wise to both the honor and hypocrisy of middle-class militants. Scathing and sensitive, Trance will make you its willing captive."
— Uncut
"Sorrentino is a wickedly talented writer...His sense of humor is as sharp as it is savage...A work where unmitigated brilliance and staggering prose is interlaced."
— Rain Taxi
"...a beautifully successful -- indeed, heroic -- attempt to restore to us what is surely one of the great American folk stories of the twentieth century. Trance is a full-blown opera -- an epic documentary fiction, a post-Coover In Cold Blood -- presenting a harmony of hundreds of points of view."
— The Review of Contemporary Fiction
Hardy Bax and Lee Pymlique, two successful Hollywood producers, have some exciting surprises in store for the five lucky winners of the All-America Family Entertainment Challenge! Unfortunately, there are a few snags at the Bax estate, where somewhat inappropriate "auditions" are being held at poolside. There's the latest outbreak of urban rioting, just down the hill. There's the regrettable but completely accidental shooting of an under-resourced youth of color selling candy door to door, and the inconvenient police investigation that follows. There's the constant chore of breaking in new security personnel. There's the Humane Society representative and his annoying objections to the alleged excesses of a zealous dolphin wrangler. There are lawsuits arising from (unproven) charges that the studio has desecrated ancient Native American monuments. There's the sudden (but very timely) passing of the aged "Iron Geezer," toned star of the Steel Grey franchise, who keels over during a contemplative moment in his homey shrine, The Pantheon of Manly Endeavor, before the latest installment has been completed. And will Babonis, the butler, ever get the library dusted? And then the apocalypse arrives.
It's a Hollywood novella, a collaboration between Christopher Sorrentino and artist Derek Boshier.
The fourth collaboration between director Michael Winner and actor Charles Bronson, Death Wish was the apotheosis of a succession of films hitting screens during the sixties and seventies—including Bullitt, Dirty Harry, and Walking Tall—that tacked against a prevailing liberal wind in Hollywood cinema. Exploiting audience fears of a bestial “other” infesting American cities, and explicitly linking law and order with a pastoral ideal of the Old West (and exurban subdivisions), its glib endorsement of vigilantism infuriated liberal critics even as it filled theaters with cheering audiences. Christopher Sorrentino examines Death Wish in its various contexts—as movie, as provocation, as social commentary, as political tautology, and as depiction of urban life—and considers its lasting influence on cinema.
"What immediately stands out is the boldness of Sorrentino’s approach...the best compliment I can give this book is that it often led me to argue with myself as much as with the author."
— Chad Trevitte, Bright Lights Film Journal
"Sorrentino manages to illuminate the film in a way that, while not making it seem any better, makes it far more interesting...Sorrentino is a fine guide, and his unexpected plea for a more even keeled audience (found roaming in a beautiful meander called "Afterthoughts on the Middle Level" that serves as a sort of philosophical conclusion) struck home for this reader in the best way possible."
— The Factual Opinion
"Like the great James Agee, another novelist turned film critic, Lethem and Sorrentino create distinct personal presences on the page, matching subtle intellects with flexible gifts of description. Both certainly got my brain working overtime in response...It is also refreshing in the extreme to read explorations of any films that are this thorough, this frankly self-searching, and (most importantly) this free of studious reverence for their subjects...What Sorrentino and Lethem pursue in their exuberant little volumes are not works of art, but retrievals of artifact: items whose abiding value is not that they are the canonical masterworks of a guiding author...We are thus invited to explore these movies free of auteur-theory mysticism, and instead experience them as living, breathing things: creations born for a variety of weird reasons, serving any number of talents and agendas, and ripe for a long afterlife as various as our affections and imaginations."
— F.X. Feeney, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Sorrentino...finds in both the movie and its reception much to mull about violence and its representation, New York in American cinema, high art and low, and so on. Throughout, Sorrentino makes an eloquent case for attentive viewing with an open mind."
— David Haglund, Salon
Sandy Mulligan has retreated from Brooklyn to the quiet Michigan town where he hopes to finish his long-overdue novel. There, he becomes fascinated by John Salteau, a native Ojibway storyteller who regularly appears at the local library. But Salteau is not what he appears to be -- a fact suspected by Kat Danhoff, an ambitious Chicago reporter of elusive origins, who arrives to investigate a theft from a local casino. Salteau's possible involvement could be the key to the biggest story of her stalled career. Bored, emotionally careless, and sexually reckless, Kat immediately attracts a restive Sandy. Moving, funny, tense, and mysterious, The Fugitives weaves among these characters, uncovering the conflicts and contradictions between their stories. In their growing involvement, each becomes a pawn in the others' games. A love story, a ghost story, and a crime thriller, The Fugitives is also a cautionary tale of twenty-first-century American life -- a meditation on the meaning of identity, on the role storytelling plays in our understanding of ourselves and each other, and on the difficulty of making genuine connections in a world that's connected in almost every way.
"The language of The Fugitives is at once remarkable, startling and invisible. I was completely sucked into the worlds of these characters. It takes a master to make me forget I'm holding a book. Well, I forgot that for more than 300 pages. Brilliant."
— Percival Everett, author of James and Erasure
"Elegantly constructed...satisfying. Given that big novels often seem to warrant attention just for their size, it is its own kind of daring for an author to aim for the understated, the concise and the perfectly joined. Like one of Nanabozho’s simple, spare tales, Sorrentino’s novel might be a little deceptive because it disguises its complexity. Those tricked by Nanabozho or Sorrentino are guilty of not listening closely enough. The trickster is a cunning storyteller, as is Sorrentino...He also delivers what any reader of a thriller would expect."
— Viet Thanh Nguyen, The New York Times Book Review
"A powerful and fiercely unsentimental novel that blazes past all the well-worn pieties about love and loss and leaves them in ashes.”
— Jenny Offill, author of Dept. of Speculation and Weather
"The Fugitives, rife with Sorrentino's dark wit and acute cultural observations, does not disappoint."
— Dana Spiotta, BOMB
"The Fugitives is neither an experimental high-wire act nor a plodding whodunit but something in between, an entirely new kind of novel with exceptional interior monologues animated by deception, double-dealing and a doomed affair that lends an air of existential dread to the story…Sorrentino's electric prose and mordant wit...tap into the secret desire we all have from time to time to shed our skin and start over."
— Jim Ruland, Los Angeles Times
"Sorrentino brings a pristine beauty to every multiple subterfuge, while delivering scene after scene with near surgical precision...The Fugitives is effortlessly expansive, finely crafted, and an absolute pleasure to read."
— Donald Breckenridge, Los Angeles Review of Books
“Generating psychological and cultural insights as bright and stinging as a welder’s sparks, Sorrentino blasts insidious commercialism and corruption, digital narcosis, and the failures of the book and newspaper worlds, while detonating hollow notions of authenticity, ethics, and freedom. A mischievously funny, keenly incisive, and mind-bending outlaw tale.”
— Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
"Smart and mordant...Sorrentino has found in the dubiously flexible terms of twenty-first century identity a subject fit for his high-powered postmodern style: the pyrotechnics of everyone lying their asses off...Bullshit is the only system [the characters] know...The Fugitives is a novel of that system: it shows us what we're all stuck inside...brilliantly cranky."
— James Camp, Bookforum
"Wild yet subtle...Sorrentino assays a wide range of approaches, pushing envelopes of genre till his fingers poke through...This novel snowballs. The miracle is in how it brings this off, always articulate and closely observed. Sorrentino never shortchanges his acuity...indeed the most heroic fugitive in The Fugitives may be the open-ended art of story itself, once more the shape-shifting Trickster."
— John Domini, Philadelphia Inquirer
Victoria Sorrentino's life took her from the South Bronx to the heart of New York's mid-century downtown artistic scene, to the sedate campus of Stanford University, and finally to Brooklyn—a journey witnessed by her son, who watched as she gradually withdrew from everyone and everything, growing more and more isolated before finally dying alone, at eighty, in her apartment. In this rigorous postmortem, Christopher Sorrentino examines the role that race, class, and gender played in his mother's life, excavating his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the working class Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the middle class white woman she had willed herself into becoming. Unfolding against the backdrop of a vanished New York, a city of cheap bohemian enclaves and a thriving avant-garde--a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place--Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrayal of the triumphs and disappointments of life, and the transformative power of grief.
"The mother at the heart of Sorrentino's absolutely compelling memoir represents a generation of women whose lives were based on mystery and chance, on reinvention and the fierce reach for survival. But it's the sharpest shards of detail in her existence that make this so readable—this son's talent for capturing the secret life of a woman once his unreachable light, the beacon, and then the diffuse memory of the sea."
— Susan Straight, author of In The Country of Women
"Christopher Sorrentino's memoir is an incredibly moving masterpiece. Now Beacon, Now Sea is a coming of age story set in a place whose time was coming to an end as told through the comforting, confounding, and crushing story of Sorrentino's relationship with his mother. I had to reach back to Nabokov's Speak, Memory to find another memoir as powerful and poignant as this one and to find one that as profoundly explores the art of memory."
— David Treuer, author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee
“In memoirs by great novelists any distance between those arts shrinks, imagination and testimony lending prose the clarity of an engraving. Put Christopher Sorrentino's accomplishment in Now Beacon, Now Sea with Roth’s Patrimony, Schwartz’s Leaving Brooklyn, Gornick’s Fierce Attachments, Conroy’s Stop-Time, books in which the necessity of commanding trauma onto the page has galvanized the language from within.”
— Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Arrest
"As irresistible as it is unflinching, Now Beacon, Now Sea is a family memoir, a literary memoir, an American memoir, a memoir about the nature of identity in our time — and if that means only Christopher Sorrentino could have written it, for all its singularity it does what riveting memoirs do: reveals not only its own secrets but ours as well."
— Steve Erickson, author of Shadowbahn and Zeroville
"Few, if any, are the memoirs of mothers and sons that are as excoriating and unforgettable as Christopher Sorrentino’s Now Beacon, Now Sea. Written equally in wrath and powerfully and patiently illuminated love, Sorrentino‘s account of filial anguish will linger long in memory. What an imperative contribution to the memoir form and to our literature generally. I could not admire this book more."
— Rick Moody, author of The Ice Storm and The Long Accomplishment
"Every genre, every form, has its strengths and weaknesses; the memoir, especially the contemporary American memoir, can fall into a default mode of progress narrative. One of the many accomplishments of Christopher Sorrentino’s extraordinary new book is the way in which it refuses to sentimentalize, even slightly, its brutal material. Now Beacon, Now Sea is impressively astringent art."
— David Shields, author of The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead and Reality Hunger
"Acute, intimate and exceedingly fair...each description feels truer than the last. We may have a greater cultural appetite for eulogies, but an autopsy, in looking directly at the cold corpse of a family in all its gruesomeness and mystery, can be just as profound, and in the hands of a writer as restrained and humane as Sorrentino, just as beautiful."
— Eleanor Henderson, The New York Times Book Review
"Now Beacon, Now Sea is an ambitious balancing act of summary and scene that painstakingly reveals an unsettled mind doing the work of reconfiguring its understanding of the past...[Sorrentino] relinquishes control of his family’s story by accepting his implication in its collapse, allowing readers to make what they will of all its messy and beautiful parts."
— Richard Scott Larson, Chicago Review of Books
"With excoriating candor, with empathy enough to give you gooseflesh, he gleans exciting new clues in that never-ending mystery, the lives of the artists."
— John Domini, Los Angeles Review of Books
"Sagacious and heartbreaking . . . Christopher Sorrentino has written a stunning, gutting memoir about his life as the son of a chronically depressed mother and a celebrated writer father."
— Nell Beram, Shelf Awareness
"Even at its darkest,this rich narrative shines."
— Publishers Weekly
"A sharp, sad tale of bitterness and regret."
— Kirkus
