LITTLE CASINO

With more than a dozen novels and a good many volumes of poetry to his credit, Sorrentino (Pack of Lies, 1997, etc.) shows no lack of energy or invention in his latest as he brings his linguistic wizardry to bear on a trio of obsessions: lust, lost loves, and lingerie.

A new kind of content emerges from the author’s use of an intensely nonnarrative approach: names and bodies parade past or loop through view with little development; short scenes receive multiple takes, each with most of the details rearranged; and a schizophrenic commentary—part acerbic critique, part poetic utterance—follows each slab of story. The plot’s rough trajectory of boy-into-man, with its full complement of initial sexual fumblings and middle-aged romantic what-ifs, is grounded in images of Brooklyn and New York half a century ago, but the story has more to do with a time of life than with any individual. Seductive poses and crude couplings abound, largely fueled by a male desire, and the slither of slips and the whiteness of cotton bras and panties, when revealed, provide readily fetishized sense-impressions to render the fantasy whole. The multivoiced response, meanwhile, like a tireless superego or an anally hostile editor, highlights factual discrepancies, moral deficiencies, and the generally limited nature of the action—with no apparent effect toward resultant changes of any kind. As the wit and wordplay in these two self-contained yet codependent spheres continues, however, the effect on the reader is almost hypnotic. As an epigraph by Joseph Cornell goes: “Although we may catalogue a kind of chain mysterious is the force that holds the chain together.”

Difficult, then, for those who are in search of plot, but an engaging riddle for those who aren’t.