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Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

4.2 of 5 stars 4.20 · rating details · 167 ratings · 30 reviews

Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Guaranteed permanent relevance by the never-ending presence of the marginally talented--and populated by artists who sold out, would-be artists with little ability, and hopeless hangers-on--this br...more

Paperback, 243 pages

Published March 1st 2007 by Dalkey Archive Press (first published 1972)

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The Day of the Jackal by Frederick Forsyth

Best Books of 1971

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Mar 15, 2013 s.penkevich rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: You!

Recommended to s.penkevich by: MJ Nicholls

Shelves: too_cool_for_school, the_write_mind, metafiction

‘There is no place for an artist here any more. He has been officially dismissed in favor of the entertainer.’

Gilbert Sorrentino mourns the artist, the true purveyor of prose drowning in the growing mass of fakers and sell-outs whose false glamour makes them the candle in which the literary flies will be immolate themselves. Through the voice of his spurned narrator, each chapter dissects the little-to-no-talented lives of several archetypal artists in the 50’s and 60’s New York art world and pi...more ‘There is no place for an artist here any more. He has been officially dismissed in favor of the entertainer.’

Gilbert Sorrentino mourns the artist, the true purveyor of prose drowning in the growing mass of fakers and sell-outs whose false glamour makes them the candle in which the literary flies will be immolate themselves. Through the voice of his spurned narrator, each chapter dissects the little-to-no-talented lives of several archetypal artists in the 50’s and 60’s New York art world and pins the autopsy up in hilariously brutal rants. Imaginative Qualities of Actual Thingsis the perfect novel to read alongside Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet; while Rilke builds a beautiful portrait of prose to empower one down the path of good writing and places warning signs to direct away from pitfalls, Sorrentino investigates the dangerous wayward souls. Within his scathing assaults on the artistic society of his times, Sorrentino delivers a poignant satirical commentary on the forms and fixtures of both good and bad writing.

‘This is a book about destruction,’ Sorrentino’s narrator writes, ‘No tool to be found here with which to build the new society. I would say that this work is to be taken slowly, more like an antidote.’ Each crumbling life highlights the fakery and falseness that he felt plagued his world and his examinations expose the inner pretentiousness and weaknesses in us all. The comedy is rich, the voice sharp and cutting, and nobody is able to reach the other side without seeing a bit of themselves in his attacks. With any hope, Sorrentino’s message reaches the readers hearts and reminds them to purify their artistic souls and do what is right for their work. Across each chapter is an artist whose weakness in character and life is transposed into the art they hide behind. They suffer self-loathing and each other as they wed and bed their way through artistic circles. They suffer ‘the devastating strain of trying to appear happy.’ Yet, despite all their poor abilities and shameful habits, they manage to make a name for themselves while our bitter narrator, with his wealth of knowledge, remains the recipient of rejection letters.

’The support of third-rate artists should be left to those who can best support them – universities and foundations. It tends to prevent them from prostrating you with boredom as they go into their nobody-has-the-courage-to-listen-to-me act. Everybody gets a piece of the action and art remains a game for the intelligent.’

Sorrentino has much to say about the art game. ‘Art as mathematics,’ he writes, ‘good students and bad. It is a matter of how one’s intelligence is fitted to the social possibilities of the environment, no?’However, Sorrentino warns against a world where it is those who succeed in their environment trump the true ‘good students’. It is a world of ‘talented amateurs’ that plague their own world with their shallowness and fakery. It isn’t just the bad authors, but those who receive them as well – the critics and readers. The attacks on critics and editors are some of the most aggressive, despite his insistence that all he really needs a good review. He writes of these critics ‘bitching, bitching, moaning about greatness, and when they are presented with it, they spit on it.’ The real artist is ‘hated and feared – these emotions disguised as admiration.’ While the critics want what is real and good, they reject it for what entertains, what sells, with no regard for the health of literature.

’There is no body of work in literature that, conceived of as some kind of diversion from the stringencies of art, will not rot and its putrescence affect the population…they think they can insult language and it not matter. I see those lusterless words putrefacting, sinking into a soured mulch that will poison the earth the writers thought to celebrate.’

Art leaves a residue in the hearts of its readers/viewers where it grows in society. Sorrentino warns that as we embrace poor art in place of pure art, we allow the bad to flourish with more and more bad art while the true artist withers. We embrace it because it is easy, because it is attractive, appeals to our baseness, our sexuality, but not our intelligence. We circle the flame of fakery and burn up in the process.

This book will bring about endless laughter and exhaust the ink supply of your favorite pen if you try to underline every brilliant passage. However, the characters are only funny through Sorrentino’s scathing criticisms. ‘What is more irritating is to meet real people in the street, at parties, in bars, etc., who have mad it the same way. That’s not so funny at all…’ The metafictional qualities of this novel is the true charm. Sorrentino never lets the reader drift into their illusions and consistently reminds them that these characters are just that – fictional characters. They represent the falseness he despises, and while they may be an amalgamation of people Sorrentino knew in real life, they are only ‘imaginative qualities of actual things.’ He has a gift for creating believable characters out of archetypes by always showing how he doesn’t ‘understand the motivations of these characters I’ve invented’ and having them act in strange ways that even he writes about not understanding. There is an incredibly impressive balance between creating characters that seem to walk right off the page (a few that he claims impose themselves on the novel despite his desire to keep them out of it), yet always keeping the reader grounded in their knowledge that these characters – the narrator included – are fictions. Like how a tiger in a zoo becomes an object of amusement instead of a dangerous predator, Sorrentino chains the enemies of art up in prose and cages them behind the bars of his fiction where they cannot harm us.

His breaks from the story often place emphasis on his own literary devices beyond character creation. He often jokingly offers possible futures for his characters, subtly touching upon how each serves a literary purpose and chastises the plot devices that would appear as overly cliché (especially when using these devices to serve just that ironic purpose). His arrogance and exasperation against possible critiques on his style make for wonderful rants.

’But one of the basic reasons for this list is to allow numbskull reviewers to tell their readers that it is merely an avant-garde convention, employed since Joyce. Further, that the use of these lists is a method whereby the writer avoids the responsibility of narrative and plot. But this book has both narrative and plot. Subtly disguised I grant you, but there.’

There is this comical heart to the novel that instructs in writing as well as deconstructs.

Sorrentino’s brutal assessment of his artistic society is one of the funniest and well-written satires on American literature. While much of the allusions may seem out-dated, such as references to publishing houses from the 50’s and 60’s, the message is incredibly relevant to any writer in any era. It rewards the reader who is well-read enough to understand many of the jokes and be familiar with some of the authors lambasted within (Norman Mailer is repeatedly poked and prodded), yet it is entertaining to anyone looking for a few shots at the artistic world. Anyone and everyone receives a punch to the teeth in this novel, the reader included, and we all walk away better for it.
5/5

‘Rapacity plus taste is a formidable combination, since it so often passes for intelligence. One pities the artist in a world of such predators, all of whom are deeply engaged in the arts too.’

(less)

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Aug 12, 2011 MJ Nicholls rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels, dalkey-archive, merkins, tortured-artists

Re-read Aug 10-12 2012

This book is dear to me as a writer, reader, wannabe aesthete lacking the Ivy League education, and someone familiar with laughing in the dark. The book presents itself as an acid-tongued rant from an embittered narrator, commonly mistaken for Sorrentino himself, who performs a serious of misanthropic character assassinations over eight lurid, self-referential chapters.

As a satire, IQOAT is as blunt as it gets, though it’s wrong to view the book as a series of personal atta...more

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Mar 25, 2013 Sean rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: favourites

No matter how well protected your ego is, no matter how many reinforced barricades you've built up between your fragile inner self and the big bad world, Gilbert Sorrentino will find a way of cutting to the quick and making you feel like the most heinous fraud in the world. Like William Gaddis in his Recognitions, in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things Sorrentino takes aim at the art world of New York in the fifties and sixties, obliterating any and all traces of artistic affectation with suc...more No matter how well protected your ego is, no matter how many reinforced barricades you've built up between your fragile inner self and the big bad world, Gilbert Sorrentino will find a way of cutting to the quick and making you feel like the most heinous fraud in the world. Like William Gaddis in his Recognitions, in Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things Sorrentino takes aim at the art world of New York in the fifties and sixties, obliterating any and all traces of artistic affectation with such bitterness it sometimes reads like he has a jagged bit of bile chocked in his throat. But while Gaddis satirises his would-be artists in order to expose the growing hollowness of art and literature in the mechanical age, Sorrentino's concerns are slightly less grand (though equally compelling), and dealt with in a radically different way.

In my view, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is an attempt to portray the anguish of the "true" artist in this consumer-driven period of late capitalism. Wait, don't roll your eyes just yet. The book is split into eight parts, most of which deal with totally different "characters" (though some recur in different parts of the book), and told in the first-person by a nasty narrator who constantly makes you aware that he is creating these characters, making them do things, and giving them backstory.

This sounds like pretty typical metafiction of the variety I'd typically stay away from, but in Imaginative Qualities there's something immediately remarkable about the way Sorrentino handles his reflexive narrator. Rather than simply being experimentalism for the sake of experimentalism, straight away there is a sense that this scathing disembodied voice really wants to just tell his stories and be done with it, but is constantly catching himself in authorial clichés or pandering to what he thinks the reader will enjoy. Throughout the novel's entirety, he rips on editors, writers, painters, publishers, artists of all kinds, and most of them sexual deviants.The narrator of Imaginative Qualities is painfully caught between his need to create art and the superficiality of the society that will receive it.

As for the whole judgment of merit I'm supposed to do in this space, well, look, Gilbert Sorrentino is a sorely under appreciated genius, and certainly one of the best "lost" postmodernists I've come across. He is constantly hilarious, verbally inventive, and dedicated to the importance and seriousness of his craft. Both Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities are absolute masterpieces and should be treasured. Five stars.(less)

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Mar 16, 2013 Megha rated it 5 of 5 stars

Recommended to Megha by: MJ Nicholls

Shelves: mj-killed-kenny, in-goodreaders-we-trust

Every time you read a Sorrentino, a week is added to MJ's life.

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Mar 02, 2013 Jeff Jackson rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Recommended to Jeff by: John

I'm reading this with a bunch of friends and have already heard complaints about the "torrents of bile" and "oversexed imagination." Plus the inevitable "maybe he's writing this way because he doesn't know how to write a real novel." Yes, "real novel." Which cuts to the quick of Sorrentino's enterprise here, highlighting and then refusing to indulge in all the conventional - read: cliched - tropes of the so-called well made novel. (It's sad how little those tropes have changed since 1971.)

What...more I'm reading this with a bunch of friends and have already heard complaints about the "torrents of bile" and "oversexed imagination." Plus the inevitable "maybe he's writing this way because he doesn't know how to write a real novel." Yes, "real novel." Which cuts to the quick of Sorrentino's enterprise here, highlighting and then refusing to indulge in all the conventional - read: cliched - tropes of the so-called well made novel. (It's sad how little those tropes have changed since 1971.)

What I found remarkable is how the narrator satirizes and still slyly indulges in novelistic conceits, continually moving in-and-out of his metafiction with consummate ease. He'll be telling you about a character he's just made up, then slip into a story about them at a party, relay that he himself was at that party, describe an overheard conversation, then tell you the conversation is an approximation of similar conversations, remind you the character isn't real, then describe how they spilled their wine on the hostess's new couch. And somehow this doesn't disrupt the flow of the narrative. It's a voice and technique that takes some adjustment, but ultimately I found it intoxicating. Dazzling, really.

The narrator calls this a "book of destruction." It's littered with the glittering not-quite-biographies of failed poets, painters, and novelists from the 1950s and 60s- most of whom would've been better off doing something else. There are eight sections, held together by overlapping characters and themes, plus stitched together by crucial motifs including violet eyes and Annette the maid. One friend compared the structure to early Milan Kundera and I can see it, though the metafiction here is more aggressive and on the surface the structure seems more loose.

The narrator exhibits some empathy for his cardboard creations, who threaten to become ever more real whenever he turns his back on them. I can imagine it's easy to miss this given the caustic tone and relentless lampooning of phonies. (Interestingly, in Markson's author quartet and here, the narrators are so fanatically determined to overturn every false idol that they occasionally look like philistines themselves: Markson's author wanting to burn every Warhol canvas and Sorrentino's narrator calling Nabokov a counterfeit at every turn). But there's real feeling and generosity here, most obviously in the finale, which builds to an unexpected climax of sorts.

So all this leaves me with a question: What's the best Sorrentino to check out from here? (less)

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Dec 18, 2007 Chris rated it 4 of 5 stars Recommends it for: the poseur in us all

This is the kind of book that makes you look in the mirror and see the phony you're always cornered by at parties.

Sorrentino's "handbook", published in 1971, follows a garden-variety hipster clique in 1960's New York city. Despite dated names and references, most of which were unfamiliar to me, the novel is far from a completed action in the simple past. It is instead a caustic satire of the modern "artist" ("modern" artist?) as well as a strikingly accurate portrayal of the vanity and pretensio...more

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Feb 06, 2013 Hadrian rated it 4 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: american, fiction, short-stories

Viciously funny. You have to close the book every few pages sometimes, look up with a sigh, and say a long reverent "Daaaaaaaaaaaaamn."

Sorrentino takes a sardonic look at society in the 1950s and 1960s. Not just the grey flannel suit types, but also the beatniks and the hipsters which latched on to any developing counterculture - those who embraced the appearances of a counterculture, but were never able to shake an inner core of mediocrity. Comically shitty poetry, vicious and bitter minor maga...more

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Sep 13, 2011 Alex rated it 3 of 5 stars

Another 3.5er.

Why not higher? This is a pretty brilliant, avant-garde, self aware book. That is, in the long run, it's biggest pro and it's biggest con.

On the plus side, I've never read anything like it, and don't expect to read much similar. It is a scathing critique of the non-artist in the artist's world... the hack in it for the money... the groupie feigning culture to be a part of a circle. The pretension as well as the obliviousness within the circle. It's a novel aware of the artifice of...more Another 3.5er.

Why not higher? This is a pretty brilliant, avant-garde, self aware book. That is, in the long run, it's biggest pro and it's biggest con.

On the plus side, I've never read anything like it, and don't expect to read much similar. It is a scathing critique of the non-artist in the artist's world... the hack in it for the money... the groupie feigning culture to be a part of a circle. The pretension as well as the obliviousness within the circle. It's a novel aware of the artifice of the novel, creating the characters as the book is written, giving us sketches of fake people (as fake as the real so-called artists they're based on?) as their on-the-spot backstories become the story itself. It crafts horrible poetry as well as anyone can unintentionally. It may even be required reading for all aspiring artists, especially writers. The people who put themselves into their work only to be second best to the fakes. It's a bitter, angry rant of a book. It's provocative in many ways. There's an odd tenderness, too... as the narrator creates every shallow, loathsome character, we still feel a shred of sympathy for the loveless marriage, the sad life, the meaningless mooch. As vilified as these shadows of stereotypes are (and indeed, often these characters are described in the terms of who they are being immaterial, because we all know these people, whether they're named Dick Detective or Joe Smith), they're still crafted with the care of an artist, and just as we have friends and acquaintances who we care about yet drive us up a wall, that's how we end up feeling about many of these characters.

However, all these obfuscations also make this an incredibly dense, difficult read. There are inconsistencies, digressions, flows of information pouring out too fast to catch. We're given a rapidfire set of vignettes, and no shortage of new personae to need to learn every last anecdote about, but we're not given a solid plot. The author (or narrator-as-author) inserts himself frequently. It's difficult. It's not going to be a "beach read." It needs your attention. And while that is not a bad thing (not at all), it does cut against the joy of the content. You can love a difficult text, and I don't know if this was indeed love.(less)

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Sep 17, 2011 Cristobal rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: best-books-ever

There are two books that I would take to a desert island. Two books that I have read over and over and will probably continue doing so until I die. One is Angela Carter's Burning Your Boats and the other is Sorrentino's Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which I first read over thirty years ago. I love this book. I love everything about this book. The opening paragraph, the lists, the distain towards "mountain men" poetry. Orange dresses, "Art." It's a freakin' brilliant book. I'll admit th...more

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Apr 11, 2013 Nick Duretta rated it 3 of 5 stars

I don't normally read "experimental" novels like this one (how Sorrentino would have hated that phrase!) so it takes some getting used to. The plot, such as it is, concerning three couples within the New York art world of the early 1970s, is nearly buried beneath an avalanche of free-flowing prose, dancing around what is going on but shooting off into many seemingly unrelated tangents. It's not quite stream of consciousness, but...well, it's difficult to say what it is exactly, but it is interes...more

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Aug 01, 2010 Teemu rated it 5 of 5 stars

Yks hienoimpia New York -kuvauksia ja yks hienoimpia kertojia mitä tiiän! Satiirinen piruilu New York -koulukunnan (Ashbery on kai tunnistettavissa kuten moni muukin) ja muun 60-luvun älykköklikin kustannuksella. Sorrentinon fiktion ja ei-fiktion rajamailla hienosti häilyvä itseäänkommentoiva ja -ironisoiva kerronta on vertaansa vailla, ja siinä missä muissa kirjoissaan (Mulligan Stew, Blue: A Pastoral) hän uppoutuu liikaakin sanaleikkeihin ja halpoihin karnevalistisiin vitseihin, tässä ollaan t...more

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Apr 23, 2013 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis marked it as to-read · review of another edition

The sins of the world: To locate in a second-hand shop an UNREAD and UNOPENED (spine still stiff) First Edition of Gil's 1971 Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. The past 42 years this volume could have been NOWHERE ELSE than sleeping in a box at Publisher's Storage because I cannot BELIEVE that a human being could have had it in a library THAT LONG and NOT read it.

Readings of this for my purposes will perhaps likely take precedence over that other over-hyped Sorrentino, Crystal Vision.

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Jul 26, 2012 Geoff rated it 5 of 5 stars

”Such the perfections of fiction, as well as that honed cruelty it possesses which makes it useless. Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness.”

Holy hell, what a book! Caustic, caustic! Firey! Lava-esque! Melting that dear earth under our feet, that we need so badly to stand on! Solar flare! But not that innocuous type,...more ”Such the perfections of fiction, as well as that honed cruelty it possesses which makes it useless. Everything it teaches is useless insofar as structuring your life: you can’t prop up anything with fiction. It, in fact, teaches you just that. That in order to attempt to employ its specific wisdom is a sign of madness.”

Holy hell, what a book! Caustic, caustic! Firey! Lava-esque! Melting that dear earth under our feet, that we need so badly to stand on! Solar flare! But not that innocuous type, far off and pleasing to the star gazer’s eye. The one that knocks out the entire Eastern power grid! Holy hell!

That art is artificial. (It’s the first syllable of the word, for christ’s sake!) That stupid, vulgar people can and will be successful in what is essentially an intelligent person’s game. That money does not follow talent. That the hip is almost never the good, because the hip must necessarily please the legion, and among the legion are divers tasteless and vapid beings. That surrounding the lousy, successful artist are those that actually desire to be in their proximity, to suck their aura, so that they may emit their own dull, puke-green, secondhand aura. That many people confuse “sexual anticipation and activity with all other emotional profundities.” That you need to look elsewhere, in the opposite direction of art, if you’re looking to have your neuroses or your sexual insecurities relieved. That art is a mirror, and if one is an artist one should spend long hours looking into those mirrors that you make and value so highly; the lighting is harsh and unflattering, and the object never ceases in giving or receiving a gaze. That there isn’t one goddamn viewpoint in the world that can’t be contradicted in the next breath. That you need to laugh at these people. That if you asked James Joyce for help he would hand you a copy of Finnegans Wake and send you back out onto the street.

A number of years ago I seriously knew a girl who argued with me that to forgive the worst cases of poor art (to pick gold specks among the feces of any rotten paragraph, any ridiculous song, any amateur painting or performance), if one found oneself sexually attracted to its creator, was all part and parcel of the arts game. That sexual attraction was a function of critical acumen. That I was silly to deny such a blatant fact. To her I wish to make a present of Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things by Gilbert Sorrentino, wrapped carefully in puke-green tissue paper and twined lovingly with a ribbon of amethyst neon, or, if you’d prefer, violet. For she was not wrong.(less)

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May 23, 2013 Phil rated it 3 of 5 stars

Sorrentino's biting humor and enjoyable style are undermined here by an overabundance of metafictional devices. He never misses an opportunity to remind us that he's making up these characters, so he can make them do whatever he wants, damn it! This sort of self-referentiality was a fairly fresh pursuit when this novel was written, but it's ironic to see a writer go at it in such an overeager, clumsy fashion in a novel focused on lampooning trendmongering artists. Luckily for the reader, Sorrent...more

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Jul 28, 2008 Eddie Watkins rated it 4 of 5 stars

It's taken me twenty years but I've finally started AND finished a Gilbert Sorrentino novel. I've had trouble fulfilling my readerly duties previously because of my perception of GS as an unrelenting post-modernist (meaning not a sentence can go by without being injected with some "clever" "trick") and a splenetic parodist. Though my intuition recognized him as a master of sorts, these imagined qualities of his were like two Moe Howard pokes in my eyes making reading him impossible.

Well, both im...more It's taken me twenty years but I've finally started AND finished a Gilbert Sorrentino novel. I've had trouble fulfilling my readerly duties previously because of my perception of GS as an unrelenting post-modernist (meaning not a sentence can go by without being injected with some "clever" "trick") and a splenetic parodist. Though my intuition recognized him as a master of sorts, these imagined qualities of his were like two Moe Howard pokes in my eyes making reading him impossible.

Well, both imagined qualities turned out to be true, but both Moe pokes were a source of readerly laughter (being generous here, more like chuckle breaths) rather than annoyance (probably because I let the book do the venting for me). It's a book about the 50's 60's New York art scene, but more specifically about the pretenders to said scene, and the unspecified narrator spares no punches on these straw people he's created - straw poets, straw painters, straw novelists, straw sculptors. Nobody in the book is likeable, including the narrator, and everyone is obsessed with porno-type sex; in fact there's the suggestion that all these straw people want is porno-type sex, the arts are just a pretext to this end. So bashing these characters satisfies the splenetic parodist side of Sorrentino, but then there's the po-mo Sorrentino that can't let a sentence go by without letting you know that none of these characters are real people - They're all characters in a novel you dolt! - which gives him license to indulge in all kinds of novelistic hijinks and narrative U-turns. Sometimes it all seemed like so much pyrotechnics, which it was, but it was also so damned entertaining and written with such verve and concision and intelligence that I read it in no time on a kind of readerly high, so I didn't have time to be annoyed.

In the end it was hard to tell who exactly was the target of the narrative, because many names of actual writers and artists were included and very few were spared the spleen, W C Williams and Pound being two that lived up to the writer's standards. But then others like Philip Whalen and de Kooning were sniped at, so who knows who was liked and who wasn't. The point probably wasn't to figure out who was liked and who wasn't, and even that nearly inevitable tendency of the reader to do such a thing might've been a trap set by the author - Just read the book you dolt! None of these people (even the real people) are real!.(less)

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Apr 22, 2012 Shannon rated it 5 of 5 stars · review of another edition

Shelves: library

This book is a small masterpiece. I highly recommend it for any artist who's ever harbored any bitterness toward his peers. Or heck, anyone who can't stand his friends from time to time. Which is pretty much everyone, right? A brutally honest satire, this is a work of experimental writing and metafiction coming not from a desire to be the cleverest motherfucker in the room, but form a place of deeply earnest human feeling, regardless of how sharp the barbs. I wouldn't have known about this book...more

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Jul 16, 2012 D rated it 1 of 5 stars

Not finished. I thought I lost this book somewhere, hopefully at the pool because we’ve never recovered anything left behind at the pool. But no, it wasn’t lost there and I found it somewhere else. I had been wanting to lose it so that I wouldn’t be burdened with reading it all the way to the end. You can never lose things when you really need to lose them.

It starts out well enough, funny but it’s a mean funny, being mean to people and how funny that can be if you are properly mean; the mean-fun...more

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Dec 23, 2007 Stephan rated it 2 of 5 stars Recommends it for: Artists who believe they're ahead of their time

I don't know much of Gilbert Sorrentino's work, so maybe this book is just his curve ball. "Imaginative Qualities" is a cynical satire of of artists who think they're artists, namely writers. But he doesn't spare anyone making anything during 50's and 60's village-era. This book is shamelessly vulgar...near pornographic at times. I enjoyed how wonderfully a mess his characters are. And how much he has hipster, "art freaks" pegged. He also doesn't spare himself, writing in a holier-than-thou, fuc...more

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Apr 09, 2011 Amy rated it 4 of 5 stars

I really liked this book and how hipsters of the '50s basically fall into the same categories as hipsters today. Posers, fuck-ups, sell-outs, sluts, etc. It's easy to see myself and friends echoed in these obviously exaggerated character portraits. While, this book is clever and undoubtedly funny, I found myself wishing there was less breaking of the 4th wall.

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Nov 24, 2008 Powells.com rated it 5 of 5 stars

This, Sorrentino's third novel, published in 1971, is a wonderfully biting and deeply cynical look at the New York City art world of the 1950s and '60s. Brilliant, laugh-out-loud stuff!
Recommended by Jack, Powells.com

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Mar 19, 2013 Andrew Schirmer rated it 5 of 5 stars

243 pages of bitter invective meta-fictional satire. Absolutely brilliant. Immensely entertaining, and though Sorrentino would spurn such an epithet, accessible as well. You need this book in your life. Sorrentino's voodoo-doll pushpieces FUCK and eat and defecate poetry to great success.

When you live in a town like Seattle...or Portland...or Austin...

...where the art scene is highly insular and back-slapping...
...where arts "coverage" consists of sloppy blowjobs...
...more writers are concerned...more

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Nov 27, 2011 Charlotte rated it 2 of 5 stars

I found this book became very tiresome, despite having some poignant moments and comments about the art world. Most of it is gossip, sex and scandal, and had very little to do with the art world in the 50s and 60s. Maybe I would try it again later, as it is a particular kind of satire that is used, but I wouldn't re read in a hurry.

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Mar 25, 2008 John rated it 5 of 5 stars Recommends it for: those seeking laughs, vision, poignance, & inspiration

Shelves: american-novels-that-matter

Decades after I first read it -- and going on two years, now, after the author's death -- this book remains for me a touchstone. A swirling collage-portrait of a few New York strivers in the arts, only one of them with the talent worth a drink, it combines both a brilliantly cleansing parodist's cynicism and a deeply probing thinker's sympathy. The applicable cliche might be "humanity, warts and all," but this novel-without-narrative goes further than that, ascending to the level of an indispens...more

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Jan 06, 2013 AC rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: novels-english-american-writers

A modern day Juvenal...! Raunchy, sardonic, ironic, irreverent, bitter, unforgiving... detached. Sorrentino knows that nothing you do that matters matters... none of the pain, beauty, craft, honesty...gets you anywhere in the modern world... only the hustle benefits you... and he excoriates any and all who resort to it.

Some brilliant writing..., not for the faint-hearted, though.

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Apr 25, 2013 Ben Kearvell rated it 4 of 5 stars

Great work. Funny. Insightful. Subtle. Sly. Bombastic. Exciting.

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Nov 11, 2010 Bill Hughes rated it 5 of 5 stars

Possibly responsible for all sorts of artful suicides, this book is a gem for any writer picking through the New York City lit scene. The prose is gorgeous and heavy with comforting truths, but it's not for the undermedicated. If you've already read it, read it again. Just open any page and go. That's a dare.

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Feb 07, 2011 Aaron rated it 5 of 5 stars

Shelves: whatwhatinthebutt

Nasty in multiple ways, but I kept laughing. I probably, instead, should have been vaguely insulted because I'm a bit like those satirized, but Sorrentino was clearly amused writing it, and he's exactly like those satirized.

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Jul 20, 2007 Jonathan rated it 4 of 5 stars

I picked up a first edition at Gotham Books in NY. I'd read it as an undergraduate in the 70s.

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Jul 23, 2008 Molly Maloy marked it as to-read

This book is somewhat strange. Interesting, but strange.

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Jul 24, 2007 Distress Strauss rated it 5 of 5 stars

A hatefucking classic.

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About Gilbert Sorrentino

Gilbert Sorrentino was one of the founders (1956, together with Hubert Selby Jr.) and the editor (1956-1960) of the literary magazine Neon, the editor for Kulchur (1961-1963), and an editor at Grove Press (1965-1970). Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) and The Autobiography of Malcolm X are among his editorial projects. Later he took up positions at Sarah Lawrence College, Columbia University, t...more

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“Rapacity plus taste is a formidable combination, since it so often passes for intelligence. One pities the artist in a world of such predators, all of whom are deeply engaged in the arts too.” — 1 person liked it

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