Odd Number

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Interviews for a murder investigation lead to a study of the nature of fiction and reality themselves

Genres: Novels

159 pages, Hardcover

First published September 1, 1985

About the author

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, the University of Scranton and the New School for Social Research in New York and then was a professor of English at Stanford University (1982-1999). The novelists Jeffrey Eugenides and Nicole Krauss were among his students, and his son, Christopher Sorrentino, is the author of the novels Sound on Sound and Trance.

Mulligan Stew is considered Sorrentino's masterpiece.

Obituary from The Guardian

Interview 2006

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first novel in Sorrentino’s challenging Pack of Lies trilogy is a detective story, except it isn’t clear what, if any, crime has been committed, or by whom. Split into three narratives, the book resembles Pinget’s The Inquisitory in its approach in that an unnamed inquisitor grills an unnamed observer about random events that have taken place—in this case at a party, where avant-garde deadbeats from Sorrentino’s earlier novels are discussing making a movie about the very party they are attending. The first narrator speaks in hesitant fragments, rendered with tabulations between breaths or interruptions, the second provides a more comprehensive version of events in long breakless paragraphs, and the third is a mere list-making machine who only gets ten pages to get things straight. Reading like the aftermath of Coover’s Gerald’s Party, the novel is a frustrating exercise in deliberate obfuscation and relentless intertextual gossiping to the point the reader cries out for some semblance of order—but a Sorrentino novel isn’t the place for trivial pettiforgeries like order or clarity, oh no. It is a place for white slips with lace trimmings and ice-blue panties and Henri Kink’s new opus, Imaginary Quaaludes of Arterial Thongs. One of Gil’s most ruthlessly indulgent books and the basis, so it seems, for his son Christopher’s stylistically similar Sound on Sound.

[Zadignose]

A mind-fucking book from an author who knows his business.

A goulash of art, fraud, sex, and evil sorcery.

A vague, insinuating contrivance (I say this with no intended negative connotations) made up of permuted elements--characters, themes, events, forms--arising from other works by the same author which, in total, produce an entirely other effect.

A bleak, cynical, witty portrait of a scene rife with corruption and pathos.

Three interrogations leading to multiple, irreconcilable conclusions.

One could probably spend an unreasonable amount of time studying this and still never get to the bottom of it all.

I'm pretty sure someone walked in on someone else in a bathroom somewhere, and something happened as a consequence.

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 4 out of 5]

Gilbert Sorrentino’s trilogy Pack of Lies is a novel about itself. Sorrentino adopts an unusual approach in that the work is actually a reconsideration and restructuring of his earlier novel, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. Odd Number is the first novel of the set.

The format is a sort of interrogation about what happened in the previous novel. It’s never made clear who the questioners are, whether they are reporters, investigators, or detectives. Nor is it ever made clear what they are attempting to uncover. The subjects of the interrogations are high brows who had all attended the same party. Essentially plotless, the story is centered around a novel based on a film about a party. The central event is a deadly car crash.

This is metafiction at its best. There is an abundance of wild narrative threads. I had difficulty getting into the flow because there did not seem to be any flow. I was more comfortable after I abandoned the notion of trying to have it make sense. So, throw away your assumptions and expectations. Just go for the ride!

[Ed Scherrer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reading Sorrentino adds wrinkles to your brain. His novels always hinge on a different post-modern conceit that perplexes as much as it invigorates his bursts of sexy prose. I liken reading his books to unraveling a Gordian knot made of lacy underwear --- with names of people you know written on the tags --- but also the names of cities, animals, and other innocuous nouns --- and you're meant to get drunk and sort them into different drawers and pieces of luggage

[George Bieber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow. What a read. I accidentally brought this with on vacation not realizing that I read it about two years ago ( rated it ⭐️⭐️⭐️at the time).
So glad I read it again. You NEED to read this book at least twice. Make notes ( as is suggested one should/did).
It's a story told like no other. Oh. And Demons.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

LA Times review by Mark C. Taylor.

[Devin Curtis · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part painfully banal, part sizzlingly great, if at times repetitive, in all the ways Sorrentino usually is.