Mulligan Stew: A Novel

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Widely regarded as Sorrentino's finest achievement, Mulligan Stew takes as its subject the comic possibilities of the modern literary imagination. As avant-garde novelist Antony Lamont struggles to write a "new wave murder mystery," his frustrating emotional and sexual life wreaks havoc on his work-in-progress. As a result, his narrative (the very book we are reading) turns into a literary "stew": an uproariously funny melange of journal entries, erotic poetry, parodies of all kinds, love letters, interviews, and lists as Hugh Kenner in Harper's wrote, "for another such virtuoso of the List you'd have to resurrect Joyce." Soon, Lamont's characters (on loan from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flann O'Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammet) take on lives of their own, completely sabotaging his narrative. Sorrentino has vastly extended the possibilities of what a novel can be in this extraordinary work, which both parodies and pays homage to the art of fiction.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, American, 20th Century, Humor, The United States Of America

445 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1979

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Originally, mulligan stew was an improvised dish prepared by hobos with whatever food they could get and Mulligan Stew the novel is exactly this dish concocted out of words. The chapters of a bizarre murder mystery, fragments of the different books and stories, narrator’s missives, epistles within stories, an absurdist play, scabrous poems, reviews, annotations, printing catalogue, far-out mathematical theory, plenty of crazy lists – there are tasty morsels of everything.

A maker of maddening lists, a lister of maddening names, a namer of glistering fakes, an acre of pains, a wicker of aches; a flatulent bore, a sucker for whores, an arthritic lout; a doubter of mythical lore, a chap who once new semaphore…

That’s the protagonist, narrator and the author of an absurdist detective story, and Mulligan Stew is a quintessence of vulgarity and the bad taste.

Certainly we know that all men are masses of contradictions, but fiction has always tried to explain these contradictions in terms of emotional qualities, elaborate memories etc.

And the main hero is surrounded by the swarm of fashionable frauds full of hypocrisy, envy, jealousy, loathing and hatred. All those authors, critics, editors, philologists, publishers are nothing but trash… All the literati are scum who keep lauding and stinging each other…
All the narrator’s characters are trash. And all he writes is just a nonsensical pulp too. And the others write nothing but vulgar trash as well:

Oh! Let your sex stand tall like gallant sail!
I’ll act as if I’m in a deli!
To feast upon your hot pastrami is my goal!

Gilbert Sorrentino manages to sustain a high degree of absurdity throughout his entire fantastically heterogeneous novel.
A literary fad is trash but it is a feeding trough for opportunists and profiteers, and a great pleasure for fools.
Mulligan Stew is about bad taste but readers having bad taste never read books about bad taste.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mulligan Stew was, after years of attempts at finding a willing publisher, published in 1979. By 2010 it had sold something on the order of 25,000 copies. Does this constitute a failure? And if so, a failure of what, or whom? The publisher? The author? The literary establishment? The reading public? I would say yes, it is a failure of sorts; the book’s essence is failure; it is pretty much only about failure in many forms- and that its legacy should be a sort of failure to reach readers makes sense. This book won’t win many readers. If it didn’t in 1979 it surely won’t now. What does a book primarily concerned with interior nature of books, written in a melange of forms from epistles to lists to fake academic papers, matter to the consuming public now? On the whole I can hardly think of a book that will connect less with the Average Joe, or that will turn Average J. off as much, or that will simply bewilder Joe, or send his mind spinning, or just frustrate or infuriate Joe, or that Joe will not simply toss across the room into the wastebasket after like 30 pages, because Joe will feel assaulted, insulted, and exhausted. Bravo to you, Gilbert Sorrentino. Because Mulligan Stew is wonderful, and entertaining, and it might be the funniest book I’ve ever read, and it is totally weird, and a masterpiece.

To reduce a 450-page brain-rattler into a few sentences, Mulligan Stew presents one Anthony Lamont, self-proclaimed avant-garde novelist, working at his new thing, an “Ur”- or “Sur”-fiction, an experimental mystery, which he believes will finally rescue him from literary obscurity and shine forth his genius into the world, with all such rewards as comes with a shining forth of genius into the world. The problem is that he is a laughably terrible writer, and oh yes he’s definitely going insane. He is also dealing with a number of let’s say “strained” personal relationships, which are presented by letters inserted between chapters of his ridiculous novel (sometimes titled “Guinea Red”, sometimes “Crocodile Tears”), excerpts from his notebook, and from his scrapbook of found items that eventually begin to display his full-on paranoid delusions. The main characters of his new work, Martin Halpin and Ned Beaumont, realize early on that they are in a real piece of dreck (Halpin once being employed by such a “gentleman” as James Joyce, and Beaumont from the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett), and discover that through Lamont’s use of flashback as the structure of his novel, imaginative space-time has been ripped and they can move about on their own as sentient, liberated beings. As they try to find a way to escape their degrading current employment, Halpin keeps a journal, in which he comments on the absurd awfulness of “Guinea Red/Crocodile Tears” and what he is made to endure as a character thereof, and of his and Beaumont’s explorations in this literary imaginary space, populated by other characters who have fled their own employment in bad novels.

This world of literary refugees provides Sorrentino with a platform for some wild and brilliant stuff; a scene involving three cowboys who discuss various degrading and ridiculous cliches they’ve had to perform at the service of hack authors stands as a classic among all the books I’ve read. One of the main things Mulligan Stew is doing is assaulting cliche, attacking lazy writing and lazy reading and lazy criticism, blasting the elevation of the mediocre and the proliferation of the dumbed-down or the derivative. But that isn’t all that’s going on here, and the very last page of the book, Emile Fion’s quote on Cezanne, affirms what is really the heart and soul of this book- that a work of art needs no other justification to exist than the sheer joy of the human imagination at play. What makes art infinite and full beyond the capacity of our annoyingly mortal selves is the absence of restrictions, the limitlessness that can so easily be achieved internally that can never be gone beyond externally, materially- that these 26 squiggly letters and 2 ligatures can be so arranged to evoke worlds on worlds on and on forever, and that whatever can be imagined actually does exist, only by the fact of its having been imagined.

One doesn’t need to know that Mulligan Stew takes its premise from At Swim-Two-Birds, or that Martin Halpin has his origins in a footnote in an obscure part of Finnegans Wake, or that “The Masque of Fungo” (a maniacally absurd play inserted in the middle of the Stew) is a parody of the Circe scene from Ulysses, or the many references to Nabokov (this book reminds me so much of Pale Fire), or any of the other countless literary Russian dolls. One must only leave oneself open to the occurrence of words. Which is why the many lists in this book, while halting the narrative and seemingly flipping the ol’ bird to the reader, that may seem excessive or even provocative parataxis, are actually just as entertaining as the rest of it. It’s the joy of watching Sorrentino at play in the fields of his own imagination, conjuring things, enjoying babble and nonsense along with high-minded literary analogies, it’s the child and adult coexisting, the low and the high communicating, the language roaming about its own wildernesses.

[Garima · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Mulligan" is a stand-in for any Irishman, and Mulligan Stew is simply an Irish stew that includes meat, potatoes, vegetables, and whatever else can be begged, scavenged, found or stolen.

A fitting title for Gilbert Sorrentino’s 1979 burlesque novel, Mulligan Stew starts off with a fair warning to its potential readers with a series of rejection letters by editors of various publishing firms, the rejections which this book apparently faced while struggling to get published. The content of most of those letters aptly furnishes several points the publishing world considers indispensible in conventional novel writing and conveys the difficulties for bringing out the avant-garde fiction in the world of literature. The gist of the matter is simple: If you’ll transgress in your literary ambitions, you’re likely to get rejected. Mulligan stew transgresses and does it in style.

This book traces the journey of a delusional avant-garde writer, Anthony Lamont, who is writing an intellectual detective mystery story, Guinea Red, which he believes will establish him as the most interesting spokesman of the American avant-garde, and for Sur-fiction as well as Ur-fiction and Post-Modern fiction to boot. The chapters of Guinea Red are the epitome of ridiculous plot and bad writing which at times becomes almost unbearable to read but have some great funny moments and present a pertinent example of flawless parody writing. But Mulligan Stew is this and thankfully, a lot more. Lamont’s novel writing strategy makes way into a notebook he keeps, where he updates us not only with his thinking process while writing his novel but various excerpts from his previous books. He also keeps a Scrapbook, containing several advertisement clippings and primarily a series of questions and answers dealt in a schizophrenic manner. The contents of this scrapbook basically tell us that Anthony is not a half-wit at work but does possess a fair range of imagination.

The high point of this novel for me are the letters which Lamont addressed to his sister, his ex-lover, and one Professor Roche who shows interest in Lamont’s work to include in his class course on “American Experimental Novel” or so Lamont believed. These letters presents his frustration as a writer in a witty and sarcastic yet ironic manner. Some examples:

To Prof. Roche
You, sir, are an asshole, fit only to teach writing courses in the prison system, where the pupils would just as soon make wallets and bookmarks.

To a random Friend(?)
I must say that your offer of $50 for my “trouble” is breathtakingly generous, but I simply must refuse. Even had I the essential expertise to perform such a task, the subject matter is far beyond my poor understanding, i.e, I don’t even comprehend the motherfucking piece of shit!

That piece of shit is a dream come true of any reader of meta-fiction. But wait! I’m yet to come to the main point. The novel Lamont is writing has characters, which are not the figment of Lamont’s imagination but the real beings, having real lives and real jobs. Their job is simple, to be the protagonist, antagonist, or mere extras in books written by different writers. The two main characters of Guinea Red, Martin Halpin and Ned Beaumont (on loan from Joyce and Dashiell Hammett) unfortunately lands up in Lamont’s novel. Their commentary on Lamont’s mediocre writing, Halpin’s journal entries which ridicule the clichés surrounding the art of fiction, their future "job" prospects under more talented writers and their plan to escape Lamont’s novel provides a brilliant dose of comedy.

The essence of this book lies in its wide scope for postmodern parody. Apart from whatever I’ve mentioned above, there are lists, erotic poetry (baffling), book reviews, etc so a reader can pick up this book, turn to any page and get a hearty laugh. Sorrentino has included some of the elements we experience in real lives which I always wanted some writer to address in their books. Although this book is a great fun to read, there are few instances which can be grasped only if someone has a basic knowledge of Joyce’s and O’Brien’s novels. As Sorrentino said:

My novel Mulligan Stew is not truly intelligible unless it is seen as dependent on the work of Joyce and Flann O'Brien.... The novel is, or was meant to be, the end of that process we call modernism.

Without such knowledge, some parts of this book can test ones patience and proves to be a bit longer than one is game for, but all this is easily forgiven for the levity it rests upon for major part of its narrative which made me laugh the loudest which no novel ever achieved till date.

It's essential to understand what Gilbert is trying to say in this book.The stew that is eventually presented to us has the underlying ingredient of writing and its various modes. How those modes are used in creating an art which faces the difficulty of acceptance among the mediators of literature, whose misinterpretations or false judgments deprive the general readers of the pleasure of reading works of writers like Sorrentino. This iconoclastic writer deserves to be read and acknowledged for his genius.

Here are few links for those who are interested to know more about Gilbert Sorrentino:

- Sorrentino's 1994 Interview
http://www.altx.com/int2/gilber.sorre...

- David Andrews Article on Sorrentino
http://www.thefreelibrary.com/Gilbert...

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Deeply strange, funny, clever, offensive and difficult to read (did I just define post-modern novels?). Sorrentino goes hunting for tropes and he pretty much bags as many as are out there,
The plot is tenuous but revolves around avant-garde novelist Anthony Lamont and his attempts to write his new book. The characters in his novel have lives of their own. Here literary characters hire themselves out to novelists and move from novel to novel like actors. Characters appear from Finnegan’s Wake, At-Swim-Two-Birds, Dashiell Hammett and Daisy Buchanan from Gatsby also makes an appearance. The characters also have interior lives and relationships outside the novel. At times Sorrentino deliberately writes badly when writing as Anthony Lamont in his novel; it is a noble attempt and he absolutely pulls it off. This does however make for a difficult (if funny) read.
During the book its characters become increasingly disillusioned with Lamont’s writing style and begin to plan their escape and the idea of a town full of book characters at rest, having escaped from bad novels or between jobs are hilarious.
Apart from Lamont’s truly appalling novel, there are lots of letters from Lamont to publishers, friends, his sister (married to a rival novelist) and his ex-wife. As the novel goes on these letters become increasingly splenetic and paranoid and are a delight. Sorrentino also has a crack at erotic poetry and it’s difficult to describe in mere words how bad it actually is! There is a more or less unreadable brief play in the middle and a section on abstract mathematics attempting to explain contravariant behaviour (this may also be brilliant, but my maths isn’t that good). The orgy scenes again are excruciating and mostly anatomically unlikely.
As you may have gathered this novel has lots of different aspects; some work very well, for example the stream of consciousness section near the beginning. Every now and then Sorrentino goes into list mode. The two main characters in the novel explore the cabin they are using in the novel whilst Lamont isn’t writing and they come across lots of books and periodicals. Some of these are just hilarious, some very clever and some just silly; I suspect they must have been great fun to make up.
I’m struggling to sum it up and it certainly won’t be for everyone; it is inconsistent, but the best of it is brilliant and the parodies are spot on

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Imagining myself looking at myself, I seem to be relaxed. (p.9)

Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew is one of the Great Comic Novels and a hack-seeking exocet missile in the War Against Cliché. The novel recasts Antony Lamont from Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds as an arrogant, self-described avant-garde novelist, chronicling his hilarious descent into writerly oblivion. Lamont considers his first published work, Three Deuces—a pompous crime potboiler—to be among the Great Works of American literature. His follow-up novel Guinea Red (later Crocodile Tears) is labelled a Sur-Neofictional mystery and ups the ante in the indulgent, ponderous hackwork stakes. Sorrentino worked as an editor for Grove Press in the 1960s (helping elevate Hubert Selby to stardom), and exacts his revenge with these exquisite and riotous parodies of arrogant, overwritten, inelegant prose styles that make embarrassing gropes for the profound. Fourteen chapters of Lamont’s MS appear in MS and leave the reader rib-tickled and breathless in equal quantities—delirious exhaustion is this novel’s MO.

I did my best to leer appreciatively, while my heart twisted in me like a boiling lobster. (p50)

Sorrentino modelled his structure on At Swim-Two-Birds, and expands upon O’Brien’s metafictional innovations with his characters plotting to escape from Lamont’s novel as the author loses control of his mind and MS. The weaving of intertextual references (characters are taken from O’Brien, James Joyce, and Dashiell Hammett), and the fondness for the relentless and freewheeling list (and there are a maddening number of lists) are homages to and continuations of Joyce’s vast literary legacy, as evidenced by his appearance in ‘The Masque of Fungo’ (a 40-page play indebted to the Circe chapter of Ulysses).

Ugo colored, blanched, then colored again and blenched. (p53)

Among the copious delights are letters Lamont writes to his sister Sheila, ranting about the novel and his loathing for the successful and talented Dermot Trellis. There are bizarre parodies of academic mathematical papers, sophomoric erotic poems (‘The Sweat of Love’), and spam letters from two Mexican seducers, Corrie and Berthe, with whom Lamont becomes obsessed, and a late descent into middle-English (presaging the archaic forms Sorrentino parodies in his inventive if less successful novel Blue Pastoral).

At that moment her face took on the unmistakeable frown that one gets on a face when one smells gas. (p232)

Mulligan Stew launches its assault on cliché, bad writing, writer egos, and literature as a capitalistic commodity, themes prevalent across Sorrentino’s career and in his incisive criticism (see Something Said), with an unrelenting blast of the original and unexpected: this masterpiece demonstrates a spellbinding comic imagination in full flight and a tireless passion for formal and artistic innovation—a lesson in what to strive for as a writer, a warning in what to sidestep as a writer, and a rewarding feast for the daring and willing reader. MS deserves to be savoured and re-read for generations.

Just the sounds that filled the dim boudoir were enough to make the thick honey of Amour flow copiously from the pounding beam I sedulously larrupped! (p326)

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

My Proper Review

Hello!

*

Choice Selections From Antony Lamont’s Guinea Red, latterly Crocodile Tears:

“Imagining myself looking at myself, I seem to be relaxed.” (p9)

“I knew the reason for our meeting was hovering in the air, like a great sinister plastic animal that was waiting its opportunity to come between us and give us cancer.” (p12)

“It was as if I had struck him full force in the faded face. He blanched, he blenched, his hand shook, he came at me with a hoarse cry, like the cry of an animal in pain, his visage that of a plastic animal trapped in a lair.” (p13)

“A hard row to hoe was to be my lot. We, as I have hinted, entered.” (p48)

“I did my best to leer appreciatively, while my heart twisted in me like a boiling lobster.” (p50)

“Ugo colored, blanched, then colored again and blenched.” (p53)

“With this hand, I seized—oh, I will not go so far as to say “seized”; clutched, perhaps, grasped, no, not so much grasped, clutched, would more precisely describe the action of this hand—I, then, clutched Ned Beaumont’s listlessly placed one, squeezing it with all the reassurance and friendship that my spirit could force down into the digits.” (p54)

“It was at this moment of traumatic shock, during which I must have lost consciousness, I later learned, that I decided to become a writer.” (p77)

“He became secretive, moody, racked by gusts of strange laughter, in short, he wallowed in melodramatic dumps, why knock it?” (p84)

“But you are right, there is no sense in raking over dead leaves. Let them lie and crepitate.” (p228)

“How I would like to shake his hand now, this humble slob, this dumbbell with the inarticulate wisdom of Estonia in his bowel.” (p232)

“At that moment her face took on the unmistakeable frown that one gets on a face when one smells gas.” (p232)

“Just the sounds that filled the dim boudoir were enough to make the thick honey of Amour flow copiously from the pounding beam I sedulously larrupped!” (p326)

“A double bed that seems to scream obscenities at my ears sits smugly in the middle of the floor.” (p410)

From Lamont’s Baltimore Chop (p122):

“He fought against the tenderness that welled up in him. Can love exist here? Love? Ha! Ha! He spilled his drink, and thought, bitterly, I spill my life as I spill this drink. Fool!” (p6)

“So he believed sardonically.” (p6)

*

Cameos From Your Author, Gimburt Sorottini:

“And did you get the copy of Fretwork I sent you? You’ll see that some of the scenes are taken from ‘real life,’ as they say.” (p5)

“ . . . Stolen Fruit by James Vulgario; The Dry Ranges by Gilford Sorento; The Ouija Kiss by Harry Bore . . . ” (p31)

“ . . . Imaginary Jollities on Factual Wings by Gilberto Soterroni . . . ” (p32)

“ . . . Bitter and Vicious: A Study of the Later Writings of Gilles de Sorentain by H. Poloie . . . ” (p33)

“He cannot take seriously the rage for Soterroni’s writing. An inferior ‘novelist,’ he maintains, spewing venom on the sacred word, ‘a murderous wise guy.’ Yet he has ordered a copy of the latest Soterroni novel, Fake Strip.” (p41)

“I published in many of the ephemeral ‘little magazines’ of the day, along with such writers as Heather Strange, Harry Polenta, G.R. (as he was then known) Soterroni, John LeKing . . . ” (p45)

“Somehow the holidays always put me in mind of a curious scene in a novel of some years ago—I forget the author—called Quantities of Imagistic Things. One of the characters receives a box of the most fantastic stuff from home; each item (there is a long list of them given) conjures up the most hopeless, yet agonizingly sweet memories of a simple and dead America. Have you read the book? It’s probably out of print, I picked up my (now ‘borrowed’) copy for 49¢ at a remainder sale.” (p56)

*

Dermot Trellis’s Temporary Employment

One morning whenever, I opened the file for Chapter 3 of my current novel, Baby Benjie’s Bacon, to an unexpected sight. Dermot Trellis was frying up lard-ons in the kitchen and chewing the chit with Alison Purdie. I had no memory of writing Mr. Trellis into my story, but I had been suffering from paranoid delusions for several months and didn’t want to irk the surreal spectres at war in my noggin. So I sent Mr. Trellis to the abattoir with Alison that morning to do a hog count in the hope he might toddle off into the afternoon. The next day, I found Trellis in bed with Alison having moved his stuff into the back bedroom. I was crazy, and prone to imagining things, but was I crazy, and was I imagining things outside of the things I was imagining for the story’s sake? Better to “follow the muse,” to turn a nice phrase, so I left it be until I woke up to find my novel entitled Dermot Trellis’s Streaky Misadventures. I don’t have the gall to confront him about all this.

*

The Necessary Evisceration of Evan Hulka’s Review:

Sorrentino was one of the lesser lights of the '60s postmodern movement

Incorrect. Firstly, Sorrentino only published one novel in the 1960s, The Sky Changes, a very morose literary novel with no distinguishing pomo elements. For the most part he wrote poetry and criticism in the 60s. His only two metafictive books of the 70s were Imaginative Qualities and this one, otherwise he wrote collage-like novels of Brooklyn life in the 30/40s (Steelwork, Crystal Vision) and published more poetry, and the prose-poem Splendide-Hôtel. Sorrentino later aligned his aesthetic more to the high modernism of Joyce and disliked the postmodernist label. He never deliberately aligned himself with Barth: it’s quite possible the two never met, or read each other. Unlikely but possible.

a schmuck from Brooklyn

A distinguished professor, critic, poet and novelist from Brooklyn with (at the time) twenty-five years or so editing and publishing experience, and a lifetime of voracious and eclectic reading behind him.

with a serious Flann O'Brien/James Joyce fetish

The problem with this being . . . ?

unless you're Kenneth Goldsmith, you can’t just do that and only that for 400 pages

Ah, Kenneth Goldsmith, that well-known name in American letters the kids can’t stop reading. I didn't realise Mr. Goldsmith had the world’s only metafiction license.

and expect someone to publish it

Clearly Sorrentino didn’t expect someone to publish it. It took him four years to find a (very small) publisher.

you’ve gotta sprinkle it in between lengthy chunks of actual novel

So there is only one way of doing things, and any work that does not adhere to that rubric is worthless? Good to know.

I find Sorrentino’s prose intolerable, overblown and self-infatuated.

In which case, you haven’t read Sorrentino’s prose.

The problem with these metafiction guys

Generalising. Always a good idea.

blatant homage

You say this as though writing a homage is somehow cheating.

Flann O'Brien's masterwork, At Swim-Two-Birds

Which you only gave three stars, so why call it a masterwork?

it was never clear that he wasn't intentionally writing badly

Read the parody closer. The parody is so subtle and nuanced, it quickly becomes clear that Lamont's writing is awful.

This is the second-best book, after John Barth’s "Giles Goat-Boy," to begin with a series of rejection letters from publishers

Of about two books which do that, this is the second best? Did we really have to rate the book in terms of how well it uses a never-used technique? Does that mean anything?

and you *know* Barth's were fake.

Because Sorrentino’s satire is more subtle than Barth’s, this somehow makes it lesser, as satire? Why can't all satire be completely obvious when we see it? Damn satirists and their cleverness.

Paratextual Matters:

1. Scott Esposito’s long article on MS
2. Interview from 1974 including rare insight into his poetry
3. Mulligan RCF Issue

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

An Excellent Melange of Verbiage

Most of Sorrentino’s sixth novel is hilarious.

It went a bit wobbly for forty pages or so in the middle (in the script for a masque or courtly entertainment), but quickly returned to top form.

I considered dropping it a star, but ultimately it’s so generous and rich in its pleasures, that there is no point in being miserly. It’s not for everyone, but you should enjoy it if you like a good laugh.

Besides, how can you punish an author who finishes his novel with the words:

"…and to all you cats and chicks out there, sweet or otherwise, buried deep in wordy tombs, who never yet have walked from off the page, a shake and a hug and a kiss and a drink. Cheers!"

Protagonists of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your reins!

The Virtue of Hilaritus

As could possibly be inferred from this form of farewell, the novel is dedicated to Brian O’Nolan (Flann O’Brien, the author of "At Swim Two Birds”) and his "virtue hilaritus”.

It’s hard to find an adequate definition of the word "hilaritus”, but from the context of its use, it implies a positive disposition to life that is sustained by wit and spontaneity (and perhaps a pint of plain).

The fact that it is spontaneous doesn’t detract from the discipline on display in this novel. It deserves a place next to not just Flann O’Brien, but James Joyce at his best, as well.

In terms of successors, it comes closest to Festschrift-worthy authors such as Christine Brooke-Rose (at the more serious end of the scale) and Gilbert Adair (at the more comic or playful end).

Note that all of these authors are British (well, Irish as well, if you won't allow me to extend the term British to Ireland, as it did until 1922). I'd almost go as far as to say that this is a very British comic novel.

Letting the Author Have His Way with His Own Words

Not everything about Sorrentino’s style appeals to me (e.g., the seemingly interminable, sometimes non-functional and not always humorous lists).

However, there’s a point when a reader has to accept that writers are entitled to write their works the way they want to.

Just because we might have written their book differently (assuming we otherwise had the skill and persistence required) doesn’t mean that the way it has been written is "bad writing”. Ultimately, this is a judgement call, no more than a subjective opinion that ”I don’t like it.”

Sorritoni’s Notebook

1. Start with numerous fictitious letters of rejection by publishers and editors.

2. Introduce one of the protagonists in the novel proper (whose author is the mediocre and paranoid Tony Lamont).

3. Set out the chapters of the novel proper in their original form.

4. Intersperse the journal of one of the protagonists (Marty Halpin).

5. Define the novel initially as a murder mystery in the English drawing room tradition.

6. Reveal that, although the victim (Ned Beaumont, Marty’s friend) is dead for the purposes of the novel proper, he remains alive in the fantasy world of fictional characters, who are merely drawn upon by authors as canon fodder.

7. Introduce a kinky erotic porno theme at the behest of the two protagonists (and an alleged morphodite).

8. Describe the mischief they get up to.

9. Allow the author of the novel proper (Tony Lamont) to discover these happenings and incorporate them into the second half of the novel proper (which necessitates rewritten versions of the first half).

10. Incorporate various journals, notebooks, horoscopes, drawings, fiction and verse by other characters, and criticism of all of the foregoing.

11. Jumble writing styles according to the needs of the narrative (including eighteenth century and erotica styles).

12. Nest these ingredients and stories in time-honoured Post-Modernist fashion.

13. Make it appear that any ostensibly "bad writing” is deliberate, thus pulling the rug from under the feet or the wool over the eyes of the earnest writer/critic who is prone to give wise, but inflexible, style counsel.

14. Encourage the reader to sit down with a pint of plain, suspend disbelief and press go.

15. Hope that the reader realises that it's preferable to have FUN when you’re alive, because it’s harder when you’re dead!

Wise Counsel for the Reviewer

I once wrote a review like this.

My agent advised me to expand it into a novella and two books of verse.

I didn't follow his advice.

NOT ANOTHER FIVE STAR REVIEW FROM THE BBC WORLD SERVICE:

Anonymous Book Review, "The Stanford Onanist", Stanford

"[Sorritoni] wrote in that weary, bankrupt vein so beloved by the corps of geniuses who fire their salvos of praise or damnation from the fortress of ignorance. God knows they didn't make him into an overnight Great Writer, but they gave him a little bit of a shake..." 1


Book Review, James Funstuff, "The Crimson Proboscus", Harvard

"All of [Sorritoni's] work has been silly, useless, vapid, formless, determinedly avant-garde, experimental..." 2


Book Review, Sheila Lamont, "Lamont Young Adult Writers Digest", Chicago

"The idea of a novel about a writer writing a novel is truly old hat. Nothing further can be done with the genre, a genre that was exhausted at its moment of conception. Nobody cares about that idea any more. I doubt whether the addition of scenes of gratuitous sexuality would rescue this shambles of a book." 3


Book Review, Professor Brian Ironwood, "The Berkeley Belch", Berkeley (2014)

"I cheerfully admit that I am a devotee of Sorritoni's 'Mulligan Stews' (first published in 1979), and have found in its mere four hundred or so pages the same richness and inexhaustible delights that others find in 'All Being the Being of Being' or even in 'Heinz's Times'. The small tome includes the curiously gentle claustrophobic fascination of Sade, the tearful hilarity of Kafka, the dark optimism of Milne, and the jocular fidget of Proust...it is also a depthless thesaurus of pleasures, a shopping list for the seeker of subtle and exquisite jests, an imaginative quantity of things actual yet forever unknown, a roster of oneiric possibilities...Even though he's dead, this book will establish Sorritoni as the most interesting spokesman for the American avant-garde, and for Sur-fiction, as well as Ur-fiction, and Post-Modern fiction to boot." 4


Letter to the Editor, Tony Lamont, "The Berkeley Belch", Berkeley

"I can see the cynical machinery at work in this 'rediscovery' of 'Mulligan Stews'. Professor Ironwood's first move toward establishing himself as a 'critic of importance'. Picks up this obscure crap and works to make it the centre of a small storm of elite adulation; he is the guru, the explorer." 5


Book Review, Electra Bangs, "The Good Times Literary Supplement", San Francisco

"[This novel] is vaguely tantalising, but in a way that is totally removed from true, not to say high art - without compassion, love, or a sense of tragic justice, and with a kind of bourgeois humor that depends on the debasement of womankind for its vulgar effects, it reminds your reviewer of the works of Henry Mailer." 6, 7, 8


FOOTNOTES:

1. She removed her bra deftly with one hand.

2. She had the largest three-dimensional breasts he had ever seen.

3. She sat on the edge of the bed.

4. She removed her panties with both hands.

5. She looked across the room to where he was still sitting naked on the glass coffee table and signalled him to come over to her.

6. Uncharacteristically for this protagonist, he did what he was told.

7. Only when his gaze returned coyly to her face, did he notice that her "tender mouth was sculpted by her mercilessly unleashed passion into a perfect O which her scarlet lips framed beautifully; and from this warm grotto came forth a low and surging river of tropical groans and naughty words fashioned into licentious urgings of such fantastical invention as to set the mind ablaze!".

8. His rampant dandelion parted her once shy apertures and bloomed profligate in her fiery interior, as the curtain of darkness descended on their crepuscular salon.


MORE BESIDES AND DISTRACTIONS:


Sorritoni's Fountain

Sorritoni's fountain
Doth send forth
Sweet water
And bitter
In the same
Time and space
Continuum,
Just like Twitter.


Roll On, Ye Mighty Round Post-Modernist Wheel
[Apologies to William McGonagall]

My little coterie
Are scarcely mere dopes.
I love how they adore
These astute tricks and tropes.
They don't seem to mind if
The plots are recycled.
Metafiction's wheel gains
Naught if not rotary.


Be Read or Be Buried

He not busy
Being read
Is busy
Being buried.


Letter to the Editor

You're such a prick
And a buffoon,
Always deflating
Everyone
Else's balloon.


Ozymandias in Reverse

No need to
Feel dejected.
I write to
Be rejected.
Later, in time,
It's assumed,
Incantation will
Ensure I'm exhumed.


Another Man

The whole time
I thought
You were
Telling the truth
On the phone,
You were just
Lying in bed.


Schreibtischmerde

A shot, a snort,
Let's take the court,
And after lunch
A nice book punch.


The Vector of Magical Incantation

Whether you look
Über, unter
Oder zwischen,
You'll find in this
Literary stewer
Not just much writing
You could skewer, but
An incandescent
Post-modern
Work of fiction.
It's both sewer septic
And an ur-epic.


Let's Just Dance (Marvelling at the Marvelless)
[Apologies to David Johansen]

I can't get
The kind of
Literachure
That I want
Or that I need.
You call your writing
Literachure,
But I've been to college,
It's really only
Litcherette.
I've been to France,
So let's just dance!

David Johansen - "Frenchette"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Otrt0...

Wiki: "Ken Tucker, who referred to [David Johansen's band, the New York Dolls] as a proto-punk band, wrote that they were strongly influenced by the 'New York sensibility' of Lou Reed:

'The mean wisecracks and impassioned cynicism that informed the Dolls' songs represented an attitude that Reed's work with the Velvet Underground embodied, as did the Dolls' distinct lack of musicianship.'"


Sleepless in the Battle
[by Vulva Divine]

I imagine that I'm Meg Ryan
And that you're Tom Hanks.
I rise naked up on top of you,
You hold me tightly by the flanks.
Then you whisper that our love is
Better than a thousand wanks.

[George]

"'The idea of a novel about a writer writing a novel is truly old hat. Nothing further can be done with the genre, a genre that was exhausted at its moment of conception.'

And yet Mulligan Stew is such a novel, the alpha-omega of the genre as far as I can tell. However, it doesn’t simply or complexly exist on a Mobius strip. We mustn’t forget the cosmic sea of stories it sprang from. In the same way that two scientists can independently discover a mathematical proof or scientific theory, for instance, Italo Calvino and Gilbert Sorrentino—our Darwin and Wallace—both wrote postmodern novels exemplary of the second half of the 20th century. That is, constructed in a deconstructed and hyper-conscious way, polyphonic, critical of reading, of writing, &c. Indeed, If on a winter’s night a traveler was published in the same year yet not Englished until a couple of years later. The latter is a novel about a reader reading a novel while this one is a novel about a writer writing a novel, mirrors held up to mirrors. Calvino was always concerned with symmetry, mathematical precision even (just look at the matrix he constructed for Invisible Cities), while Sorrentino’s Stew is purposefully superfluous despite the fairly clear structure, chunky in its broth, you could say. There’s plenty of fun to be had here as Sorrentino includes everything and the kitchen sink, as well as the chick’n shrink, the hitchin’ slink, the stitchin’ kink, the sickened think, the quicken blink, the witch’s drink, and the bitchin’ Sphinx, just the way I like my Stew."

Read my full review for free here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/10/2...

[Zadignose]

A flabbergasting heap. Mulligan Stew is funny, playful, and also rather vicious. I had a lot of fun with it, though I was forced to a temporary retreat about midway through when its unrelenting listifying, absurdity, and echolalia threw me into a temporary condition of shock and awe.

Sorrentino develops a schtick, and his voice and characters grew on me, but the essence of the schtick is this: if there are 15 possible ways to say the same thing, he'll find an additional 39 and treat you to all of them.

The novel showers bile and derision upon phonies, hacks, and philistines; editors, critics, and charlatans; faithless friends, family, and lovers; women who won't put out, and those who will; and anyone who doesn't love the most obscure of cultural references presented in sing-song and baby talk; but it saves most of it's extreme debasement and humiliation for the sincere struggling artist who strives to achieve his best, who is unfortunately delusional, incompetent, and unable to live up to his ideals.

It's funny. It's also painful. Because no one wants to be Antony Lamont. But perhaps some of us feel quite like him, from time to time... or at least we have a secret nightmare that, unknown to ourselves, we are as deeply deluded and utterly doomed as he.

One magical feat that Sorrentino achieves is that he writes extremely badly extremely well. Somehow one is able to see that what Lamont writes is unrepentantly awful, yet with ironic distance it seems that Sorrentino make something quite good from the same exact words.

But note that Sorrentino attacks his reader as much as he does his characters, himself, and his very own novel. There is no compromise--rather the opposite. The reader's goodwill is thoroughly and intentionally abused.

Well, maybe one can say that, and maybe one can't. Let's look at it another way.

Let's say you can raise 5000 cabbages in one acre. Okay. What if you can raise 8000 in two acres? Okay. Well, what if you can raise 10,000 in five acres. Do we want maximum yield, or maximum efficiency? There's no correct answer. But what if one acre gives us 20 blisters. Five acres gives us 500 blisters and two compressed vertebra. When do we like the tradeoff?

Let's say a novel can give us 5 laughs in one page, and nothing but light, breezy reading. What if it can give us 20 laughs in 20 pages, and 10 groans along the way? Maximum yield? Like the tradeoff? But what if groans are part of the payoff? I.e., the book wants us to laugh and groan too... because light and breezy is not the soup du jour?

One thing I like, and I find I'm liking more and more is WRONG ENGLISH. I really like it. Language is fun to play with, including when you bend it, break it, and occasionally kick the shit out of it. Apparently Sorrentino agrees, which is one of the many reasons why I felt I got plenty of good payoff for my invested reading time. In fact, there's a significant chance I may read it again! (But first another Sorrentino's in order... after other things... Finnegan's Wake soon?)

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Life of Pi has 344,976 ratings and 23,531 reviews on goodreads, in 152 editions. Sorrentino's masterful Mulligan Stew has 136 ratings and 18 reviews in 8 (!) editions. 36 of my Friends, with 27 providing a rating, have added the prior and 27, with 8 ratings (one from a fictional character, naturally, and the only not-5-Sternen), the later. I'm happy about the 27 Stews, but that first pair of statistics makes me go, "Hmmmm."

Mit anderen Worten, find some time for a bowl of Mulligan.


Original Insightful Review
At war with cliche. I believe it's ruined me for ever reading genre fiction again. Excellent.

[Mala · Rating 5 out of 5]

I swear by The Masque of Fungo that Mulligan Stew is the craziest book I've ever read. Yet, despite all the endlessly outlandish things that happen in this book, Chapter 12 still managed to take me completely by surprise (Sweet Jesu, it took 'ghostwriting' to a new level !) & it unequivocally earned its five stars there & then. Mulligan Stew is a dazzling showcase for Sorrentino's masterful writerly chops. Period.

Amazing variety on display here: chapters from a novel-in-progress by 'avant-garde' author Antony Lamont, along with anaconda-length lists, letters, notebook entries, journal entries, a scrapbook containing - excerpts, junk mail/promotional material, found items - a thoroughly bewildering masque, excerpts from reviews of Lamont's four published novels, publisher's catalogue, & a manuscript, interviews/profiles, book reviews, cheap erotic 'poetry', sample chapters from 'imaginary' books in various categories — all of them spot-on parodies of cliched writing, an 'academic' paper on mathematics ( 12 pages long, the only thing I gave up reading, its maths probably as dodgy as the 'french' in the earlier chic French restaurant scene), & so on. Almost all of which provides context for Lamont's life & work and/or brings comic relief. Clearly it's a book that delights in its excesses.

But it requires a really tough reader who can digest all that rich fare; most folks would get a bad case of indigestion! The stew metaphor very cleverly lets Sorrentino incorporate disparate elements into his progressively chaotic tale, still, even in a stew, flavours clearly need to go together... 'The Masque of Fungo' with its crucial setting at midway point in the narrative & its message of triumph of the underdog did give one hope that the book would get a happy ending... Well, it happened only partially.
And then there are those exhaustive lists, e.g., the list of books & magazines found in Beaumont's cabin, & then O'Mara's list of noun phrases: while being highly inventive play-wise, they do nothing in terms of character development/insight. And then to pass them off as intentional bad writing...
Compare that to Theroux's devastating use of list in the Misogynist's Library chapter in Darconville's Cat, & Barth's fun loaded list of words for 'whore' in The Sot-Weed Factor, & you can guess why they would often test a reader's patience here.

But Sorrentino doesn't care a fig what you think! The main concern of a writer, if you mean a writer as artist, is to make art. He must have the luxury of being permitted to do this, just as the physicist is permitted to do physics and the surgeon to operate. An artist makes things. All else that he does, in his role as an artist, is incidental, accidental, or peripheral. If he worries about being an anachronism then he should quit writing and do something else.

Personally, what worked for me is the metafictional aspect which lays bare the creative process & its meltdown, a writer's insecure & lonely life, & it isn't a pretty picture when that writer happens to be a neglected one — a 'failure' to be precise. Antony Lamont is a highly complex character & Sorrentino purposefully didn't turn him into an out & out hack or the book would've lost the drama & pathos of his gradual unraveling. Certain Halpin-centric chapters do display his talent & his desperate letters with their increasing paranoia really tug at your heartstrings. The neat punch comes towards the end when you learn the truth about his rivalry with a fellow writer...The problem is, as a self-proclaimed experimental writer, Lamont is perhaps trying to fill in shoes that are too big for him, hence all the tricks of PoMo writing while missing their correct usage & impact. His self-pity & his ego get the better of him.
Still, it's hard to continue believing in yourself when no one else does. Writers don't come from another planet. They need support systems like anyone else: mentors, readers, lovers, friends, & money. In the absence of which it's easy to lose touch with reality.
While it's obvious that this book's brilliant comedy & metafictive hijinks tend to overshadow the human element — Mulligan Stew, above anything else, is about writing & writers & how they should always keep their eye on the ball.

Mulligan Stew's intertextuality (& its intratextuality )sort of demands familiarity with the source material — satire/parody loses its impact when you have no idea what's being satirized/parodied.
Unlike others, the rejection letters coming before the beginning of the book didn't strike me as fake — they've the sting of truth in them. They are the kind of things those publishers & editors would've said to a book like Mulligan Stew. Of course, Sorrentino turned them into satiric gold! * Also, the Reader's Report (kind of what Vollmann did with the Argall review) didn't feel ironic & that's why it was perplexing to read "Flawless Play Restored" (...) it resonates with all the essential themes of adversity and ultimate triumph that Lamont's career encloses; and it may well be the essential core of what seems a tale of failure and misery.
Where was Lamont's triumph? Yes, he continued writing despite everything, but what kind of writing?! Utter gibberish.

Sorrentino is notorious for settling personal scores in his fiction but his targets here are the deserving ones: When the publisher-retailer-critical-academic machinery gets started. . . a steamroller! Makes me wonder how important it is for deserving books to be part of academic syllabuses so they continue being in print & in public consciousness. Makes me wonder how many (if any) books of Sorrentino are being currently taught across colleges & universities!
Suddenly Lamont's paranoia doesn't seem that crazy to me...
**************
* From Wikipedia:
"Sorrentino began the novel in November 1971 and finished it in February 1975. At the time it was titled Synthetic Ink. His agent shopped it out, unsuccessfully. The novel received nearly thirty rejections. Most publishers praised the novel, often extravagantly, but because of its great length and avant-garde nature it would be too expensive a loss.

Eventually, in 1978, Grove Press accepted the book, subject to three demands. Barney Rosset wanted a different title, and got it. Rosset wanted the rejection letters to be published as part of the book, and Sorrentino agreed, although he supplied parody versions. Rosset wanted the Masque of Fungo section deleted, Sorrentino refused, and Rosset conceded."

***************
Worth reading:
"One gets the impression that Sorrentino’s survival as an avant-garde novelist required that he make lemonade out of lemons. In Mulligan Stew he certainly did."
http://quarterlyconversation.com/mull...

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

review:

a lot of fun

BUT

not great with its treatment of women and minorities

NOR

does sorrentino always know when to reign it in

HOWEVER

if you'd like to see dfw out-jargoned and also perhaps peek at what (i venture) seems to be the source of the whole wry smile thing that appears in broom o'system

IT MERITS A BROWSE


Review

Every time I found myself away from this book, I couldn't wait to return to it. Mulligan Stew was truly a joy to read. Unfortunately, its treatment of women and people of color was somewhat problematic.

For fans of David Foster Wallace and other postmodern authors.

It was like Joyce and O'Brien on acid!


Opinion:
Pretty good. 4 stars.


But really, if the mission of your book is to call out cliche, and all of your characters of color are con-artists, then your call ain't gonna reverberate as much as you might like. I'm well aware that this is satire, but most of these hackneyed strategies and phrases are addressed by the cowboy characters directly during the scene in which they commiserate about cliches around the campfire. Racial slurs and stereotypes do not appear here. I'd say that's a clue that these things were not incorporated in a particularly thoughtful way. I don't believe that Sorrentino is a hateful person, but including slurs and stereotypes as simply more hi-jinx for your madcap meta-romp does not strike me as the most constructive course to take. And I am not saying this novel should have tackled issues of racial inequality or privilege. Clearly, that would not have worked in this context. Better, in my opinion, to have left it out entirely.

Mulligan Stew is clever. It situates itself as the sort of bastard-son of At Swim-Two-Birds. I'd love to see this line of O'Brien-Sorrentino-(your name here) carried on by a woman and/or person of color who could take these characters and really put their asses to the fire for their (certain) misogyny and (assumed) racism. If the metafiction tradition is to continue, it might as well criticize itself. As a nerdy, straight, white man in love with po-mo lit, I'm ready to be scaldingly satirized in a similar style. In other words, snap my Rabelaisian codpiece, please. And make it sting!

[Eddie Watkins · Rating 5 out of 5]

A no holds barred barrage of self-reflective hi-jinks, virtuosic bad writing in the service of hilarious parodies, sublime nonsense, gobbledygook dialogue and interviews, and insanely sustained lists of no consequence all under the authorial rubric “Art for Art’s sake” as filtered through the mind of a fictional avant-garde writer experiencing a middle-age mental breakdown. This is a comedy of Rabelaisian gusto, a blazing cartoon bulldog with real teeth let loose in literary la-la land.

In a book replete with borrowings Gilbert Sorrentino wrote a thoroughly unique masterwork. From Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds (a novel I MUST read some day) he borrowed the idea that characters in novels are merely people working odd jobs and so can hop from book to book, wherever they can get work. Sorrentino uses this to create some of my favorite sections of Mulligan Stew. But to describe this requires a new paragraph.

Mulligan Stew progresses as Anthony Lamont, a fictional author within Mulligan Stew who is also a partial parody of Sorrentino himself, progresses with his book, Guinea Red. Guinea Red is an avant-garde noir wherein one friend murders another, possibly over a woman (likely story). The surviving friend is stuck in a cabin with the body of his dead friend, but as Lamont goes progressively insane (with rage and jealousy and neglect) and gets more and more involved with attacking all his enemies real and imagined, the two main characters of his novel realize they have some autonomy and start sneaking off and exploring the fictional land they find themselves in. At first this world is hazy and ill-defined, but as they adjust to the strangeness more details emerge and they discover other fictional characters like themselves living in-between lives as they’re between character gigs. It’s an hilarious conceit with touches of metaphysical profundity. Let me add here that these two characters themselves have been borrowed by Sorrentino from Joyce and Hammett. Wheels within wheels! Eventually the dead character absconds from the novel in progress entirely and ends up on a low-rent tropical isle with other out-of-work characters, hanging out at a bar, living a Margaritaville life. Meanwhile the novel-within-the-novel continues without one of its main characters, so the remaining character is forced to play both parts, without the knowledge of the author. Funny funny stuff.

And this is only one small part of this novel. Other sections are just as involved, just as inventive, and all are accomplished with an extraordinary attention to detail, as if each word was polished bright and etched in place. This is art of the highest sort, even without having much meaning beyond itself. But it doesn’t need to be anything but itself because it was the product of a thoroughly unique Mind on Fire.

And one other thing... There were regular mentions throughout the novel of the color blue - characters looking up into a clear blue sky, sometimes just the word "blue" thrown in - and after a while I knew there must be some great significance to this. While I was working (playing) my way through the reading of the book I read an interview with Sorrentino from the time when he was working (playing) his way through the writing of the book. In the interview he mentions an aesthetic epiphany he had many years previous regarding creative writing, poetry in particular. His epiphany came when he realized that poetry did not have to be based on any previous life experience, that it could be written "out of the blue". Ah! So that's what the characters were doing when they were looking up into a clear blue sky - they were looking toward where whence they came.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is not your mother’s novel within a novel. Not with lines like, “but wild horses could not drag my head around to make me look!” and, “I knew the reason for our meeting was hovering in the air, like a great sinister plastic animal that was waiting its opportunity to come between us and give us cancer.” But with the prevalence of lines like these, I wouldn’t begin describing this book by calling it a novel within a novel. That device is an afterthought here. This is parody on parade, a vehicle for the varieties of bad writing. And I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for loving this book if such a one trick bullet train does indeed tickle them. For me though, it’s a little fun, but little fun–for 450 pages.

If I were to judge Sorrentino solely by this work–which I know is unfair–I’d say that he is something of a talented studio musician whose best attempt at a work of art of his own is a sprawling send-up of the polyphonies he recognizes as amateurs and pretenders. But let’s be honest, idiot characters such as these are nothing if not easy targets. And it’s not exactly a courageous stance to take issue with the flaws of a capitalistic publishing industry run by humans, most of whom are more concerned with fame and sex–or whatever sates their ego–than with the thankless rearing of art. And talented as he is, Sorrentino himself sometimes commits something of the sin of telling vs. showing, which he’s so eager to put on display in his characters.

In my conception there is a point in history after which any distinct form–within a respective art–that has yet to be born, is to be, by right, green-lit and given a place in the flowering–a code which I cannot but wholly endorse. However, my loyalty here is to the like-minded reader, and my contribution will remain in the spirit of her best interest: a humble sign post, warning her away from any work that is not of the highest profit, no matter its place in the history or hierarchy of literature. I keep saying it–unapologetically: Life is too short for 3-star books. Kafka, you probably know, said it better:

“I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we're reading doesn't wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.”

[Andrew]

Long before David Foster Wallace (peace be upon him) found a jest that could be called infinite, and long after Flann O'Brien wrote about two birds mid-swim, Gilbert Sorrentino wrote a peculiar thing called Mulligan Stew, a novel within a novel that oscillates between voices and modes with a level of mastery in just the sort of way that would inspire countless young moodies like myself... and yet he's fallen by the wayside. Why do we have no trouble looking for wind-up birds, why are we comfortable getting lost in houses of leaves, but why don't we sit 'round the campfire with a bowl of mulligan stew?

It's the same question I have about Robert Coover, too.

But either way, you should give Mulligan Stew a shot, it's a big, sprawling novel that contains lists of many things known and unknown (think of the filmography footnotes in Infinite Jest) and has a mystery novel within an anxious frame narrative, and it's fucking hilarious too (the ridiculous direct-mailer ad copy for cheesecake pics from the small-time Mexican pornographers is one of the funniest things I've read in ages). Oh, and he authors a version of Daisy Buchanan who is somehow even more obnoxious and insufferable than Ol' Fitzy's.

Sure, it's not perfect, and I wonder about the utility of some of those lists (even though I'm glad they're there). But it's a landmark text from a time in American fiction when authors were actually willing to teabag the general public.

[Greg · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ripped off from MJ Nicholls’s A Postmodern Belch. This man is a Hack Attack! Do read him unless you want four weeks of horribleness. I am Greg. I am the star of the novels A Postmodern Belch, A Postmodern Belch, A Postmodern Belch, A Postmodern Belch, A Postmodern Belch, A Postmodern Belch and A Postmodern Belch. Six of these are available from Tim. Hi!

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Proper review to follow. Masterfully done, and at times breathtaking. One star has, however, been deducted from a purely personal level for those rare sections which had this Reader's attention wandering off. Too much, while funny, can sometimes be too much.

[Cathie · Rating 3 out of 5]

"I have little ear for music, and, I shamefully confess, can listen to almost anything, and often do, including bad advice".

So begins my review.

We’re taken on a ride as we go through the author’s journey, in his quest to write his next novel about a murder mystery, the writer’s frustrations with the characters and developing chapters of the novel and living a life. Truly a hapless stew of garbled gobbly gook.

What a POV on what it’s like to look into the lens of an author’s writing process. And what an interesting perspective on the thoughts of the characters! I enjoyed Halpin’s Journal, looking forward to when the next excerpt would appear. There were sprinkles of comic relief. And the letters!!! If not for those pieces, I would not have been able to forge through the 400+ pages.

At times I was questioning why am I reading this when I have so many other books to read. However, having been exposed to this type of experimental parody of a story line is one I can say “been there, done that”.

If you are up to the challenge and have patience, this is an eye opener of a read on the randomness of thoughts on paper.

[Adam Floridia · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is just filled with absolutely awful writing....It's great!

It takes a real virtuoso to write purposefully bad prose that is still incredibly engaging and entertaining. For the most part, Sorrentino handles this subtly, and it is only when there are obviously made, glaringly poor choices of syntax/content that I felt the text falters a bit.

A few favorites:
-The list of phrases to be used in rejection letters beginning on page 83
-All of the times Lamont recognizes the problems with his writing but immediately chooses to ignore them
-The list of hackneyed tropes starting on page 272
-The ideas for creative writing lessons: Give random questions and see how creatively students can answer them (21, 86, 144, 217, 289); give made up titles and authors and have students write a book synopsis (266).

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not have time to review this when it was freshly read, unfortunately, as was the case with many books from this past autumn. It's an ebullient, rambunctious, sometimes blistering read. I confess that The Author's chapter on Daisy, even if it was intended to be a parody of love in high-lyrical mode, broke my heart anyway. In being all over the place, Sorrentino's legacy here hits the spot.

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

This should be subtitled "At Swim-Two-Point-Oh-Birds"

A 1970's riff on Flann O'Brien, and much like his Irish source, Sorrentino's book is infested with cultural references that will leave most people out of the know, unless you're a New Yorker of a certain age...

Is the book clever? Yes. Did Sorrentino put a lot into this book? Yep. Even the kitchen sink, and therein lies the rub. If you're into pomo word torrents for the sake of pomo word torrents, then this book will make you come again and again...

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is writing at its finest. Every chapter, scrapbook, journal entry, review, letter is straight up genius writing at the highest level. This is my first Sorrentino and my mind was blown. Hell yeah, give me more of this. I could go on and on. Find it and read for yourself.

[Ezra James · Rating 5 out of 5]

4.5

This book can be adapted into a great movie, but only if it’s in the hands of a David Lynch disciple.

[Devin Curtis · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book celebrates words like no other thing I've ever found. It is not so much about a story, as it is about playing with and having fun with the words we tell stories in. It is extremely dense, sometimes hard to read, and definitely challenging. It is one of the weirdest books I've ever read. It is stupidly meta and postmodern without being cheeky about it like most meta narratives are. It is both low brow and high brow, and maybe everything in between. This book does not reflect real life. It has no great lesson to teach. There is no great moment of reflection. I didn't understand all of it. Tons of references, tons that I caught, tons that I knew were references but were unable to understand, and tons more that passed right over my head.
I loved every minute of it.

**** Review - Second Reading ****
Fiction! Farce! Fuckery!

[Nicole]

It's entirely possible that the counter-culture I read original literature crowd is just as susceptible to thinking something great based on its context (instead of its content) as are the best-seller consuming, genre fiction swallowing public they so like to mock. Just because the dalkey archive picked it up doesn't mean it's inherently awesome. Some things have a hard time finding a publisher not because they are buried, neglected and under-appreciated, but rather because they aren't very good.

I cannot decide if I even want to bother finishing this; so far it's extraordinarily tiresome.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 5 out of 5]

"the better the author, the more difficult he is with his workers"

"The strange thing is that Halpin (my narrator) seems to be bursting with the desire to say and do things that I don't want him to say and do. This has always been, of course a novelist's problem, but in this book it seems more a problem than ever."

I quote Sorrentio here even though he writes that one should not do so, that we should rather take the book as a whole, understand it as a whole. And, what a whole it is. As reviewers (and Sorrentino's narrator) state, Mulligan Stew is an attempt to create the ur-metafiction. It is also a runaway train of characters exerting their own free will, and, at a deeper level, an explanation of what it means for the fictional characters to exert themselves in this way - and also what it means for the author to attempt control their characters and thoughts.

If that isn't enough this book has a lot of tricks in it. A seemingly infinite (or ad-nauseum) amount. We're mocked with playful poems, silly and super long lists, majestic turns of phrase, big words, foot-in-mouth catch phrases and even fake book reviews to start the book. While I loved it for the most part, sometimes it just felt like Sorentino was unnecessarily showing off, (which again is definitely all part of the schtick - but it doesn't mean that I have to like it). The good far outweighs the bad. I loved the brief foray into Lonesome Dove-like language, likewise Sotweed Factor 16th century? English writing was also well used.

To say that there were tricks I didn't like is perhaps absurd, because this is book of absurdism, its why you've paid the high price of admission, because this is a book with a bit of everything, a veritable bookstore's worth of form. If ever "hot mess" could be used to describe a book of serious fiction, and not an over-shopping prone twenty-something in a pink and turquoise paperback, then then this is the time.

[Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

Tedious, tedious, tedious. Did I mention that it was tedious? Oh, also, it's tedious. It ain't funny either.

Sorrentino lifted the structure of Flann O'Brien's At Swim-Two-Birds for this novel. Since I hated Mulligan Stew so much, my copy of At Swim-Two-Birds has languished unread for years. I may never read it.

[Oriana]

It sounds like I should maybe be ashamed that I haven't read this yet

[Maggie · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book is about a writing IDIOT. it is so funny that it makes me tremble and took me a long time to finish because i don't like trembling. IT'S VERY FUNNY!!!! HAHAHAH!!

[Michael Kuehn]

I had to put it down. Take a break. Not really enjoying it . . . too clever by half. Purposely writing bad writing -- humorous at first. Quickly a tedious exercise. Might I try again? Perhaps.