At a boardinghouse in New Jersey in 1939, four people come together: a ten-year-old boy, his mother and grandfather, and a salesman on the make. As each relates his or her own version or their meeting in a series of superbly-constructed yet vibrant vignettes, the pathos & hilarity build to a climax that both delights & instructs, leading to laughter that hurts. Sorrentino has contrived an elegantly-patterned narrative that also manages to transcend its own schematic, creating 4 living souls whose shared dreams, defeats, memories & actions can enrich those of us who get to know them, seeing in their lives much of our own. In this way, Sorrentino works as a literary alchemist, forging living gold from the base metals of his masterly technique & insight. This is a book that deserves to sit on the same shelf as Faulkner, Hemingway, Woolf, and Joyce. It is a classic and will live long after its more popular brethren have been buried in the dustbins of literary history.

Wow, this stuff is wonderful. One of my favorite books. Read it and become "tarnation perceptive".

The man is nameless, yet we begin to know him personally. His sadness, his anger, and his frantic attempts to salvalge a marriage damaged beyond repair are emotions apparent in the pages of the book, The Sky Changes. Gilbert Sorrentino has written a compelling psychological novel in which a man travels across the contry with his children and his driver, and a wife who no longer cares for him. The man recounts his thoughts as he heads west, giving us an intimate look at the cracks of his marriage; cracks which ultimately lead to the shattering of lives. Sorrentino, who has written many books in the past, gives us one more reason to understand why he has been the recipient of many prizes for his past works. Certainly, this is one of his best yet.

I wish someone like Sorrentino were writing today in publications like "The New York Times Book Review." Many of the essays in this book are short reviews, of a page or two. A few are slightly longer essays on key figures like Williams and Spicer. What is amazing is how often Sorrentino is right. His style is vigorous, his judgments firm. The line about John Gardner alone is worth the price of admission: "We are struck ... that Mr. Gardner is one of those 'writers who cannot write," a Robert Bly of fiction.

In many of his novels, Gilbert Sorrentino has left linear storytelling in the dust to give equal voice to the alternative points of view of his characters. In his most successful novels - such as Aberration of Starlight and Odd Number - Sorrentino's method raised serious questions about "reality" and whether "facts" can ever be relied upon within the context of fiction. "Gold Fools" also ventures into an exploration of the "real," although its results are decidedly mixed. Sorrentino's penchant for riffing in all directions is present throughout. And he remains one of the few novelists who relish their political incorrectness in ways that can be uproariously funny. But there's a luridness in this book that seemed more than a little inappropriate, given its foundation as a parody of boys adventure books. And the interrogative structure of the novel - while a considerable technical feat - ultimately seemed more like a stunt than anything that contributed to a deeper understanding of what the author is trying to accomplish. Perhaps this is burdening this obviously lighthearted novel with too much baggage, but some of the writing seemed (uncharacteristically) forced and was a chore to read. In his 1976 review of "A Month of Sundays.," Sorrentino criticized that book's author, John Updike, for his "vivid" writing where, Sorrentino said, "anything goes as long as the surface dances." In many respects, the same accusation can be leveled at "Gold Fools," whose surface pleasures can't mask the emptiness of the vessal containing them.

Damn, this is a funny book! Sorrentino subverts the Western novel with a ludicrous tale of hunting for gold narrated entirely in interrogative sentences. Reminiscent in some ways of the boys' novel parody in "Misterioso," Sorrentino has a field day with the traditions and lingo of the Western, as well as going off on riffs concerning contemporary culture. Throughout, Sorrentino interrogates our use of language, especially our reliance on cliches; a linguistic hygienist, Sorrentino questions any sloppy misuse of language, knowing that sloppy language can lead to sloppy thinking. The Western genre has attracted many innovative writers--Coover, Brautigan, Kesey, even William Gaddis wrote a Western screenplay, unfortunately never produced--but Sorrentino's inquisitorial contribution is the funniest.

First three-quarters of the book are great. The prose was pitch-perfect, the composition and literary technique masterful, the narrator self-aware and reader-involving. An absorbing, fascinating read.

Then the book got a bit repetitious. Some material went over my head. Other stuff seemed to be an "in" joke between Sorrentino and his friends. By the end I was relieved.

Still, if you like heavily literary fiction with a strong sense of humor about others', and its own, pretensions, you'll enjoy this minor masterpiece.

I'm too young to have lived through the fifties, but I'm utterly convinced that phoniness and fakery must have reached a pinnacle in that decade, largely because of this great novel. It's a corrosive satire, not of the pervasive I-like-Ike suburban culture as one might expect, but of the downtown New York intellectuals and artists who opposed it. In devastatingly funny prose, their motives are mocked, their sufferings are skewered, and their mediocrity is made manifest.

If you've ever patted yourself on the back for being smarter than the Philistines around you--and who hasn't done that when the subject of Sylvester Stallone's salary came up in conversation?--you'd do well to read this book, spotting glimpses of yourself on every page.

Sorrentino had eluded me for almost a year. A writing teacher first introduced me to the author with, "The Moon in its Flight," and I fell in love with its metafiction (what with Sorrentino himself commenting on plotting and character development, challenging the reader to see the story for what it is--a story). I went on to try other stuff, but what I tried--"Gold Fools," whose every sentence is a question, and "Pack of Lies," a compendium of three early novellas interrelated, sort of, with recurring characters and circular storylines--left me frustrated.
"Little Casino," however, is different. An engaging, accessible, and finally wonderful book, it is similar to Vonnegut's "Breakfast of Champions," only not so cute. Sure, the plot/s is/are hard to comprehend, and some character portraits bleed into others, but the writing is full of wisdom and truthful observation regarding real-life human feelings--love, loathing, excitement, depression, despair. Read it and be glad you've found a way into the mind of a great writer.

This novel definitely destroys the sappy Waltons-style familial myths that dominate so many books and movies about the Depression. Sorrentino captures the self-destructiveness of his novel's unhappy, uneducated, unloved characters quite well, a self-destructiveness stemming from their quite brutal environment. I liked Sorrentino's use of two formal methods--via his omniscient third-person narrator--to report on his characters' grim mental states: his eschewal of direct quotes, instead using only paraphrases (e.g., "Grandma said that...") to capture the characters' loss of individuality; and his narrator's frequent reporting of the characters' thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. However, Sorrentino's vivid and masterful writing style doesn't quite conceal the novel's near-total lack of positive character development. Red, Grandma, and most of the other characters begin the novel screwed-up and merely become progressively worse, with no epiphanies. Of course, why should epiphanies occur to characters who have been too busy surviving day-to-day to develop even rudimentary senses of self-awareness?) In short, anyone who wants to know, in often graphic and brutal detail, how a dysfunctional childhood can actually damage a child should read this novel.

In the course of its 450 odd pages, Gil Sorrentino's aptly titled Mulligan Stew manages to embrace nearly every one of the flaws and shortcomings cited by various publishing house editors in the collection of rejection notices that he serves up as a kind of ironic prologue to the novel itself. Or are the letters part and parcel of the novel itself? Or is it a novel? Beats the hell out of me.

Yes, it's too long. Yes, it reads like an incoherent goulash of unrelated bits and scraps of ideas which seem to have been jettisoned from previous experiments during the revision and editing process. And the mystic caverns of technique he drags us down into have already been illuminated and thoroughly mapped out by the likes of Barth, Sukenick, Queneau, Robbes-Grillet and company. The characters are cardboard cut-outs and the dialogue flops back and forth between dull cliches and stagey pretentiousness. But wait. Sorrentino has created only one character, a disintegrating hack named Lamont, who exists in a frenzied denial of his failure as a writer. It's Lamont who's responsible for all that purple prose. Right? His work in progress is so bad that his characters begin to plot an escape just to distance themselves from the awful dialogue he keeps putting in their mouths. But that must be Sorrentino's doing. Right?

Are we being offered a window on the punishing battering a writer's psyche must endure as he goes into battle to defend the integrity of his craft against the evil philistines of the commercial publishing industry? Or is Sorrentino just putting a good one over on us while cleaning out his old notebooks? I don't know. The damn thing is diabolical. But it sure was great fun to read. And, really, isn't that enough?

A very funny, still timely look at the mind of a writer who is nowhere nearly as good as he hopes. He's a terrible writer, and is struggling desperately to avoid having to face it, but he's no better than the hacks and idiots he spews venom at. (The parody of erotic poetry alone is gaspingly funny and well worth the price of admission all by itself.) The book also touches on the old adage that a writer's only as good as his last book, and adds a sensible new dimension to it: that a book is only as good as its last writer. Not an easy read, and sometimes redundant, but still a scream.

If this were the first book I'd read as an adult I'd have stopped reading 30 years ago.

how the previous reviewer could give this book one star...oh, never mind. Crystal Vision is as good as Sorrentino's other novels, especially Mulligan Stew, Steelwork, and Imaginative Qualities. Wildly inventive, comic, and deeply depressing all at once, Sorrentino's novel is a masterpiece in the American idiom. Sorrentino's ear for American speech is as good as a great jazz musician's.