A Strange Commonplace

By Gilbert Sorrentino

The author of Mulligan Stew presents “a savage, baffling and beguiling novel about the wreckage that infidelity leaves behind” (Kirkus Reviews). 

Borrowing its title from a William Carlos Williams poem, A Strange Commonplace lays bare the secrets and dreams of characters whose lives are intertwined by coincidence and necessity, possessions and experience. From the boozy 1950s to the culturally vacuous present, through the jungle of city streets and suburban bedroom communities, lines blur between families and acquaintances, violence and love, hope and despair. As fathers try to connect with their children, as writers struggle for credibility, as wives walk out, and an old man plays Russian roulette with a deck of cards, their stories resonate with poignancy and savage humor—familiar, tragic, and cathartic. 

 “One never expects traditional plots from Sorrentino . . . but one can usually count on wit, vigorous prose, and an unflinchingly bleak take on life. . . . The novel is divided into fifty-two discrete parts—a dazzlingly original deck of cards.” —The New Yorker 

 “[Sorrentino] can be cutting in his satire, and bullying in his eroticism, and now adds anger to the mix as he portrays a circle of struggling New Yorkers living back in the sexist, alcohol-sodden, and hypocritical 1950s on into the egomaniacal present.” —Booklist 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coffee House Press
• Release date: Nov 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781566892872

Gilbert Sorrentino

In addition to his books of poetry and criticism, Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of fourteen novels, including Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, The Sky Changes, and Mulligan Stew. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award.

Book preview

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In the Bedroom

AFTER HER HUSBAND LEFT HER FOR SOME FLOOZIE WHO was supposed to be an executive secretary at the crummy half-assed company he’d worked at for years without a raise or even so much as a bottle of cheap whiskey at Christmas, she packed up a few things, took the girl, and moved in with her cousin Janet on Gerritsen Avenue. She’d get the rest of her things after her father had spoken with the rat about his plans for taking his clothes out of the house: she didn’t ever want to see his face again. She should have known that something was going on when he took to wearing a ridiculous homburg instead of his usual fedora. She’d laughed at the hat and he’d blushed and then got angry. Now that she thought back on this she realized that the tramp must have said something about how distinguished he’d look in a homburg, and the damn fool went to the haberdashery, probably the Owl Men’s Shop, where the kike told him he could be a banker in a hat like that. Happy as a clam. After a couple of weeks, she went back to the house to pack a suitcase with some of her toiletries, and found a note from him on the kitchen table, pinned under a bottle of Worcestershire sauce. Dear Sweetheart, I’ve made a great mistake but I love you only, you, can you forgive me? Please call me at Ralph’s or leave a message with him for a time I can talk to you. I love you, and want our marriage to last more than you can know. She put the letter in her handbag, went upstairs to their bedroom, and opened a drawer in her dresser. In among her lingerie and stockings she found his white silk scarf, the one with the blue polka dots that she’d always liked so much. She startled herself by laughing convulsively, then threw the scarf on the floor and stepped on it. The son of a bitch bastard son of a bitch.

Success

AT THE WHITE-WINE BOOK PARTY, AN EVENT HIS NERVOUS publisher had never even begun to conceive of as a portent of his memoir’s surprising and modest but somewhat hysterical celebrity, he bumped into Napoleon, a bro, as the cant of the day momentarily had it, who had been one of his drug suppliers in his high school days. Napoleon was quite different now, dressed in a dark, conservatively cut suit, and an elegant tie against a gleaming white shirt. He thought to say how far they’d come from the old days, but realized how jejune such a remark would be and kept still. Napoleon’s card announced him as an Entertainment Consultant, and listed addresses in both Chelsea and Williamsburg. They laughed and postured, the usual half-true stories were hauled out, and Napoleon’s wife, Claire, smiled brilliantly in her role as ignorant but pleased outsider. She was an arrestingly beautiful young woman, whom the memoirist immediately decided to pursue; his pursuit of her led to a sexual encounter some weeks later, then another, and soon they were lovers. According to Claire, Napoleon was not interested in her comings and goings, and had other girls. This fact, true or not, somewhat tarnished the exoticism of the affair for the memoirist, and he felt on the cusp of boredom. One day, Claire, pale and nervous and chain-smoking the execrable Gitanes that sex had instructed him to tolerate, told him that she’d been diagnosed with multiple myeloma. He comforted her with assorted clichés, held her tenderly, fucked her with what he was certain was sensitive caring, and sent her home with a stricken yet deeply compassionate look on his face: sadness beyond words, of course. That was that! He had, after all, literary responsibilities, publicity tasks to honor, people to talk to and cultivate, too many things to do to permit this exhausted intrigue to continue. She might want sympathy or understanding or whatever it is that the incurably sick want. Well, she was married. He stopped calling her, and did not acknowledge the messages she left on his answering machine. That, indeed, was that. She died less than a year later, while he was in Los Angeles, where he had moved to further his romantically stalled career, as he probably liked to think of it.

Born Again

CLAUDIA, AS SHE HAD TAKEN TO CALLING HERSELF THESE past five years, came in from her supper at the Parisian diner at about six o’clock, as usual. She’d had a hot brisket sandwich and a small salad and they’d refilled her iced tea free of charge; she was a good customer. She double-locked the door and slid the chain on, then hung up her coat. She took off her dress and slip and laid them carefully over the back of a chair, put on her pink chenille bathrobe, placed her flats in the back of the closet and slipped her feet into worn corduroy slippers. The apartment was silent, save for the thin clanking of the two radiators that warmed the small rooms. The letter from Warren that had come a week before lay on the kitchen table. She hadn’t opened it, nor would she, of course, and in a week or two, or maybe a month or even longer, she’d throw it away unread. There was something satisfyingly insulting and contemptuous about ignoring the letter. It would be, she knew, just like the others from the pig—those that she, like a fool, bothered to read—maudlin and self-pitying, filled with regrets and sentimental clichés about the sacredness of marriage and love and the gift of children from a loving God; about being together through thick and thin, about, God help us, their honeymoon even, which had become sacred. He’d have the gall, certainly he would, to mention their daughter, her daughter, pretending bitter guilt and deep remorse and talking about Jesus and salvation and being born again: enough goddamned sanctimonious evangelical Christian bullshit and broken glass, as her grandfather would say, to make a decent human being blush. She had never thought, never, that she’d hate anyone as much as she hated Warren, and she often smiled sourly to herself when she acknowledged the fact that she had permitted her hatred to ruin, utterly, what was left of her life. And Warren, with his disgusting Jesus this and Jesus that, his whining, falsely joyous Christian idiocies, had arranged his putrid life so that his past, if not virtually obliterated, was—even better—redeemed. He was the fake grateful recipient of a fake grace. Claudia thought that any God worth a nickel—even Warren’s loathsome creeping Jesus—should have mercilessly destroyed him with disease and agony and poverty. Should have killed him! It was dark in the apartment now, and she rose, quite abruptly, to walk to her small dresser and open the bottom drawer, where she kept the lingerie that she’d never wear again, not that it would fit her now. She had hidden there, although hidden from what she had no idea, an old tattered book, wrapped in the white chemise she’d worn on her wedding day, her sad and dark wedding day. She opened the book at random, and read: For a moment Bomba was so taken aback by the sight of the jaguar that he did not stir. She closed the book and wrapped the chemise around it, then stood staring at the window, black with night. One of these evenings she’d read the whole book through, as she hadn’t done in at least twenty years, more like twenty-five, and allow her heart to break completely. Then it would be the right time to take the pills she’d been hoarding. Maybe she’d bump into Jesus and tell him what she thought of him and give him a good one on his other goddamned cheek.

Lovers

FOR ALMOST FORTY YEARS NOW I’VE KNOWN A WOMAN whose husband, almost that many years ago, was utterly crazy about—the phrase, I realize, dates me—a younger friend of hers, whom he thought unimpeachably beautiful; often, upon meeting her, he would quote Marlowe’s lines on Helen in Doctor Faustus, throwing wide his arms and declaiming the famous words in a graceless parody of ham acting that was neither funny, nor, to my mind, appropriate, and that embarrassed his wife, the young woman, and anyone else unlucky enough to be awkwardly present. Even more embarrassing was the obvious fact that this rote performance was a transparent attempt to conceal his deep feelings for Clara, I believe her name was. Clara had a younger brother, who, early one morning, was, astonishingly, shot to death from a passing car while standing outside a Bay Ridge diner. She never really recovered from this stupid and abrupt death, and the husband, it is perhaps unnecessary to say, took immediate advantage of her rickety emotional state, to seduce her. Clara became pregnant, which led, or so I believe, to the breakup of the marriage, although the man’s wife, my woman friend, even after all these years, has never so much as suggested that this was the case; she has never even suggested that the two were intimate. Clara must have had an abortion or suffered a miscarriage, because no child was, to my knowledge, ever born. Clara’s Uncle Ray, so the rumor went, came looking for what he called her boyfriend, soon after the latter, filled with self-pity, had moved out of the apartment, and beat him up badly, breaking his nose, jaw, and two teeth. Clara was married, about six months later, to a young black man who was involved in the music business, or maybe it was the real-estate business. Given the time and the place and Clara’s yahoo relatives, they moved away. Quite recently, my woman friend told me that Clara had died just a few years into her marriage. It took me a moment to realize that this had happened some thirty-five years ago, perhaps because my friend seemed so pleased—delighted even—about her death, and spoke of it as a recent event. We’re both alone, as you may have surmised, and since we get along fairly well, I’ve decided to ask her