Red the Fiend

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Making Red the scapegoat for all of her life's disappointments, Grandma convinces herself that her grandson is a monster who deserves his punishment

Genres: Fiction, Novels, United States, Literature

213 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1995

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

[Megha · Rating 4 out of 5]

This family could make any run-of-the-mill dysfunctional families look like rainbows and sunshine.

Grandma - Red's Grandma - can easily put to shame any tv show/book of the S#it My XYZ Says variety. She often breaks into over the top, endless diatribes without warning, giving one an earful about her irrational opinions, idiosyncrasies and pet peeves. Not only does she transition smoothly from whatever topic to whatever, she is quite creative with name calling too.

All would be peachy if Grandma were just an amusing/annoying old lady running her mouth. But don't underestimate Grandma. She lives to make lives of everyone within her force field miserable - miserable possibly meaning something worse than whatever the word miserable means to you. Be it making Grandpa choose between cigarette and lunch, or treating her daughter like a servant and constantly telling her how she is the scum of the earth, nothing is beyond her. Her favorite toy, though, is Red. From making him eat the food he hates to beating him within an inch of his life, everything goes. While Red's retaliation largely involves practicing a semi-moronic expressionless look in the hopes that it will somehow make him invisible, it goes much deeper than that. There is no way his psyche can make it past scar-free. There are times when those festering wounds do show up on the surface and it is real ugly.

This is a black comedy where you will be hard pressed to come up with a single positive quality for any one of the characters. The only hero here is Sorrentino's writing. His playful, sarcastic and often exaggerated voice worked really well for me. Writing here is mostly straight in comparison to Mulligan Stew, there are some chapters that stand out stylistically.

If you enjoy dark humor and can stomach some ugliness, go for it. Grandma is as interesting and strange a literary character as they can be. She will be super-delighted to entertain you.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

The thing about Gilbert Sorrentino is that he is, only occasionally, a metafictional pioneer and postmodern innovator. Half the time he wrote books like Red the Fiend which, although conceived in his usual book-as-useless-artefact style, is a work of bloody-minded breakneck realism, spliced with a world-weary comedy and an ever-present tenderness. Tenderness came to define Sorrentino’s later work, especially in the beautiful and haunting memory novels Little Casino and A Strange Commonplace—both rich in spectres at once tragic and screamingly funny. Sorrentino, perhaps more than anyone, understands the precarious, perhaps nonexistent line between comedy and tragedy. Split into forty-nine chapters, Sorrentino’s glib narrator coolly describes life among a dysfunctional Brooklyn family, focusing on only-son Red and his sadistic Grandma, a superb Dickensian villain of (somewhat) exaggerated Irish-Catholic cruelty, where any minor violation of proper behaviour results in Red being ladled, whipped, bashed and clobbered. There is no Dickensian moral equilibrium for Red in this novel. He’s trapped in a Depression-era reality—all he can do his endure his pain and steal occasional looks up his teachers’ skirts. As Sorrentino said, Art cannot save anybody from anything. It certainly won’t help poor Red here. Red the Fiend is a heartbreaking and blackly comic book, and also doubles up as an effective satire of those Dave Pelzer-inspired, Please Daddy No books clogging up British airports.

[Zadignose]

I loved this book. It's brutal, painful, wise, deeply cynical, true, and all one should reasonably expect from Sorrentino. I've learned to like reading again, even as it has caused me to feel a greater degree of hatred and distrust for the human species.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brutal and brilliant.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

A child is being beaten.

And beaten and beaten and degraded and belittled and insulted and traumatized and irreparably broken.

The End.

Unfortunately not, because for too many people you casually interact with on a regular basis, it is just The Beginning. Sorrentino's atrocious account is brutal and essential. The bedeviling details are neither grotesquely sensationalized (ala the fetid frissons of "torture films") nor submerged in transfiguring sentimentality (ala Lifetime Movie Network). Offering virtually no omniscient narrative commentary, Sorrentino dramatizes--with near clinical accuracy and disheartening super-realism--the deliberate ruination of a life. What makes the depiction so compelling is far greater than the cliched consequences of cruelty; Grandma and Red are shown in thrall to a putrid rapport. The stunning lucidity of Sorrentino's writing chronicles the events, in thought and action, which (un)make an unlivable life. Children are monsters, and most people just age without maturing, so families become bigger monsters tyrannizing littler monsters in endless series of petty, histrionic recrimination and retaliation, forever. Red is all-too-human: helpless, clueless, angry, afraid, curious, frustrated, desperate, violent, tender, deluded, implacable, and at every moment nauseously swinging between abject trust and infinite suspicion. His only hope lies in the fact that his misery cannot go on forever, simply because everybody dies, and the lucky ones die fast; his only understanding is that when you become brave enough to inflict pain you are no longer afraid. He is a poor kid, doomed to become a poorer adult.

I want to briefly take issue with something misleading on the back cover. It is insinuated there, perhaps in a superfluous attempt to gild a raggedly hopeless text with the rhinestones of socio-critical redemption, that Red's travails are "like" the hardscrabble lives of Depression era immigrant families. In my judgment there is nothing in the text to support such a spurious analogy. That sort of interpretive approach safely isolates the disturbing element in "hard times long ago." This is no satisfyingly bitter, edifying slice-of-life nostalgia, like some cynical noir throwback. It is certainly not a self-satisfied by-the-bootstraps paeon to greater, tougher generations either, like, you know, those that had to walk uphill both ways in the blazing snow with no shoes and were happy about it etc etc. You won't come away fortified with a feeling of grizzled determination and stoic endurance.

So what is it, then? A ready riposte for almost every situation in which an aghast onlooker--you, me, anyone exposed to the eye-blink obsolescence of everyday newsworthy catastrophes--asks frantically, "How could this happen?!" Sorrentino's answer is vivid, pensive, caustic, indigestible, and difficult. Which is perfect, because even if the answer ultimately proves inadequate, the point is to meet the questions on their own recalcitrant terms, to stare back and not flinch.

[Jafar · Rating 4 out of 5]

Almost every page of this book will make you chuckle – and then feel guilty about it. There's nothing funny about child abuse, poverty, alcoholism, ignorance, repression, prejudice, and nihilism… but still it's funny.

And thanks god for urbandictionary.com where I could look up the colorful old racial slurs that I had never heard before.

[Zach · Rating 5 out of 5]

Christ this is a painful book to read. Read it anyway.

[Erica · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read this book as a child...I thought it said "Red the Friend". At a time when I was reading things like Charlie Brown and Raggedy Ann and Andy, this was an emotionally horrific book. To this day, I'm not sure why it was on the Children's Literature floor of the library. I can't even bring myself to re-read it as an adult because of how disturbing the childhood memory remains.

[Kirill Yesen'kov · Rating 5 out of 5]

Какая же потрясающая вещь!

[Chad · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wish I had reviewed this right away. It was about a month ago that I read it, as of the date I write this; now, my ability to form a very clear and comprehensive picture of it is somewhat diluted.

I can say this:

Its ending seemed somewhat less significant or powerful than I expected, but it was in perfect keeping with the tone of the rest of the novel. The title is a trifle overblown, judging by the end. Even the most fiendish things Red does are mitigated by some very human self-justification, and after that peak I found his vileness actually mitigating itself over the rest of the novel.

He did not strike me as a fiend so much as a slightly worse example of most of humanity -- just enough worse so that the potential for foulness in people manifested in more directly recognizable forms. The usual weak self-justifications, mental contortions to avoid cognitive dissonance, and spite were cast in slightly starker light than usual.

I have read this book and several of Sorrentino's short stories. I liked the short stories more, though Red the Fiend was a worthwhile read as well.

[Jordan West · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hubert Selby's In God We Trust All Others Pay Cash; contains a strong contender for the worst grandmother in american (and quite possibly world) literature, an absusive, manipulative, sadistic, pig-ignorant, semi-psychotic petty tyrant par excellence, and captures as well those lifeshattering tragedies and everyday traumas with such a terrible clarity that at times it takes the breath away. The sort of book that goes a long way towards illustrating why things are just the way they are.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hlariously repetitive story of a kid abused by his grandmother.