Crystal Vision

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Fiction. Re-printed by Dalkey Archive Press. Both comic and haunting, CRYSTAL VISION invokes the world of magic and the arcane as filtered through a group of characters gathered on the streets and in the stores of their Brooklyn neighborhood to gossip, insult, lust, brag, and argue. In a series of seventy-eight short narratives, Gilbert Sorrentino perfectly captures the speech, allusions, and confusion of The Magician, Ritchie, The Arab, Irish Billy, Big Duck, Doc Friday, Fat Frankie, and many others. Through formal inventiveness, Sorrentino liberates these characters from the confines of realism and gives us their world--zany, vulgar, hilarious, and exuberant. "CRYSTAL VISION is a remarkable work of transparence, both artfully faceted in its construction and vital--full of speaking fossils--in the life it remembers"--Thomas LeClair, Washington Post Book World.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Tarot, American, Short Stories, Literature

289 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1981

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]

Fortunetellers use tarot cards to predict the future… Gilbert Sorrentino also knew how to read tarot…

The Magician, terrifically bored – again – turns himself into some kind of ancient nobleman and stands on the roof of a building looking over his lands – somebody’s lands, anyway…
The Magician doesn’t quite know what to do with himself here in his new-found domain. He’s got a funny-looking hat on and a doublet and such all. A cloak. All that old-time costuming. Knights and pages and so on. He has two staffs of office…
Just for the hell of it, and either because it looks good or he thinks it looks good, the Magician is contemplating a model of the globe that he holds in his right hand.

The residents of the neighbourhood gather in the local candy store and spend their time gossiping, telling tales, recounting dreams and recollecting events of the past… And their talk comprises scenes of tarot cards… And they themselves are the characters of tarot: magician, high priestess, empress, emperor, hierophant, hermit, fool, lovers…

Take instances of lost opportunities. Take ruing the day, remorse, the heart melting with ruth. Imagine two young people, a man and a woman. They stand under God’s mellow and brilliant sun, an angel from heaven above looks down on them, his arms spread in friendly blessing and benediction…
Now – years and years and years and years pass. These two young people have drifted apart, they’ve put on clothes, they’ve married other people also with clothes. Jobs, children, their hair is thin, teeth missing. The usual flatulence, fallen arches, myopia, indigestion, sagging breasts, grey hairs, paunches, and on and on.

Signs of the world, symbols of life – everybody interprets them in one’s own way.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic. Might be my favorite Sorrentino thus far. The formal conceit of Mulligan Stew, that characters are somewhat autonomous or interactive within (or without) the text is so finely subsumed into the weave of this work that it is no longer audacious, no longer something trumpeting itself with, um, trumpets or clarions or what have you. It simply is the given fabric of this text that characters intrude, appear, disappear, assume each other’s roles and voices and bodies, take authorial control, comment, critique, and assail the text with all manner of metatextual hijinks and Möbius strip-like cavorts and gambols of narrative logic. Possibly orchestrating all this, or at least having a hand in it, is the tired, bored, exasperated Magician, kaleidoscoping the stuff of this world with a wave of his wand very much like (wait for it…) an author poking about the page with a pen! Sorrentino is clearly enjoying himself here, at play in the formal fields of his imagination, but what elevates this to more than mere textual necromancy and verbal prestidigitation, is that feeling, that je ne sais quoi particular to Sorrentino at his best, where amid truly hilarious scenes of near-or-total-absurdity (you will laugh on every page of this book), a reader is suddenly struck with something definitely approaching sadness, or nostalgia, or regret- the best image I can come up with to reflect this Sorrentino-feeling is... stay with me here... remember a great day, a near perfect day from your youth, some love is proven or some great happiness has taken hold, and you are home or on your way home, and perhaps the sun is setting or it has set, and you look back at your near-perfect moment of love or happiness or victory, and suddenly the realization sets in that its essence is only momentary, that you must necessarily leave it behind and walk on, move on, that life is only and utterly made of moments that dissolve and happinesses that fade and love and ambitions that are, eventually and always, abandoned. This great sense of the comedic human tragedy of the retreating moment, that will both buoy us up and destroy us finally and totally! And so the retreating moment, the absolute particle of all our experiences as human beings, which can only be experienced in anticipation or in memory (because even this very moment has already passed), is essentially a fiction, something always in the process of being created, our own story. Sorrentino at his best (and Crystal Vision is among his best) understands this so well, and puts into his work layers and layers of story, stories on stories, stories intruding on stories, stories hijacked by stories, stories having dialogues with stories, and the characters in those stories are as bewildered, amused, angry, regretful, forsaken, alone, and hopeful as we ourselves are in our own lives...

"Great grief seized me at the heart when I heard this, for I knew people of much worth who were suspended in that limbo."

...so Dante begins Crystal Vision... the fictional limbo that makes up this book, of course, is the fictional limbo of life, the ever-retreating present perfect tense which is always past and always approaching. Art is life, life is art- to further grind down an old cliche.

For a review that explains the structural basis of this book, based on the Rider-Waite tarot deck, please see the impeccable MJ Nicholls (to whom I owe my reading of Sorrentino).

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

I had intended to say some clever things about Crystal Vision such as for example that maybe Schmidt had done it better or maybe I would have started off with that classic zinger “Finnegan did it better” or maybe get really clever and just go for the jugular with Sorrentino did it better with Blue, but this time I might have said it in all modest earnestness, not intending to once again get feathers all riled like we did last time at Blue Pastoral which really was a hell of a good time -- I mean both the book and the little romping and counter-romping about its virtues -- but thanks to the magic of the internet one can visit and revisit that little hashing-out of Sorrentinoisms day-or-night until the ephemerality of the internet intervenes ; too, I wanted to say something else about how Great Minds think differently and then I was going to say ‘such, for instance, take MJ and “N.R.” for example’ because we are the only two who have performed the three aRe’s (read, rate, review) upon both Blue and Crystal and how MJ seems to prefer Crystal and how “N.R.” prefers Blue [and for the record I would have entered also the following names for the following reasons :: Eric, a Great Mind who read and rated but didn’t review Blue , and Vjatcheslav who read and rated Crystal, and let’s not forget Geoff who did in fact read and rate and review (whew!!!) Crystal Vision (outstriding MJ-Himself in Lick’ings!!), and then I would have said how that exhausts the readers, raters, and reviews of Blue and Crystal from my Friend circle and how I can’t be responsible for judgement upon other goodreaders but maybe some of them are Great Minds too but then if they in fact are why have they not sent me a Friend Request, but that’s maybe just a technicality wherefrom we ought not hang ourselves too long ; and after making this comparison between Blue (whose words are more fantastic) and Crystal (whose stories are more fantastic) (but half a dozen of one....) I was going to try to say some conciliatory words because even with the cliche of “at the end of the day” all that “really” matters is that one is reading and adoring Sir Gilbert Sorrentino ;; but that didn’t really sound strong enough so I came up with a second really brilliant and clever thing to say at the end of this Review which would make everyone (who matters) read a little something from Sir Gil, and maybe even specifically Crystal Vision and that thing that occurred to me to speechify is the following ::

Crystal Vision is the kind of novel about which some folks are very likely to say something like “But it’s not really a novel, not in the technical sense” or some other such nonsense (it is a novel) but anyways, you know who you are when a phrase like ‘but it’s not really a novel’ comes as the highest recommendation to read that novel which someone who knows (what a novel is?) describes as ‘not really a novel’ ; I mean those be magic words!


postum scriptum-mum ^ Why aren't you reading Crystal Vision?

[Mala · Rating 4 out of 5]

(With due apologies to the Arab, my favourite character in this book.)

How can I possibly lucidify the deep arcanums of this oddest-ball book to you, my bosom compañeros?
I should elocute that it's magical, beyond superficialism of many subloony things we find in other commonplace books. But who can enumberate the hidden literary influences, all alabour in the air, benefic or malefical, whatever?
With what tingling twinges of agonic pain, poring with sedulousness over Sorrentino's acmeic prose, I, the epitome of callowness; tried to copy it!
Indeed, it burdens the very aorta with pangish pain that my imaginatious stricturations couldn't enableate me & my beggarly sentences fell flat on their face!
I absolutely acknowldgeate Gil Sorrentino's comic masterliniousness.
Crystal Vision's goofy brand of intellectualities will turn your dizzied heads with gouts of laughter. Do I discernate odd cackles of effusion?!
* * *
What is it about? A series of 78 vignettes, about a long cast of oddballs & losers, flitting from subject to subject, evoking bittersweet nostalgia, laughter, & sadness, in equal measure. "A soupçon of elegantia, not a mere slice of life, but an entire reeking and steaming slab of same."
I laughed throughout the reading of it, yet I laughed with moistened eyes because its "bone-freezing and tooth-shattering poignance" would pulverize your "heart to a telcumish powdery residue." ( Sorry, I can't help using the Arab's expressions!)
Sorrentino could be writing about his own Brooklyn neighbourhood for all I know, because the stories here have that depth of feeling & truth that comes from life itself, of characters with lost dreams, lost innocence, of those who were left behind. These are characters in limbo,* stuck in a time warp as it were, replaying their past via faulty memories, questioning them & creating/desiring new ones. Sorrentino is more concerned with the design of these conversations rather than the content, i.e. it's highly stylized. On a deeper level, Crystal Vision is about the nature of fictioning itself, esp.of the meta sort where, by drawing attention to its own artifice; it shakes our confidence in the representational quality/ability of fiction but then isn't fictional truth greater & truer than reality as it's not confined by it? Despite the sad undertones, there is definitely a clear delight & freedom experienced in the telling of tales— tall & short ones, interconnected ones, true & false ones.Through stories these lives find some meaning for every life is a story worth telling.
Not for everyone, of course—you don't bury the already buried! Only "the creamy cream of the (GR) neighborhood should partake in" Gil Sorrentino's writings.
* * *
(*) Sorrentino takes his Epigraph from Dante: Inferno, IV.
* * *
My spellchecker went crazy correcting the opening section! Apple's famous ad touts thinking outside the box; yet its system can't handle PoMo prose!

And, yes there's a (crazy) list here too & also gentle ribbing of C.Sandburg & R.Frost!

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

This outstanding novel presents 78 vignettes about a cast of characters in a 1940s Brooklyn neighbourhood. Each vignette corresponds to a different card in the Tarot Pack. Chapters 1-22 correspond to the twenty-two cards of the Major Arcana, with the remaining fifty-six covering the four suits of the Lesser Arcana – Wands, Swords, Cups and Pentacles – moving within each suit through King to Ace.

In each vignette, a story is told (or attempted) by a recurring character: The Arab, Professor Kooba, Ritchie, The Magician, Big Duck, Doc Friday or Irish Billy. There is no one narrator of each individual chapter, and often chapters are ‘hijacked’ by the squabbling characters. In places where the narrator is not made clear, an unknown narrator stalks the pages, who may or may not be labelled Mr. Sorrentino.

The Magician is given an authorial power over the characters: he can change their fates, transport them to the locations evoked in their storytelling. However, he is prone to abuse this privilege, preferring to trick and humiliate the characters as he sees fit, much in the manner of the heartless experimental novelist.

The Arab is the most distinctive character – a chronic malapropist who likes to ‘eneverate’ and ‘enableate’ his stories, correct the grammar of his companions, and applaud proper usage of unusual words. In the same mould is self-taught Professor Kooba, whose forever incomplete epic ‘The Curse’ is recited to the chagrin of the characters.

Largely, it can be said this is a novel about storytelling. The characters are gathered in a Brooklyn candystore, telling stories illuminated by the Tarot. The stories are interrupted, broken off, and even intercepted by the characters within these stories, who ‘break into’ the narrative and heckle the storyteller should he be prone to fabrication of real events.

The Tarot system gives the reader a key to ‘unlock’ the meaning behind each chapter. The Tarot and the novel illustrate one another through the descriptive evocations of the Tarot cards. Their fates and lives are manipulated by these cards, at the mercy of each trump.

Sorrentino melds the experimental devices – literary parodies, nagging self-comment, the process of writing and representation – of his novel Mulligan Stew with his earlier realist stories about Brooklyn life, such as Steelwork or Aberration of Starlight. Through this approach, we not only get a strong sense of their lives, the neighbourhood, but also of their predicament outwith the realm of nagging fictional beings.

They are trapped in a limbo between false memories and vain aspirations, and their lives are relegated to the role of the self-commenting fiction. By calling to attention to its own artifice, Crystal Vision destroys confidence in the representational power of fiction as fiction. The novel is a sustained lament for people lost by the impossibility of representation.

Oh, and it’s also hilarious. That’s quite important too.

[Adam · Rating 3 out of 5]

Originally assigned this book in my philosophy of literature class (whose syllabus included: the Confidence Man, Dr. Adder, and some other arcane gems) taught by the absolutely amazing Louis Mackey at the University of Texas at Austin in 2001, I was only a junior and really didn't understand deconstructionism, or anything else for that matter. As part of my project "read all the books you were assigned in college, but were too lazy to read," I started reading this in 2010 while doing my master's degree (in Taxation, you people thought I was going to say comparative literature! didn't you! didn't you!) it proved delightful bathroom reading. Each chapter is no more than 3 pages long.

This book is funny. It's sad, and it's a nice slice of the life that I'm sure existed in New York in the 70's and 80's. The philosophical part of the book (I think) is the meta-literary device (it's patterned after a deck of tarot cards-don't worry, I didn't ruin anything) employed. Unlike most devices to which most authors become enslaved to, and ultimately make the book as tedious as possible to read (cf. the Autograph Man (which I've tried reading about 3 times now)), the book doesn't suffer from it. In fact, it makes what may have been incredibly boring stories about the lives of ordinary people, in an ordinary place, in an ordinary time, quite extraordinary (plus, all the fantastical stuff that happens doesn't hurt). In other words, each little "tarot reading" of the characters is just short enough to be interesting.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

Liked but did not love this one. Sorrentino is always at least very, very good, but this isn’t the best place to start with him. Still, his characters are fantastic all the time.

[Catherine Mustread · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's all in the cards and carried over in the book – a planned and ordered hodge-podge of confusion, complication and artistic interpretation. Had I not read reviews mentioning this novel is based on the Tarot cards, I would have had no clue -- not being familiar with Tarot. So this book (not a novel, but not exactly short stories either -- they share a setting and time period and a large cast of characters) caused me to learn a lot more about Tarot cards, and to question my understanding and interpretation of literature/fiction.

The origins of Tarot are vague and uncertain, same as the stories in which the characters make up stories about others in their neighborhood, some fantasy, others more realistic, some serious but most comedic. Some chapters have overt relationships with the relevant card, others quite oblique, but all serve as symbols of life and the quest to know more about the past, present and future.

Like the chicken and the egg, a regenerating cycle, this book illuminates in stories what the cards illuminate about life, and life is illuminated by literature. To quote from Louis Mackey (Contemporary Literature, Summer 1987), "Professor Janos Kooba [my favorite character] is composing an encyclopedic novel, The Curse, which will incorporate everything that happens in Crystal Vision, which of course contains Professor Kooba and his novel. Contained by and containing itself, Crystal Vision/The Curse is thereby provided with endless opportunities for endlessly shifting perspectives on its own being and value."

The appeal of Sorrentino, the wealth of substance and style, the relationship between philosophy and literature, the mockery and endlessness, leave me thinking this is more work than fun and no matter how much time and energy I devoted, I would still not get it, as his writing is not designed to be gotten. In Summary: Enjoy and move on and as the Magician says, "Try to treat people with a little more kindness."

My copy of the book, without a dust jacket, was borrowed from University of Arizona Library.

[Peter Lehu · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'll never forget this novel--its audacity and absurdity and uniqueness--but I'm already forgetting most of the specifics. There's no plot, just absurdist dialogue between cartoonish characters on a Bay Ridge, Brooklyn (my hometown) street corner. Specific characters are not even memorable, but the dialogue as a whole is totally unique, a pleasure to read, and often LOL funny. My closest points of reference are Mark Leyner or obscure scholarly remarks made by Lisa on The Simpsons. The basic theme is the joy of storytelling and language as a salve for the harshness and banality of everyday life. Lots of talk about getting drunk and (not) getting laid but as if relayed by a nineteenth century Oxford professor. I enjoyed this, but I've always liked obscure vocabulary words and the southern Brooklyn references were a bonus.

[Grady Ormsby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Crystal Vision, by Gilbert Sorrentino is not a diary, nor a series of short stories. It is more like a sketchpad with words rather than drawings. Each of the seventy-eight entries is, if not a story, a slice-of-life vignette. The reader is taken on a tour, not of Brooklyn’s hot spots, but of ordinary places where people might gather. There are bars, street corners, Pat’s Tavern, Volger’s, a gas station, Gallagher’s, The Aubway Inn, Lento’s, and a candy store, among others. Somewhat analogous to Edgar Lee Master’s Spoon River Anthology, most characters appear in multiple entries, sometimes as central figures, but most-often as minor players.

[Oriana]

cannot fathom why I haven't read anything by him yet.

[Erin Tuzuner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Absurd, complex, engaging. Just like the tarot.