University of Virginia Library

Gilbert Sorrentino's Revisions of The Sky Changes
by
David Leon Higdon and Robert F. Sheard

Gilbert Sorrentino is now firmly established among those authors one invokes when discussing post-modernist American fiction. Although he may not yet enjoy the stature of Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, or Ronald Sukenick, his metafictions, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971)

and especially Mulligan Stew (1979), have created a solid reputation and drawn a wide circle of admirers. Such, though, was not always the case. When his first novel, The Sky Changes, was published by Hill and Wang in 1966, he was known as the editor of Neon and as a promising poet, author of The Darkness Surrounds Us (1960) and Black and White (1964). What attention his novel received was largely negative. John M. Carroll, reviewing it for Library Journal, concluded that "as a whole, the literary devices of no names, no inhibitions, and no continuity only result in a repetitive, tiresome, clinical prolongation of a hypothetical psychological case study," and Choice's anonymous reviewer decided that although "a distinctive voice . . . has shaped a taut novel," Sorrentino at present only "bears watching."[1] Critical reactions addressed to Sorrentino himself were often even more pointed. He recalled that "some guy wrote me after reading The Sky Changes and said that after he had finished it he went and threw up."[2] Such negative responses did not then motivate Sorrentino to revise his novel, as he would later do in 1986. In a brief, rather disingenuous "Author's Note" to the 1986 text, Sorrentino explained that creating "a more harmonious whole" which, as a result of revision, "is now . . . as sound as I can make it" carried him towards his larger goal of "strengthen[ing] and purify[ing] the narrative strategies of the text."[3] The revisions, he adds, "are not, as they say, substantive." In actuality, they are. In addition to adding two sections to his novel, Sorrentino also made 149 other revisions, including 62 deletions, 58 revisions, 25 additions, and 4 paragraphing and break changes, which significantly reshape motivations, themes, and the larger sense of design in the novel.

As early as 1974, Sorrentino had planned revisions, should the opportunity afforded by a second edition of The Sky Changes ever arise. In an interview, conducted by Barry Alpert, Sorrentino said he could not reread The Sky Changes, or any of his other published works, because rereading "recalls the weariness of composition."[4] He had, however, given considerable thought to his text. He said he saw "a lot of flaws" and knew "right off the top of [his] head. . . . There are 2 sections that are missing from The Sky Changes. . . . that should be there and are not" (Alpert, 12). He also sensed "lapses in tone . . . sentences that drag and limp—that shuffle along. . . . sentences that don't do anything except tell you things" (Alpert, 11). Clearly this novel on which he began writing in 1961 and completed sometime in 1964 still claimed his attention, especially so, it seems, now that he was in the midst of a new project, Mulligan Stew.

The Sky Changes is a short novel made up of seventy-three sections (seventy-five in the 1986 edition), each but the first, "A Start," carrying a geographical place name for a heading. These identify the points through which the characters pass on their way from Brooklyn to San Francisco, during a leisurely journey which takes them south to Maryland, west through Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois, south into Missouri, Tennessee, and Mississippi, before the trek west through Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. In his desire to achieve pure spatiality in form and theme, Sorrentino "splintered" the chronology so that "the past, the present, the future are mixed

together in order to show very clearly that there is no past that is worse than the present and there is no future that will be better than the present" (O'Brien, 8). Even the novel's title reinforces the desire for spatial form with its muted insistence that only the sky changes. The title, taken from Horace's "Quid tibi visa Chios, Bullati, notaque Lesbos" or "To Bullatius, on There Being No Place like Home," is, in context, even more pointed: "But the climate change" is the more usual translation; however, Sorrentino, who has himself translated the Elegaics of Sulpicia, undoubtedly supplied his own translation of the line. Forty-nine of the sections (fifty-one in the revised version) treat the present journey; nineteen chronicle the couple's courtship and early marriage; five are devoted to future events which trace, in reverse order, the husband's return alone to New York.

Sorrentino found both "an enormous sterility" and a "lack of hope" in America in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his novel records both in detail (O'Brien, 10). It is a keenly pessimistic work in its topography, its marriages, and its culture. America resonates as a wasteland, changing only in the nature of its threats. A "grey sky, grey rain" (6) and "malignant clouds" (12) accompany them through the "shabby, eternally grey" (8), "inhospitable" (11), "incredible darkness" (17) of Maryland, Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois. The protagonist feels "as if he is moving through hell" (16) at times, in "all this dead land, this wasted heartland" (24) of the Midwest with its "bent, cruelly dwarfed" (8), "withered and sunbaked" (11) people and "barred store fronts, an anonymity of evil . . . no life behind them" (17). Memphis, New Orleans, Houston, and San Antonio offer no respite. Memphis brings "a heavy despair in the very rays of the November sunshine" (28-29); New Orleans is no more than "a lousy fucking town, a rotten, stinking town" (60), and San Antonio stands "stale, used, so dreary and grey in the rain" (64). The sparsely inhabited spaces of the West bring another kind of threat, an almost Pascalian terror of the openness, barrenness, and coldness. "His heart shriveled at the beauty, the utter barrenness of the country," (75) the narrator tells us of the protagonist's reaction to New Mexico, while Arizona looks like "a landscape of some foreign planet" (98). Only in California do the land and sky join in fertility. As they cross into the central valley, the protagonist perceives that it is "unbelievably beautiful" (122); "Biblical remembrances of a land of milk and honey seemed to find reality in the countryside" (126).

The emotional landscapes visited by the travelers are equally bleak and barren. They visit several old college friends and other acquaintances who

have fled New York, seeking happiness in rural America. In Urbana, Illinois, they visit S and B (no character in the novel has a name). B is now an instructor in humanities at the University of Illinois, but while in the town park he is still quite willing to spear an annoying goose in front of his small children. S and B, we are told, "slash at each other constantly" (21), as indeed do all these couples who are in flight from New York and themselves. S remains "as nervous, as strident as ever," while B remains "honed to a razor edge of frustration" (21). They have found only disappointment in the Midwest. In Santa Fe and Taos, R and M repeat the pattern. Both are jobless, depending on R's ex-husband for "gratuitous and sporadic financial assistance" (78). Their life together resembles "guerrilla warfare" (79), escaped only through drunkenness. San Francisco brings stopovers with both W and Q, whose wives never even receive initials. W's wife seems "simply grasping" (129) and greedy; her husband is resentful of having to work at a steady job, of knowing he and his wife can have no children, and of the bullying sadism of his wife's illegitimate son. The novel closes with a sombre scene of an ultimately estranged couple met in transit through Albuquerque. The husband is on heroin; the wife is an alcoholic. Together, they are sitting "decorous and serene, staring into the gentle sunlight, blunted, secure from each other, and from everything else" (139).

Sorrentino said during a 1981 interview that "there's nobody in the novel who's worth a damn, nobody at all" (O'Brien, 11), not even the "whining voice" of the narrator; the characters are "zombies," he concluded (O'Brien, 11). The primary characters number six: the paranoid, sexually insecure husband, the estranged wife, their two silent children who seem to exist in the novel only to be bathed and put to bed, the mysterious, unnamed driver who eventually elopes with the wife, and a cantankerous green Ford station wagon of questionable roadworthiness. The husband and wife, both largely convinced that their marriage is a failure, are travelling to the West coast of Mexico in hopes that its isolation and romance will somehow revitalize their relationship. The trip has been made possible by the husband's inheritance of his mother's estate, a point which comes back to haunt him numerous times.

As noted, the major characters are tightly clustered around one disintegrating family unit. The children remain ciphers, rarely affecting the story except as reminders of their father's essentially ambivalent feelings towards them now that he wonders if they are actually his. The parents have been married for seven years, and the husband's apparently devout Catholic mother has been dead for four months or so when the trip to Mexico begins. The husband is estranged by doubts from his children, and he feels "he can't get through to them, anything, any more" (7). Sexual uncertainties devour him almost hourly, because, as the 1966 text emphasizes, he knows of his wife's infidelities (as well as his own). His identities as father, husband, and lover have been shaken. He no longer knows if he recognizes his wife, his doubts having been awakened when she called him by another man's name during lovemaking (18). On one hand, he assures himself, "whatever else she was she

was faithful. She had to be faithful" (39); on the other hand, he goads himself on through "self-imposed blindness to what he now allowed himself to consider were her probable acts of infidelity" (92). He scripts an affair between his wife and the shadowy driver, not knowing the accuracy of his imaginings. By the time the party reaches Nevada, the wife has become "so remote, she moved in a box, transparent, but sealed" (110). The trip becomes the protagonist's futile attempt to escape the realities of his existence. The escape from friends, dead love, and the inadequacies of self he confronted on the opening page of the novel have haunted him all the way to San Francisco.

These four paragraphs of interpretative summary could stand fairly adequately for either the 1966 or the 1986 editions, so far as the larger structural units are concerned. The basic facts of the story remain largely identical in both editions; however, the role of the wife and especially the role of the narrating voice change considerably. Contrary to Sorrentino's assertion in the "Author's Note," the changes are substantive. In fact, they alter dramatically the way the reader perceives the characters and their relationships. Sorrentino established a greater sense of distance and objectivity between his narrating voice and his protagonist, especially as these narrative strategies affect the presentation of the husband/sometimes narrator. The role of the wife also underwent considerable alteration, probably the most crucial cluster of revisions for the 1986 edition.

In the 1966 edition, the tone of the husband/sometimes narrator is much more bitter and vindictive than in the 1986 edition. Time and aesthetic distance may have softened the autobiographical ties Sorrentino had with the material. Nonetheless, in the later edition, we see the narrator displaying a less pessimistic attitude about his wife and their relationship. For example, early in the 1966 edition, the husband and wife are making love and "He feels himself coming, blinded with fury, impotent, where are his balls? What happens to them that he comes and it is vinegar?" (14). The 1986 edition deletes "impotent, where are his balls?" (5), thereby painting the wife as less of an emasculating force. The revision still shows the husband's anger but it removes some of the blame from his wife for their incompatibility.

A similar change in the husband's attitude is evident in "Jackson, Mississippi" (Section 34) and the flashback, "Brooklyn, New York" (Section 35) which immediately follows it. In Jackson, the husband and wife are staying with a couple—one of their many nameless friends: "So, they talked that night in bed (in lieu of fucking, which was more trouble than it was finally worth) . . ." (64). In the later edition, the parenthetical aside is deleted. And in the next section, pondering C's troubled relationship, the narrator thinks, "Ha . . . what she and I do all the time. Put up with anything so as not to disturb the comfortable status quo" (69). Again, in the 1986 edition, the accusatory remark about the status quo is deleted (49). In both passages, then, we see a change from the accusatory, bitter husband of the 1966 edition to a more resigned, more conciliatory narrator, one who realizes that part of the blame is his. In fact, as we see from his continual attempts to have sex with his wife, it is not more trouble than it is worth.

At the same time, however, we also get a narrator in the second edition who is more self-deluded. When the family arrives in New Orleans, the husband senses that a positive change in his fortunes is inevitable. Describing the hotel room in the French Quarter, he thinks: "It was a fine room, and he was delighted. The hint of better things to come in this state seemed to be flowering fully. He looked at his wife with a love he had not felt for her in years—a love and a hope for the both of them" (74). In the second edition (53), the first two sentences of the quoted passage are deleted, leaving out the external presence that provides the husband with the sense of optimism and hope. In the later version, we see the husband wanting to feel optimism, but it is an optimism based on nothing tangible—a delusion.

The husband's attitude and stance are not the only ones to undergo revision though. After the husband and wife separate, the husband calls his friend, J, for advice. The 1966 edition closes the section with J's thoughts after his conversation with the husband:

The 1986 edition, however, entirely deletes J's thoughts. The focus now remains on the husband. After he and J hang up, we get only a short paragraph: "The husband stood for a moment, his hand still on the phone, controlling the nausea that was threading through him. J's voice had filled him with loathing and horror" (77). This major revision accomplishes two purposes. First, and most obviously, it removes the terrible account of J's hypocrisy so evident in the earlier version. The second edition shows J to be concerned for the husband, not his money. The revision also provides another instance of Sorrentino's change in attitude toward the wife. The reference to her outright greed and manipulation has been deleted completely. In fact, logically, greed cannot be a motive for her to leave the newly affluent husband for the perennially destitute driver.

A second instance of this type of revision occurs with yet another set of friends, M and R, during Thanksgiving in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The 1966 version gives us the thoughts of M and R as the husband and wife arrive:

This insight into M and R's questionable enthusiasm over the visitors' arrival is eliminated in the second edition, and the centers of focus become the husband and wife: As with the passage about J, this demonstration of M and R's greed is eliminated in the second edition, leaving us with a more comfortable and typical reunion of friends—less bitter and less vitriolic than the tone of the 1966 edition.

In addition to softening the bitter tone of the first edition, Sorrentino also made several narrative changes designed to focus more tightly on the husband as the center of consciousness. The narrative employs both third person omniscient and first person point of view variously throughout the text. At times, though, third person viewpoint alters the way the reader perceives the actions of the characters, and the author has revised several of these passages to bring the husband's perception of the events into the foreground. This emphasis on the husband's observations brings up all the questions in the reader's mind associated with a first person narrator. What is real? What observations are biased? What can we believe and what must we question?

On several occasions, what was an objective external observation in the 1966 edition becomes the husband's internal observation of an event. For example, during an argument between husband and wife, we are told "The driver sits, silently, a tenuous smile on his lips. He finds it all slightly amusing" (83). The second edition removes the editorial comment about the driver's amusement: "The driver sits, silently, a tenuous smile on his lips. The husband glances at him" (61). In the later version, we have no indication of the driver's real state of mind; all we see is what the husband sees and speculates upon. Another passage which changes from an actual observation to an indication of the husband's perception occurs when the husband feels a sense of the driver's growing resentment. The husband cannot substantiate his feeling, though, and decides to ignore it. The objective narrator tells us, however, "He was right in his feeling, the driver was resentful . . ." (109). The second version leaves the passage strictly in the mind of the husband: "Yet he could not help but feel that the driver was resentful . . ." (81). Again, the revision eliminates any objective indication of the driver's attitude, leaving the reader with increased doubts about the credibility of the narrator/husband.

In the revised edition, the reader's view of both wife and driver is filtered through a perceptual focus of the husband. At no time in the second edition do we get any indication that the conspiracy the husband suspects is genuine; it remains only suspicion until the very end of the narrative. For instance, when the husband is contemplating his options concerning his wife's suspected affair with the driver:

The revised version of this passage lessens the level of authorial presence. We do not see a narrator so obviously corroborating the husband's suspicions, but rather one exposing the husband's perception, again calling into question the differences between appearance and reality:

This second group of revisions alters the reader's conviction that the husband's suspicions are valid. By removing the objective intrusions and placing the events in the eyes of the husband only, Sorrentino has allowed the reader a reasonable and necessary doubt as to the reliability of the husband as an objective observer.

Nowhere is this more clear, however, than in the third set of revisions where Sorrentino eliminates every reference to the wife's actual infidelities, both in the past and currently with the driver.

The first of these occurs in an early flashback scene, recalling the time in Brooklyn, New York. The 1966 edition contains a scene between the wife and the husband's friend F which confirms her early infidelities of which the husband knows nothing. Sorrentino deleted the following lines in his 1986 edition:

The passage continues with the husband's thoughts while he is at work—a passage present in both editions—and then the 1966 edition closes the scene thus: Both of the passages demonstrating the wife's infidelity are omitted in the 1986 edition (30). Although the husband suspects she has been unfaithful, the reader only sees the husband's suspicion, not any evidence of her affairs.

In another recollection from their time in Brooklyn, a similar reference to actual infidelity on the part of his wife is deleted in the second edition—this time an affair with J. Staying with them for four months, J "laid his wife each weekday when the husband went off to work. The husband knew only that he was sponging off them, nothing else" (100). This becomes simply "The husband went faithfully to work each morning" (74) in the later edition. Continuing with the same incident, the 1966 edition states: "For his wife, it was a simple step from the first indiscretion to greater ones, and the step came almost naturally." And we are told a few sentences later that "The driver knew about J and his wife, J had told him" (100). Again, none of this remains in the second edition. The references to her "indiscretions" are erased, and we are left with: "His wife told him how relieved she was that J was finally gone. Getting in my way all day long, is what she said" (74-75).

Yet another indictment of the wife's unfaithfulness is deleted from the second edition on the occasion of the stay with M and R in Santa Fe. The first edition recalls the wife's former close relationship with R: "His wife had in R a former confidante, someone whose advice she had sought many times on the telephone concerning her infidelities, both real and desired" (108). The 1986 edition reads: "someone whose advice she had sought many times on the telephone" (80).

The scene continues with M and R looking upon the husband with pity:

Compare this with the 1986 version: While we still have a portrait of a failing marriage in the second edition, we do not get any specific indication of an attributable cause. In short, every reference to an actual infidelity on the part of the wife has been eliminated from the second edition, leaving the reader with only the paranoid suspicions of a sexually insecure husband.

Not only has Sorrentino removed the references to the wife's guilt in the 1986 edition, but he has erased any evidence of the driver's guilt as well. On two occasions in the 1966 edition, the omniscient narrator tells us what the driver is thinking while in his room. In Memphis, Tennessee, the narrator tells us:

This passage is omitted in the 1986 version, leaving only the husband's speculations (35). Again in the New Orleans episode, the narrator tells us the driver's thoughts. In the first edition, we read: "In his black room across the inner patio of the house the driver thinks, any time I want it, any goddamned time I want it" (79). With this deleted, we are again faced with a reinforcement of the husband's paranoia and suspicions. In the second edition, by the time the wife actually "admits" her infidelities, the reader has seen so much evidence of an overly insecure and entirely deluded male ego, that one actually begins to question the veracity of her "confession." Is she confessing because she is indeed guilty as we see in the first edition, or is she "confessing" because she has been accused and suspected for so long now that she will admit to anything to satisfy her husband and be done with the situation?

Despite Sorrentino's claims, therefore, that his revisions "are not, as they say, substantive, but are for the most part intended to strengthen and purify the narrative strategies of the text" (iii), we have changes which potentially undermine the entire interpretation of the novel. In fact, we have two very different versions, each capable of being perceived differently in terms of characterization and thematic values. It is a mistake, therefore, to look at either and claim it to be the "definitive" edition. With twenty years separating the publication of the two editions, it is not going too far to suggest that the two narratives were written by essentially two different authors—one at the beginning of his career, the other writing with the benefit of several successful works behind him and the altered perception that comes with two decades' additional experience.

Sorrentino told one interviewer that he cut twelve to fifteen sections from Steelwork, his second novel, an indication that deletion is one of his major tools in revision; the interviewer recalled for him, "You mentioned to me some time ago that you had to rewrite and even omit several sections from that novel [The Sky Changes] because they tend to arouse emotions on the reader's part which conflicted with the emotionless and sterile quality of the characters' lives" (O'Brien, 9). Rather than deleting further scenes, though, Sorrentino added two new sections to The Sky Changes, "written especially for this [the 1986] edition which serve the purpose, one hopes, of giving the geography of the journey a greater coherence" (iii). In his 1974 interview with Alpert, Sorrentino said these sections were absent in the first edition because "it's just that I didn't put them in because I didn't know enough to put them in. I was rushed and anxious. And now I know that they should be there" (Alpert, 13). This coherence is needed, particularly for the reader who wonders why the travellers go from Washington, D. C. (Section 4) to Jacksontown, Ohio (Section 5). To explain this, Sorrentino added the Hagerstown, Maryland (4A) and the Wheeling, West Virginia (4B) episodes. Hagerstown enabled Sorrentino to emphasize the shabby greyness and the malformed people a bit earlier and more emphatically; Wheeling gave him the chance to show the husband so estranged from reality that he wonders if the actors on television in the Lee Marvin movie (Shackout on 101) are not more real than he is. We also glimpse the drunken sentimentality and self-pity of the husband

who feels sad that he does not know anyone in either Maryland or West Virginia—one of the most deft additions to the text.

The individual word bears the responsibility of conveying a sense of the artist in Sorrentino's novels. In addition, he said, "the words must also have, in their composition, a texture and design we call style. . . . The flash, the instant or cluster of meaning must be extrapolated from 'the pageless actual' and presented in its imaginative qualities."[6] In approaching his revisions of isolated words and phrases, concern for "texture and design" is immediately recognizable in Sorrentino's revisions, deletions, and additions, apart from those revisions affecting character portrayal. For example, he obviously wished to sexualize the protagonist's perception of his wife's body at various stages in the journey, because her "pants" (28), "dress" (78), and "legs" (157) became her "panties" (18), "slip" (57), and "thighs" (119), although by the end of the novel she has become "The woman" (138) rather than "His wife" (181).

Sorrentino's dexterity and success in adjusting images is particularly evident if one considers his ability to refocus the image entirely by substituting a different word. For example, he changed "signs" (41) to "banners" (28), thus capturing more vividly and more accurately the "FOR SALE banners cracking in a yellow breeze" (italics added); he revised the description of the husband literally kicking his wife out of bed from "an absurd act" (85) to "a mean act" (62), thus making it less a philosophical gesture and more a consciously literal spiteful act which diminishes our sympathy for the husband, just as revision of "a riot of ideas" (97) to "a storm of plans and schemes" (72) creates a sense of a more desperate and deluded man capable of scarcely formed "plans and schemes" rather than the more in tellectual "ideas"; and in similar fashion, the substitution of "mute recriminations" (92) for "silent recriminations" (122) to describe the "torture" of the husband and wife lying together in the same bed shifts the image from one of choice, the choice of remaining silent, to a true inability to speak in the first place. Finally, replacing "blast" (158) with "shock" (120) in describing the wife's reaction to her husband's near seduction of a sixteen-year-old at a party both changes the reaction and deletes the positive connotations of "blast." These and other revisions keenly hone the presentation of the marital relationship which is at the heart of the novel. Elsewhere, Sorrentino changed W's stepson from a "drooling bastard" (75) to a "drooling brat" (55), making the perception less vindictive, though accurate, on the protagonist's part. Sometimes the revisions are as minor as changing "the husband and wife" (109) to "they" (81) or "Assuming himself" (128) to "Putting himself" (97); at others, as complex as rewording "speaking now of their daily hatred of Santa Fe" (104) to "They would soon speak to their guests of their hatred of Santa Fe" (77), or making the figurative "so loudly that it was like being in a box of noise" (113) the literal "so loudly that the car was a box of noise" (84).

Not surprisingly, Sorrentino made very few additions to his text—only twelve in all. As the travelers pass through the Mojave Desert, they now see "half-finished and abandoned housing" (121), rather than just "housing" (159), a revision totally in keeping with his image of the decaying America.

The husband's "desperation" (24) becomes his "absolute desperation" (15); his wife's allure intensifies as he now glimpses "Stockings, a misty flesh" (18); and the husband now silently calls the driver "the bastard!" (61). Even the mariachis (92) in San Antonio become "some shabby mariachis" (68). Only one addition is lengthy. Originally, the protagonist and his wife discussed the sponging J and decide that "You just had to forgive a guy like that" (100). To the next sentence, Sorrentino appended the ironic comment: "the husband offered, and they both laughed indulgently and with sublime generosity" (75), a generosity they cannot feel for one another. The closing phrase is particularly ironic to the reader considering what he or she knows of their relationship.

As noted above, Sorrentino's favorite mode of revision is the deletion, and just as he reshaped the reader's experience of the protagonist by slashing key passages, so, too, does he attack the problem of certain sentences and phrases. Sometimes, the deletion almost involves the laughable, as in his change of "a damp worm" (153) to merely "a worm" (116); the redundant, as when "ate their food" (92) became "ate" (68); or the inappropriate, as when "It was a rather festive occasion" (107/80) disappears from the description of the first evening with M and R in Santa Fe. Occasionally, a stylistically unusual word gets cut: "motility" (119/89) and "detritus" (29/19), for example. Most of the deletions, though, simply tighten syntax, sharpen idiomatic phrasing, tame minor redundancies, though the Hopi Indian who in the 1966 edition was both "handsome and inscrutable" (141) is only "handsome" (107) in the 1986 text.

While reshaping numerous passages, Sorrentino also made eleven necessary corrections. The 1966 text prints "Sante Fe" (106, 107, 107, 110) which the 1986 text corrects to "Santa Fe" (79, 80, 80, 82), while also changing "the rub" (173), an obvious misprint, to "the tub" (132). "Oakland Bridge" (167) becomes "Bay Bridge" (127), reflecting current geographical idiom, and the distance from which New Orleans becomes visible on the Ponchartrain Bridge changed from "ten miles" (71) to "five miles" (52). The phrase "arching poverty" (56), describing the workers in the Mississippi cottonfields, becomes "aching poverty" (39), either a correction or a suppression of the metaphor of the arch their bodies trace against the sky, reasoning which would be congruent with Sorrentino's desire to avoid the figurative statement. One correction seems to stem from a major misprint or the failure of a joke. As the travelers enter Columbus, Ohio, the husband thinks "This fucking town, what a perfect name. Columbus. After that businessman. The usual car lots" (25), but in the 1986 text, "businessman" becomes "failure" (15). Sorrentino may have regarded the image of Columbus as a "businessman" too strained, though he indeed was, and thus substituted "failure" since Columbus was a failure on several levels.[7]

The jacket blurbs of the first edition had high praise for Sorrentino's novel. Robert Creeley, for example, hailed it as "unique, brilliantly and sparely written, absolutely without self-indulgence or embarrassment," and Robert Gover called it "a spellbinding tale that is compact, poetic and tragic.

For the reader who is not afraid to be shown the tortured side of our modern style of quick dissolve, five-and-ten-cent-love." Donald Phelps' note perhaps came nearer the bone when he labelled the novel "an odyssey of spiritual onanism, movingly and brilliantly executed," because he captures the essence of the two aspects of the novel central to its success: the nature of the protagonist and the characteristics of the style. As we have suggested, it was to these two aspects that Sorrentino emphatically turned when North Point's interest in republishing his first novel offered itself to him. Here was his opportunity of revising the narrative strategy of his novel so that it would truly earn every syllable of praise directed towards its protagonist and its style in the 1966 comments and so that it would be fully in accord with his aesthetic assumptions and practices.

Notes