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Notes
John O'Brien, "An Interview with Gilbert Sorrentino," Review of Contemporary Fiction, 1 (1981), 7; hereafter cited as "O'Brien."
The Sky Changes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1986), p. [iii]; the first edition is (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966). All quotations, other than in the discussion of variants, are from the 1986 edition. The best discussion of The Sky Changes is in Jerome Klinkowitz, Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction (University of Illinois Press, 1980), pp. 156-158.
Barry Alpert, "Gilbert Sorrentino—An Interview," Vort, 2:3 (Fall 1974), 11. The interview was conducted 7 April 1974.
Horace the Epistles, ed. Edward P. Morris (University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), p. 77, a reprint of the 1939 edition. The translation is that of Ross S. Kilpatrick, The Poetry of Friendship: Horace, Epistles I (University of Alberta Press, 1986), p. 76.
"'The Various Isolated': W. C. Williams' Prose," New American Review, No. 15 (1972), pp. 196-197.
Any time a novel is reset for a new edition, the opportunity for changes in punctuation arises. Short of seeing marked proof or marked copy, we will probably never know if the forty changes in accidentals originated with Sorrentino, an editor, or a typesetter, especially since there are few recognizable patterns in them. Three times hyphens were added or two words became one; twice italics were deleted and once added; and parentheses were deleted twice. Commas were deleted seven times to no particular effect other than slightly more correct punctuation and, in one instance, the clarification of meaning: "I guess it is a shock to her, she's been good, to me, and" (158) loses a comma (120), thus focussing the shock entirely on the wife. All the comma deletions come in the last sixty pages of the novel, but the five additions are spread throughout, all of which pair with another comma to set off a phrase or clause within a sentence. Several times, commas were raised to question marks (seven times) or to exclamation marks (once). Each mark is technically more correct: "he shouted" (114) does seem to need the exclamation mark, and the seven other instances are phrased as questions. Finally, several commas become periods, thus changing one sentence to two, and occasional subordinate phrasing is removed, thus creating two sentences. In nearly every instance, punctuation revisions appear on pages where substantive revision has occurred. This suggests that Sorrentino is probably responsible for both types of revision. For the sake of completeness, it should be noted that Sorrentino occasionally inverted word order, changing phrasing such as "pass it by" (21) to "pass by it" (13) or "grim and gay" (162) to "gay or grim" (124), the latter possibly effected to parallel "manic and bitter" and "success or failure" which appear in the same sentence.
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