Gilbert Sorrentino

Congratulations are in order for Gilbert Sorrentino, who will receive the 2005 Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award for his contribution to English-language Literature. The award comes with $200,000, and a ton of respect. Other recipients include William Gass, WIlliam Gaddis, John Barth, John Berger, and Edward Said.

Sorrentino began writing in the 1950s, but it was in the '60s and '70s that he really found his style. His writing is often described as metafictional, and in his works Sorrentino tries to reveal the things that most authors are at pains to hide: the artificiality of narrative and the impossibility that fiction can truly mirror reality. To this end, Sorrentino has deliberately made his characters 2-D cutouts, made them aware that they are in a novel, and made them comment to the reader on things like plot. Sorrentino uses writing constraints and relentlessly experiments with style, voice, and perspective to push his novels into strange territory. He's done things like write a novel entirely in questions and create a novel out of 59 fragments, each describing a different piece in a series of 59 pen and ink drawings.

Derik of MadInkBeard has written often on Sorrentino. For more on the author, see Derik's reviews of Aberration of Starlight, Under the Shadow, Gold Fools, and Crystal Vision. Also see this Dalkey Archive interview with him. Also, see my own comments on Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.

Here are links to some of his notable novels:

Mulligan Stew

Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

Aberration of Starlight

Sorrentino's recent works include The Moon in Its Flight and Lunar Follies. A Strange Common Place is forthcoming in 2006.

Comments

[derik]

All my Sorrentino posts are on this page:

http://madinkbeard.com/sorrentino.html

[Robert Nagle]

Wow. I've been meaning to pick up another Sorrentino book. This will be a good excuse.

this may just be the typical writerly envy speaking, but I'm uncomfortable with huge awards like this (especially when it's clear the writer is at the latter stages of a career and presumably has attained tenure at some university or has some university pension). I honestly don't know the income trends for distinguished writers like this or whether that has been identified as a special need. (I would hate to have Anne Tyler working at a MacDonalds to make ends meet, for instance).

If the motivation behind the sum is to arouse publicity, it has certainly succeeded. But the question becomes: couldn't you have done the same thing with $50,000? $25,000?

There's the infamous Ted Turner prize for Daniel Quinn's novel Ishmael, which ended up winning $500,000 (when even the judges scoffed at the extravagance at the amount). A writer acquaintance of mine (John Gregory Brown) from the past won a $200,000 prize for a first novel. An excellent novel (with a New orleans theme, btw), yes, but is that the most effective way to bring out literary talent?

Then again, $200,000 doesn't get you what it used to nowadays. And far be it for me to oppose awards of arbitrary amounts. (Doing some surfing, I noticed that Lanham Foundation funds the superlative KCRW Bookworm Program and an impressive audio archive (real media only unfortunately). I know that creative careers have a lot of financial insecurity, and thank god someone is trying to address this issue.

I for one would like these huge awards be accompanied by some commitment to make free or subsidized versions of their works available.

[Christopher Sorrentino]

Robert Nagle's comments regarding the bestowal of awards is well-taken. In particular I'm often a little dismayed by the well-heeled recipients of those grants and fellowships whose stated purpose is to enable writers who might otherwise be obliged to interrupt their work to keep at it. But the Lannan is a prize, not a subsidy. Its purpose is to be all gravy. You may as well object to the hundred and fifty grand they spent on the full-page ad in the Times announcing the awards. That could keep three or four writers eating for a while too.

By the way, my father is comfortable but hardly wealthy, and over the course of a career that's spanned half a century I would estimate he's earned perhaps fifty or sixty thousand dollars in royalties, tops.