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In addition to his books of poetry and criticism, Gilbert Sorrentino is the author of fourteen novels, including Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, The Sky Changes, and Mulligan Stew. He has received numerous grants and awards throughout his career, including the John Dos Passos Prize for Literature, two Guggenheim Fellowships, two NEA Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award.
A sullen husband has uprooted his family to take them on a trip cross-country in an attempt to change his wife's frigidity and his own self-doubt and blind, stifled rage. But the husband finds that nothing has change but the sky, the land. The difference in space only accentuates the event of the marital breakup. The trip is no salvation: it is grubby and sad, his encounters with his friends around the country nasty. The husband who had tried in this journey, as in the bleak fields of mid-America, to find yellow in wormy dead corncobs, ends in failure and humiliation. It's a world of rotten people and situations, a world where people seem to let things happen to them. The emotions of the husband become exhausted in his striving to be a nice guy to the wonderful friends who abuse and cuckold. It's not sophistication that has the wife's lover as best man at the wedding, but the hunger to be loved, when the I'm sorry always elicits the painful It's okay. This is not the road trip of Kerouac's Dean Moriarity, glad, mad, digging it all; it is a bitter, more adult insight into hip America. (Kirkus Reviews)
