There has been a lurch towards the 1970s and 1980s, some of the nether regions of my bookshelves. I had not looked for a long time at Douglas Woolf or Gilbert Sorrentino, and I wonder why. Gilbert Sorrentino's Splendide Hotel, a pleasing rambling take on Rimbaud's 'Voyelles', I did read many times, sometimes out loud in class, when I was teaching. I haven't felt ready for Mulligan Stew after the first read; it is immensely long and prefaced by the many rejection letters it generated. I also haven't gone back to Joyce. Nor I think, will I. So much reading swirls around early zeal, and so much zeal does not find a future.
Aberration by Starlight is a charming title for a short book published in a Penguin American Fiction list in 1980. Though formally innovative, with chapters of different styles and viewpoints circulating around a father/his daughter/her son/her would be lover, it is somehow only that. Or: the excesses and stylisation of all the characters, charmless as they must be in the eyes of all the others, is such that this reader does not want to hear another take in another chapter. Though, being cursed with diligence, I read to the end, just in case the formal experiment relents into a human place to rest and take human breath.
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