On avant-garde writing and Gilbert Sorrentino

Excerpt from page 60 of Alan Moore's BBC Maestro Course Notes 1.0, related to the 30th episode of the series, Lost In The Funhouse. Full course: HERE!

Alan Moore: [...] I recommend Gilbert Sorrentino’s Mulligan Stew, an ingeniously hilarious avant-garde novel about someone writing a dreadful avant-garde novel.

There are some wonderful touches in it. All of the characters in the novel get together in between scenes to discuss how the novel is going and previous books they featured in. [...]

One chapter was the writer’s attempt at pornography and is one of the funniest pornographies that you will ever read. It was based on the style of Victorian pornographies with their very overblown language. You would have this sexual situation where the writer keeps describing the colour of the underwear being torn off the female participants. The writing gets so overwrought that some of the underwear is being ripped off numerous times and seems to be changing colours.

Another book of Gilbert Sorrentino you might want to look at is Aberration of Starlight, which is not funny so much as incredibly moving. It tells the story of a woman and her young son at a boarding house, and the arrival of a travelling salesman who might be a good romantic match for the young single mother. Each chapter is composed of three or four different parts, perhaps a letter that the character has written but not posted, a fantasy the character has had, and so on. You start to get an idea of how all of these people are misunderstanding each other. [...]

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