Interior Landscapes

...That's why we made the trip...

...Think of Donne's words, "This minute I was well, and am ill, this minute...

...In fact, it has been the great realists who have taught us to read a novel in this way, so that every detail becomes an incarnation of the reality presented...

...Sorrentino's success, in his brief, charged "odyssey of spiritual onanism" as Donald Phelps calls it on the jacket, is to make his imagination coincide with his consciousness, so that anything he sees and, more significantly, anything he fails to see, is aureoled with visionary truth...

...Its time sequence mixes up blocks of affectless prose so that the reader encounters the husband returning in cowardly stupor on the Super-Chief before he has reached the farthest rim of his abasement...

...I am surprised with a sodaine change, and alteration to worse, and can impute it to no cause, nor call it by any name...

...By his fearful chronicle of those changes-the sky, the land, the towns-Sorrentino has been able to show how that other knowledge, after which there is indeed no forgiveness, has been burned into the husband, mile by mile...

...Not since Butor's Mobile has a book responded so desperately to the metaphorical possibilities of the American landscape, the American road culture...

...A young man known to us only as "the husband" ("what he never understood was that he would have scorned any other marriage that remotely resembled his own as stupid, meaningless") is travelling by car with his wife, his two children and another man identified as "the driver" across America, from Brooklyn to San Francisco...

...It is customary to attach the label "poet's novel" in a rather dismissive way to novels like this (consider the neglect of Creely's The Island, a comparable triumph) in which every object-that used refrigerator, what an emblem of a marriage!-and every landscape, like this one from New Mexico: "The land was a throwback to some time when monsters walked and crawled the earth...

...no men belonged here, they were simply allowed to stay by the land's good graces, they squatted here, battling the climate, the sand, the sterility constantly...

...Its compositional unit is a three- or four-page chapter assigned to some place or other, "lacksontown, Ohio" or "Mojave Desert...

...Thus the book ends in Albuquerque, fading out on a struggle to get a used refrigerator into a trailer, followed by the merciful amnesia of the Martini pitcher: "They sat, decorous and serene, staring into the gentle sunlight, blunted, secure from each other, and from everything else...

...or, in a more intimate mode, "he locked the door of his roomette, took a slug of the bourbon, lit a cigarette, and began to read the New Yorker-an austere dedication, on this novelist's part, to all the devices of art he can get his hands on, all the methods which will allow him by imagery, rhythm and narrative distortion to conjugate an observed physical environment with an inner weather felt by the characters...

...The highway stretched, flat and boring, into the distance, meeting the horizon at some point which was itself a seeming dreamor nightmare . . ." every episode, like the sinister encounter with the state trooper in Mississippi, and every observation, like "the vulgarity of the Washington housing projects is too precise in its choices to be ugly," is an expression of the total feeling of the book, its emotional marrow...

...assumes the seigneurial privileges the husband suspects him of enjoying-though no one gets much in the way of kicks here-all the way out...

...Its cover, a famous and terrifying photograph by Robert Frank announces the novel's theme, a katabasis or night journey into unholy places...

...The husband's mother has died before the little novel begins (the excision from Brooklyn is several times referred to as "a tearing out of the rotting roots," plants "torn from the earth souring under the cement," the mummy "breaking out of that cocoon"), and there is now enough money to escape, for a while at least, a life of soul-grinding routine...

...The avowed purpose of the trip is to "save the marriage"-that characteristic American rescue operation-by leading a life of noble savagery in a Mexico altogether of the mind, while its recognized consequence is to wreck everyone involved (except the car): "Can it be that the trip has been the source of knowledge-that he cannot believe, nothing has changed but the sky, the land...

...His heart shriveled at the beauty, the space, the utter barrenness of the country...

...Once the trajectory is established, his wife and children abandon him for the driver, the shadowy alter ego who in Las Vegas (where else...

...And though every writer, as Robbe-Grillet has recently pointed out, believes he is a realist, there is, for all the accurate reporting here-"the Midwest is made up of police and driveins...

...The Sky Changes is a novel about pain and weakness and ugliness...

...The gesture made, for which a shape is sought, a form found, is the terminal phase of a seven-year agony: the rotten marriage...

...it tells us by a cunningly administered dose of images, in an intermittent but containing rhythm, how the mind gets from one place to another, and literally in what space of time the transformation occurs...

...Great vistas of reddish soil, preposterous mesas blue, purple, black in the distance...

...Of course we could say the same thing about Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary: poet's novels indeed...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" "The shape of the gesture, the form of it"-that is what Gilbert Sorrentino announced he was after in his last collection of poems, Black & White...

...forthwith the husband in his shameful and shamed cuckoldry returns by train to New York, pulling himself together and apart in that roomette, the systole and diastole of consciousness: "Good-by, it's all over...

...That is how most of us account-or fail to account-for the disasters of our lives, while it has been Sorrentino's peculiar care to embody, to articulate, to make metaphors which will accommodate chaos...

...To separate, with manufactured reasons that would never have proved efficacious in the stability of living, together, in one place, the stability of residence...

...The trip was their exit, their opportunity...

...The achievement of this novel is that it accounts for process...

...it is-without being merely "poetic"-joyous and strong and beautiful...

...The responsibility of forms continues to be his preoccupation in fiction, the way in which an art becomes accountable for a life which is otherwise merely lived or eluded (journalism or fantasy...