I believe that Gilbert Sorrentino is one of the most underrated and unappreciated American writers; it would not surprise me if most of the people reading this had not heard of him. He boldly experiments with form, and few writers are funnier or have a better grasp of the quiddities of human nature and the nuances the English language. The first book of his stories I read was Little Casino, which captures the contrariety and confounding absurdity of life (in Brooklyn). Hopeful dreams disperse and dissolve in a vale of tears and laughter. It is filled with temptresses and poseurs, the meritorious and the meretricious, the profligate and the downtrodden. The individual stories are but a few pages long; each one is followed by cynical, sardonic commentary by the narrator. For example, after recounting the bathetic, hapless romantic adventures and history of a married man, he notes “one might, as an amusement, do worse than think of adventures such as these enveloping forward-looking politicians, dim professors of civil engineering, and dreadful Christian fundamentalists.”

The story ‘The very picture of loneliness’ has stayed with me ever since I read it many years ago. In a mere page and a half Sorrentino evokes more empathy and understanding about loneliness, the pathos of never fitting in, and the sad, desperate love of a father for his son than most could summon forth in a novel. It is beautiful in the sense that melancholy can be beautiful. As a father looks, heartbrokenly, at his son standing in a desolate lot in tattered hand-me downs, he realizes that “the boy, in the sad, quiet of this gray, dispirited lot, will be alone always in his life”, destined to never comes to grips with “the distant, perplexing world.” Years later, after father and son have become estranged, he remembers “the shape of a brown leaf that lies at his feet, crepitant.”

in Little Casino, Coffee House Press, 2002