This whole scene is cast in an immensely unflattering light in Sorrentino’s roman à clef–ish 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which might be described as a master class in distinguishing between writers with drinking problems and drinkers with writing problems—think Dawn Powell with an MFA from Brown. An unsparing catalogue of the endless varieties of self-deception, dilettantism, fraudulence, and self-serving malarkey among the marginally talented, it has always seemed to me a seriously bridge-burning sort of book (“Art is the undoing of many a hick … Wait till the folks in Terre Haute see this!” is one of its milder provocations).
Gerald Howard on Gilbert Sorrentino
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This whole scene is cast in an immensely unflattering light in Sorrentino’s roman à clef–ish 1971 novel Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things, which might be described as a master class in distinguishing between writers with drinking problems and drinkers with writing problems—think Dawn Powell with an MFA from Brown. An unsparing catalogue of the endless varieties of self-deception, dilettantism, fraudulence, and self-serving malarkey among the marginally talented, it has always seemed to me a seriously bridge-burning sort of book (“Art is the undoing of many a hick … Wait till the folks in Terre Haute see this!” is one of its milder provocations).
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