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
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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