Little Casino big payout

American author Gilbert Sorrentino on his latest book

Little Casino is a novel that invites rereading. A collection of fragmented memories about growing up in Brooklyn, it teases you as it unveils truths of life, contradicts itself and plays little tricks on your mind. It is in fact a very playful book, something which the author intended it to be. "I hope that you could read the book once or twice, then a year or so later, it might be fun to pick it up and begin anywhere," says Gilbert Sorrentino, in Toronto recently with the International Festival of Authors. "You know more or less what's going on. It's not like you have to follow a story."
Sorrentino is the acclaimed Italian-American author and poet, most famous for his novel Mulligan Stew. In his career he has taught at Stanford University, received two Guggenheim Fellowships and a Lannan Literary Award. He recently moved back to his native Brooklyn after several years in California, which is properly skewered in Little Casino (at one point he calls San Francisco "The Queens of California" perhaps best summing up his take of the place).
Made up of loosely related snapshots, Little Casino roughly follows a chronological order from the 1930s through World War II and on to the present day, with the various characters slowly maturing on the way. "The book, without being engineered that way, does curiously move from childhood to adulthood," says Sorrentino. "It is in a way about how to grow up."
On the way to growing up we meet a slew of Brooklynites, most of whom remain unnamed; men, women and children who vividly inhabit the pages in often painful, or painfully funny, ways. The specific identities of the characters are less important than their experiences and feelings. Rather than trying to map out who's who, which you soon realize is not worth the effort, it's better to just enjoy the ride. Once you do, it's a delight to get lost in world of people fumbling through adolescence, relationships and careers, which are as tangled as the streets of Brooklyn.
Sorrentino knows Brooklyn well. He was born there in 1929 to an Irish-American mother and a father who came from Sicily at the age of 10. "The Irish and the Italians were generally poor labourers, and being Catholics, were ghettoized together," he remembers. "We went to the same parishes and dances, and therefore knew each other." Brooklyn neighbourhoods were very tightly knit. "One end of the block would form its own neighbourhood. The next block over may as well have been Chicago. It's still that way."
His characters in Little Casino are uncomfortably easy to relate to, often pricking the skin of the reader. Whether laughing at how a tomato can unleash a fury between spouses; about a young boy in a bar becoming aware for the first time of his mother's sexuality, or at a hapless sexual harassment claimant, whose "post-dramatic stress disorder" lands her in some compromising positions caught on film, the book dredges up often embarrassing feelings in the reader.
Each chapter closes with a commentary. "I usually start with a form in mind rather than a story, notion or idea," Sorrentino explains. "Once I have the form, my writing is an attempt to achieve it," He always begins by writing in composition books, jotting things down but not admitting to himself he's actually writing anything. "I write half a page one day, but tell myself this is not really a book. I'm elbowing myself as I look for the form."
With Little Casino, he had written about three of the primary texts but was unhappy. "I was boring the hell out of myself," he remembers. "I didn't want to be writing a bunch of vignettes." Things begin to gel for him one day when he found himself writing criticisms on the texts. "I wrote 'what is this crap?' and 'what's this guy thinking?' I then decided I would write a commentary on each chapter. But it wouldn't necessarily be coming from me, it would come from anybody. In other words there are many voices speaking: sometimes me, sometimes me behind the cloak of first-person singular, sometimes others."
As the book took shape Sorrentino found that the commentaries could also be on other chapters, and could be contradictory. "The book opened up from there," he says.
With form playing a crucial part in Sorrentino's process, it's not surprising that all of his books are different from one another and therefore, not classifiable by a simple style. "My agent always tears his hair out," he laughs. Sorrentino published his first collection of poetry in 1960 and his first novel in 1966, quickly followed by a second and third. After this initial success it got a bit tougher. "What happened to me and many writers of my generation is you have a fine critical reception but a commercial reception that has been the pits." If the books aren't selling enough they get labelled as "difficult." "I have a collection of rejection letters to break your heart," he says. Little Casino was rejected 18 times; Mulligan Stew, 34 times.
Sorrentino turns this into gold, however. In a brutally funny chapter of Little Casino, there is a Dear John letter to end all Dear John letters. It is made up of phrases from his rejection letters.
Far from being difficult, Little Casino is great fun as well as insightful, and if you are not already so acquainted, a terrific introduction to the work of Gilbert Sorrentino.

Publication Date: 2002-11-24
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