Talent on Loan Book

The thing about Gilbert Sorrentino is that he is, only occasionally, a metafictional pioneer and postmodern innovator. Half the time he wrote books like Red the Fiend which, although conceived in his usual book-as-useless-artefact style, is a work of bloody-minded breakneck realism, spliced with a world-weary comedy and an ever-present tenderness. Tenderness came to define Sorrentino's later work, especially in the beautiful and haunting memory novels Little Casino and A Strange Commonplace'both rich in spectres at once tragic and screamingly funny. Sorrentino, perhaps more than anyone, understands the precarious, perhaps nonexistent line between comedy and tragedy. Split into forty-nine chapters, Sorrentino's glib narrator coolly describes life among a dysfunctional Brooklyn family, focusing on only-son Red and his sadistic Grandma, a superb Dickensian villain of (somewhat) exaggerated Irish-Catholic cruelty, where any minor violation of proper behaviour results in Red being ladled, whipped, bashed and clobbered. There is no Dickensian moral equilibrium for Red in this novel. He's trapped in a Depression-era reality'all he can do his endure his pain and steal occasional looks up his teachers' skirts. As Sorrentino said, Art cannot save anybody from anything. It certainly won't help poor Red here. Red the Fiend is a heartbreaking and blackly comic book, and also doubles up as an effective satire of those Dave Pelzer-inspired, Please Daddy No books clogging up British airports.