Mulligan Stew Book

Mulligan Stew was, after years of attempts at finding a willing publisher, published in 1979. By 2010 it had sold something on the order of 25,000 copies. Does this constitute a failure? And if so, a failure of what, or whom? The publisher? The author? The literary establishment? The reading public? I would say yes, it is a failure of sorts; the book's essence is failure; it is pretty much only about failure in many forms- and that its legacy should be a sort of failure to reach readers makes sense. This book won't win many readers. If it didn't in 1979 it surely won't now. What does a book primarily concerned with interior nature of books, written in a melange of forms from epistles to lists to fake academic papers, matter to the consuming public now? On the whole I can hardly think of a book that will connect less with the Average Joe, or that will turn Average J. off as much, or that will simply bewilder Joe, or send his mind spinning, or just frustrate or infuriate Joe, or that Joe will not simply toss across the room into the wastebasket after like 30 pages, because Joe will feel assaulted, insulted, and exhausted. Bravo to you, Gilbert Sorrentino. Because Mulligan Stew is wonderful, and entertaining, and it might be the funniest book I've ever read, and it is totally weird, and a masterpiece.

To reduce a 450-page brain-rattler into a few sentences, Mulligan Stew presents one Anthony Lamont, self-proclaimed avant-garde novelist, working at his new thing, an "Ur"- or "Sur"-fiction, an experimental mystery, which he believes will finally rescue him from literary obscurity and shine forth his genius into the world, with all such rewards as comes with a shining forth of genius into the world. The problem is that he is a laughably terrible writer, and oh yes he's definitely going insane. He is also dealing with a number of let's say "strained" personal relationships, which are presented by letters inserted between chapters of his ridiculous novel (sometimes titled "Guinea Red", sometimes "Crocodile Tears"), excerpts from his notebook, and from his scrapbook of found items that eventually begin to display his full-on paranoid delusions. The main characters of his new work, Martin Halpin and Ned Beaumont, realize early on that they are in a real piece of dreck (Halpin once being employed by such a "gentleman" as James Joyce, and Beaumont from the hard-boiled detective novels of Dashiell Hammett), and discover that through Lamont's use of flashback as the structure of his novel, imaginative space-time has been ripped and they can move about on their own as sentient, liberated beings. As they try to find a way to escape their degrading current employment, Halpin keeps a journal, in which he comments on the absurd awfulness of "Guinea Red/Crocodile Tears" and what he is made to endure as a character thereof, and of his and Beaumont's explorations in this literary imaginary space, populated by other characters who have fled their own employment in bad novels.

This world of literary refugees provides Sorrentino with a platform for some wild and brilliant stuff; a scene involving three cowboys who discuss various degrading and ridiculous cliches they've had to perform at the service of hack authors stands as a classic among all the books I've read. One of the main things Mulligan Stew is doing is assaulting cliche, attacking lazy writing and lazy reading and lazy criticism, blasting the elevation of the mediocre and the proliferation of the dumbed-down or the derivative. But that isn't all that's going on here, and the very last page of the book, Emile Fion's quote on Cezanne, affirms what is really the heart and soul of this book- that a work of art needs no other justification to exist than the sheer joy of the human imagination at play. What makes art infinite and full beyond the capacity of our annoyingly mortal selves is the absence of restrictions, the limitlessness that can so easily be achieved internally that can never be gone beyond externally, materially- that these 26 squiggly letters and 2 ligatures can be so arranged to evoke worlds on worlds on and on forever, and that whatever can be imagined actually does exist, only by the fact of its having been imagined.

One doesn't need to know that Mulligan Stew takes its premise from At Swim-Two-Birds, or that Martin Halpin has his origins in a footnote in an obscure part of Finnegans Wake, or that "The Masque of Fungo" (a maniacally absurd play inserted in the middle of the Stew) is a parody of the Circe scene from Ulysses, or the many references to Nabokov (this book reminds me so much of Pale Fire), or any of the other countless literary Russian dolls. One must only leave oneself open to the occurrence of words. Which is why the many lists in this book, while halting the narrative and seemingly flipping the ol' bird to the reader, that may seem excessive or even provocative parataxis, are actually just as entertaining as the rest of it. It's the joy of watching Sorrentino at play in the fields of his own imagination, conjuring things, enjoying babble and nonsense along with high-minded literary analogies, it's the child and adult coexisting, the low and the high communicating, the language roaming about its own wildernesses.