The Moon in Its Flight Book

The title tale The Moon in Its Flight, opening an anthology, is a story of the first love, enchantment of youth and the disappointments the coming of age brings. The time is the beat era and an aura of the narration is nostalgic.
The second story Decades also begins in the epoch of beatniks but it continues into the time of flower children and the story is outright sarcastic, probably even a little bit cynical.
…in the fifties, Ben was a member of a large minority of young people that thought that life was somehow nonexistent outside of the academy, that is, life within the university was real life - outside were those strange folk who spoke ungrammatical English and worshiped the hydrogen bomb.
The Dignity of Labor is a somewhat Kafkian parable about slaving for the system. Then comes a series of highly abstract and abstruse stories that haven't made me any wiser.
In the midst of its opening meeting on the subject of punishment for the transient, one member made it embarrassingly clear that he believed that the color of decay, disease, shit, piss, vomit, paralysis, and death is a color that one can't help but see each and every day, right on the quiet, but rather sticky streets.
After these Gilbert Sorrentino returns to the period of beatniks once again and becomes vaguely autobiographical. I liked all the tales belonging to the beat generation and especially the first two.
Somewhere in the building a young man is singing a song, accompanying himself on the guitar. I can't make out the words, but I know that they are about freedom and love and peace - perfect peace, in this dark world of sin.
It takes just one false step to make one's life turn into an indescribable mess. It seems easy to avoid these fatal steps but we continue to take them again and again and again…