The Sky Changes Book

I've only read one road-trip book before. Quirky, girl-gets-over-old-love, meets-new-love, feel-good but-not-too-good, lots of asides about those bits of the US y'all laugh at. Not my cup of tea, though it sold lots of copies and it won't surprise me if the movie version pops up on your (sic) netflix menu.

I didn't realise, when I opened this that it was a road-trip novel. For a start, it takes some pages to figure out what's going on. And I found the poetry of it stopped any flow. It has an Under Milkwood beguiling sense that it should be read aloud. I would read a couple of pages and then go back and read it aloud in my head. Maybe half way through the book I stopped doing that, and I'm not sure if that was just taking for granted what earlier distracted me, or if the style of writing somewhat changes. I should note that I read the 1986 edition, a revision of the 1966 edition, itself the author's first novel.

Feel good (but not too good), girly lit this is not. I'm not surprised to see that he takes on the mantle and the cause of William Carlos Williams: the similarities are obvious. For more on Sorrentino's work and his relationship with WCW, see Ken Bolton's article in Jacket Magazine.

It you read Sorrentino's wiki page, you are immediately hit by 'post-modernist' and 'meta-fiction' and that makes you go to goodreads with a sneaking feeling....yes, the only one of your friends to have reviewed this is MJ. Fortunately I only did this after finishing the book. Post-modern? Meta-fiction? Absolutely not - and perhaps that's why MJ excoriated it after his first reading. It's just a straightforward tale of the breakdown of social relations at a time we now remember fondly for the social devastation wreaked. I wonder if you needed to be closer in generation to that period in order to feel the heat of this book? Sorrentino muses on the nature of memory. I love this:
If they hadn't built that fucking house we would have stayed, he thought, we would have stayed and everything would have been OK. What he meant by OK was that everything would have remained in its long-ago attained state of rot, but it would have been submerged rot. He needed, however, the monumentally trite fable of the good old days to avoid their drab truth, in his heart he suspected, even, that the time would come when he would speak, and perhaps even think, of this trip as fun, as adventure, this very moment would become part of the good old days.
This book is incredibly dense, it's short but has so much in it. His inept relationship with his kids, the false nature of friendship. The pissing away of life - through alcohol in particular - that was integral to the scene he is part of. The changing geography and social fabric of the America they pass through as they head from NY to Mexico. The North South divide. Lying and denial as the basis of relationships. It's quite misleading to talk of this as a book about divorce. It is about relationships of all sorts and their fraught, dishonest bases.

rest here: