Tying Things Together

Anyone who has read Gilbert Sorrentino knows that he was constantly trying out structural devices that would substitute for conventional narrative in fiction. In a 2006 review I wrote of Sorrentino's penultimate novel, A Strange Commonplace, a structurally bifurcated novel whose twin halves mirror and repeat each other, I suggested that this device "tempts us actively to seek out correspondences between these episodes; perhaps such correspondences can indeed be found, but one suspects that Sorrentino himself would be less interested in leading his readers to the meaning' that might be gleaned from this approach than in the process — unconventional and unorthodox — by which they are led there." Paul Deppler decided to in effect test this proposition and has produced a concordance charting the correspondences between the novel's two parts, here. He also offers an insightful interpretation of Sorrentino's use of these correspondences, here.