Too Much of a Good Thing

I've read his essays and many of his novels (some of which were life-changingly good), but had missed the short fiction somehow.

This collection, however, isn't working for me. It's not that the stories are bad--by no means!-- Sorrentino wields a precise scalpel and dissects for our amusement the bloated corpse of artsy pretense amongst the New York literati, while deflating consumer culture and corporate homogeneity along the way. There are some multi-faceted gems in this book, the tales often brutally funny and scintillating.

My problem is that these stories dissect the same bloated dead equine again and again without sufficient difference in style or construction or narrative or character. I never should have read them straight through. A couple here, a couple there, with a break to read some Updike or John Gardiner or some similar comfortable pap in between and I would have enjoyed The Moon in its Flight much more fully. Recommended, but in digestable doses.