Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things

by Gilbert Sorrentino

Book Overview

Wildly comic and bitterly satiric, Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things is Gilbert Sorrentino's ruthless, and timeless, attack on the New York art world of the 1950s and '60s. Guaranteed permanent relevance by the never-ending presence of the marginally talented--and populated by artists who sold out, would-be artists with little ability, and hopeless hangers-on--this brilliant novel masterfully dissects the art world's culture of corruption and...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394471083
• ISBN13: 9780394471082
• Release Date: January 1971
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 243 Pages
• Weight: 1.08 lbs.

Customer Reviews

Almost a masterpiece

and a great read, especially if you are inhterested in the art scene in New York during the 60's.

A masterpiece of failure, burning with ferocity and affection

Sorrentino's death in the late spring of '06 prompted me to take another look at this extraordinary novel -- among the accomplishments of which is a savage yet satisfying evisceration of what novels usually deliver. What I found was nothing less than a neglected masterpiece of the last thirty years. What distinguishes Sorrentino's accomplishment, above all, is his honesty. IMAGINATIVE QUALITIES OF ACTUAL THINGS portrays some eight failures in the arts (by and large the literary arts, as a title filched from William Carlos Williams would suggest) of the '60s in New York: "this," our narrator notes repeatedly, "is a book about destruction." But nothing so defines that destruction, nothing so renders it at once hilarious and poignant, as its denial -- the specious yet laughable reasoning by which artists and writers justify their failures. A number of the figures here lack the talent worth a drink, yet flounder in self-importance, in the process blowing their chances for other kinds of fulfillment, in particular fulfilling love. Each chapter here sketches a different loser, and yet the impact throughout is leavened by a certain perverse affection. Our narrator is the thread that binds them all, a recording angel who wails "I'm so tired of you all," yet seems also to kiss each hypocrisy, each deeper blackening of these rapidly shriveling souls, and to award the sin a bitter but tasty wisecrack. Too, the loosely interwoven anecdotes of young adulthood and early middle age do include the story of one writer of real gifts -- though his gifts go unrewarded, driving this closeted gay to fierce excesses of self-hatred. And yet this tragic character's chapter often has you snorting with laughter, out of bittersweet recognition. While all this is going on, IMAGINATIVE QUALITIES also composes a portrait of an era, and it's again vicious and cleansing when it comes to more popular delusions of the `60s. Among the most deluded, the most deserving victims of Sorrentino's most ferocious attacks, are the gatekeepers to this kind of success (hmm, perhaps in quotes? "success?"), the New York editors who believe they know what's worthwhile art. Such attacks often prove unexpectedly full of insight, and rise to penetrating meditations on the national spirit; the malaise these protagonists suffer seeps outward, raising its stink far beyond Manhattan. No American novel from the generation now passing on, the generation born between the wars, punctures our failings with such a sizzling, loving, and well-placed needle. No up-and-coming novelist who seeks to create a frank portrait of ambition in all its misfirings and thwartings -- who seeks to trade in true psychological complexity -- can afford to leave IMAGINATIVE QUALITIES off his reading list.

Great when not an in-joke

First three-quarters of the book are great. The prose was pitch-perfect, the composition and literary technique masterful, the narrator self-aware and reader-involving. An absorbing, fascinating read. Then the book got a bit repetitious. Some material went over my head. Other stuff seemed to be an "in" joke between Sorrentino and his friends. By the end I was relieved.Still, if you like heavily literary fiction with a strong sense of humor about others', and its own, pretensions, you'll enjoy this minor masterpiece.

The perfect vaccine for overgrown egos

I'm too young to have lived through the fifties, but I'm utterly convinced that phoniness and fakery must have reached a pinnacle in that decade, largely because of this great novel. It's a corrosive satire, not of the pervasive I-like-Ike suburban culture as one might expect, but of the downtown New York intellectuals and artists who opposed it. In devastatingly funny prose, their motives are mocked, their sufferings are skewered, and their mediocrity is made manifest.If you've ever patted yourself on the back for being smarter than the Philistines around you--and who hasn't done that when the subject of Sylvester Stallone's salary came up in conversation?--you'd do well to read this book, spotting glimpses of yourself on every page.