Rose Theatre

This new novel is the second of a trilogy which started in 1985 when Gilbert Sorrentino published Odd Number, a novel which told of the happenings of a group of people mostly from New York, when they arrived at a party in Vermont. The characters are drawn from other previous Sorrentino novels like Mulligan Stew and Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things. This novel challenges the idea of the "facts." So written in a time when writing is losing its art and resembling the newspapers. Why do so many American novelists ignore the literary past? The whole novel is based on a series of questions and answers, which are repeated to acquire clarity. There are three chapters. This only confuses things more. The last chapter uses maps and tries to clarify "what really happened," but only contradicts those things which we were absolutely sure did happen. This is a fiction which undermines itself. Rose Theatre picks up where the first novel leaves off, concentrating on the female characters. The women include some writers: Annette Lorpailleur, the supposed author of "La Bouche Metallique"; Sheila Henry, the author of "The Orange Dress"; and Lorna Flambeaux, who wrote some erotic poems entitled "The Sweat Of Love." Some portions of this book were published in some magazines earlier last year, in The Review of Contemporary Literature and Conjunctions. The second novel is much more complex than the first, exhibiting a plethora of language unlike anything in the English language. Sorrentino writes using a montage of signifiers, which shows that he has definitely said good-bye to days of James Joyce and Flann O'Brien, and suggests that he has moved into a rich space of literature that is absolutely new. This book is about relationships, seen from the perspective of women, if that matters; but more importantly this is a novel where language is put on stage, in the "theatre", to act out its possibilities, to question itself, and to question its possibility to ever tell the truth. The language is a wild show that relates the identities of these characters. Gilbert Sorrentino is a writer that is so ahead of his time that we cannot ignore him for the fear that we may be left far behind, never being able to catch up with the new.