Interventions: An Interview with Christopher Sorrentino

Abstract

InterventionsAn Interview with Christopher Sorrentino Frederick Luis Aldama Reading Christopher Sorrentino, I can't help but think of John Barth's still poignant yet decades-old observation about the "used-upness" of literature—all while championing the vital spark of those like Borges and García Márquez. I put Sorrentino squarely in the latter's camp. His work innovates, without wearing innovation on its sleeve. He inventively shapes new storytelling designs, all while keeping us grounded in tellurian matters of mind, body, and heart. He replenishes our planetary republic of letters. From his first novel, Sound on Sound (1995), which is narratively shaped as a multitrack recording session, to his claustrophobically close-up view of a fictionalized Patty Hearst in Trance (2005), to his kaleidoscopic kinesis of consciousness in Now Beacon, Now Sea (2021), Sorrentino refuses to slip into repetition or formula. He is serious about the craft. He's also an author who, like Cervantes, Laurence Sterne, Flann O'Brien, and Katherine Dunn (a few that come readily to mind), has fun—and gives us permission to have fun. We see this most visibly in the coauthored (with Jonathan Lethem) Believeniks! 2005: The Year We Wrote a Book about the Mets (2006), where the Quixote/Sancho protagonist pair, Ivan Felt and Harris Conklin, also appear on the book's jacket cover as the novel's authors; and in The Fugitives (2015) he does with the crime thriller what Cervantes did with the chivalric romance, transforming formula (genre) into transformative art. Sorrentino's creative range is broad; he coauthored (with Brit Pop artist Derek Boshier) American Tempura (2007), a magisterial study that weaves the personal with the sociopolitical; his lively Death Wish: A Novel Approach (2010); as well as exquisitely rendered, deeply probing shorter work appearing in the New York Times, Esquire, Harper's, the Paris Review, Granta, and McSweeney's, among others. His journey also includes teaching at prestigious universities, such as the New School and Columbia, and holding a visiting writer position at Fairleigh Dickinson University. His accolades are numerous, including Guggenheim and Lannan fellowships, and was a finalist [End Page 68] for the National Book Award for Fiction and long-listed for the International Dublin Literary Award. He is a member of the Unterberg Poetry Center of the 92nd Street Y. I had the great pleasure of talking with Christopher Sorrentino about his life and work. frederick luis aldama: In 2006, your father, Gil Sorrentino, died—a beloved professor of mine at Stanford. In 2017, your mother, Victoria Ortiz, died. You chose to write with great sensitivity and nuance about Victoria's death in Now Beacon, Now Sea, capturing beautifully and candidly the idiosyncratic ways we experience the death of loved ones. christopher sorrentino: Parents are the big ones for most of us. When my father died, I felt mainly relief. He'd been dying for eight months, and I did most of my grieving while he was fading. When he was gone, I felt an enormous weight lifted. My mother's death was different. It was sudden, and shocking. Given her genes, I figured she'd keep going for another ten years. But I think her will to live abandoned her. As I relate in Now Beacon, I think she found her situation intolerable, and I couldn't really help her. With her death, I quickly and intensely felt anger, regret, and guilt. fla: You not only explore your conflicted relationship with your mother but also her identity as a Latina of Puerto Rican descent. cs: My mother's sense of her identity was complex, and she mostly kept it to herself. I think she was ambivalent about it, proud but also convinced that it was something it was best not to advertise. She certainly didn't try to keep me from my grandparents, or the rest of our family living in the Bronx. They were a big part of my life, and I visited with them regularly. On the other hand, she conditioned me to accept myself as a white, or white passing, person. It was an extension of her own aspirations, and in fact those of her parents, who fully embraced an...