Gilbert Sorrentino. Something Said: Essays. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 2001. When first published by North Point in 1984, Something Said was a wonderful collection of essays, a rare work with the potential to transform readers interested in innovative literature. Dalkey's updated edition is not only still wonderful, it is more so, with some twenty-five incisive pieces having been added to the original forty-seven. Part of what makes the new, longer edition so satisfying is that it forms a whole no less coherent than its predecessor. Though Sorrentino wrote these essays between 1959 and 2001, his voice remains consistent and even unmistakable throughout this updated edition. This is the glad result of the fact that over the course of a long, unswerving career Sorrentino has changed little as a critic. fundamental positions and values espoused in the most recent essays collected here are largely identical to those espoused in the oldest essays of the inaugural edition. Though he has deepened and complicated his ideas while varying and enlarging his critical focus, Sorrentino has not given an inch when it comes to his twin ideological emphases: an aesthete, he still believes in the autonomy of the aesthetic, and he is still obsessed with assessing aesthetic value. collection begins with The Act of and Its Artifact, a relatively long piece in which Sorrentino asserts the nonutilitarian nature of the creative act; he substantiates his claim with a fascinating account of how he composed a chapter from his fiction Splendide-Hotel (1973). Though the North Point edition contained other independent critical essays in the mode of The Act of Creation (with titles like Black Mountaineering and Genetic Coding), it consisted primarily of reviews and review essays written for a disparate variety of forums, from obscure little magazines like Sixpack, Adrift, and Guerrilla, to influential journals such as Kulchur and Yugen, to more mainstream venues such as Poetry, Nation, and Village Voice. In contrast, the updated section of this new Dalkey edition contains a higher proportion of non-review pieces that were originally published in influential literary organs such as Conjunctions and Review of Contemporary Fiction, as well as in a variety of more mainstream venues. Whether new or old, Sorrentino's reviews are rarely standard in that they resist the glib, commercial function of the conventional review. Indeed, several of Sorrentino's most memorable reviews-for example, his affecdonate and perceptive treatments of William Carlos Williams, Louis Zukofsky, Jack Spicer, Paul Blackburn, Italo Calvino and John Hawkes-- equal and occasionally surpass his non-review essays in critical acuity. Such pieces, advertently or no, seem to yearn for independence, as if Sorrentino wanted to air his critical opinions in a more detached and systematic fashion. new material fulfills this desire through such flamboyant non-review pieces as Fictional Infinities, What's New?: Innovative Act, and Writers and Writing: Disjecta Membra. Perhaps as a consequence of Sorrentino's rising eminence as an artist and a critic, the new material collected here contains nothing comparable to the extended denunciations of Marianne Moore, John Updike, and John Gardner that appear among the earlier pieces. This is not to suggest that Sorrentino has softened over time-- or even, for that matter, that he has noticeably modified his rhetoric. Sorrentino's acerbic energy, not to mention the muscular elegance of his opinions, has not been lost. Robert Creeley has said of Sorrentino that the necessity to make judgement, to define value, is always primary in this writer, no matter the formal means employed or the technical pattern. In tandem with fictions like Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971) and Splendide-Hotel, Something Said validates Creeley's point. This pugnacious emphasis on aesthetic value suggests that Sorrentino is at once a modernist and an aesthete, twin designations that he has actively encouraged in his interviews. …