A STRANGE COMMONPLACE: BOOK REVIEW
During quarantine and over the last pandemic year, I’ve found it easy to forget that there are other people living their lives in quite close proximity to my own. Obviously they haven’t been physically close to me, but my life can still find a way to affect theirs, and vice versa. If I buy the last package of toilet paper in the grocery store, that means that someone else may not be able to buy toilet paper that day or they might have to go to another store and be late for their next commitment. This would then go on to affect yet another person or group of people. It’s been easy to forget this, but Gilbert Sorrentino’s A Strange Commonplace managed to remind me what that can look like. I might think about my actions a little bit more going forward.
Sorrentino’s A Strange Commonplace is a collection of short vignettes that serve as little glimpses into the lives of several adults. Each vignette has a title and the titles from the first section are then reused in the second section. As the book progresses, this seemingly piecemeal collection of stories begins to come together. These are stories of love, loss, violence, connection, and malcontent which lend a gritty realness to what it means to be an adult.
Much like we may recall our own memories, Sorrentino’s vignettes don’t seem to follow the rules of sequence and storytelling. One thought weaves into another and then into another, pointing to the ways in which our lives touch those who exist adjacent to us. These thoughts come together and form waves of text that washed over me and allowed me to place myself within the story — a fly on the wall observing the happenings.
Sorrentino utilizes and breaks a number of writing conventions in order to better communicate the chaos, disorganization, and unpredictability of adulthood while weaving in repetitive imagery. He plays with narrative perspective, chronology, sentence structure, point of view, and many other writing conventions throughout the book. Every short vignette is slightly different — each has a unique feel despite all being a part of the same narrative, while also serving to draw attention to the themes of the novel.
One of the central themes of the story is infidelity and the ways in which it can affect more than just the central couple. Sorrentino does not shy away from showing just how much it can wreak havoc on one's life. However, I found some of his depictions of the scenes unnecessarily sexually graphic, specifically when they involved women who did not consent. Maybe these moments were meant to add to the violent realness of the narrative somehow, but after a number of them I felt numb to the sexual violence. I began to expect such violence after a time, and it failed to retain its shock value for me. Such an experience was disorienting and somewhat difficult to reconcile when I arrived at the end and the cast of characters had been sapped of most, if not all, of their optimism. I suppose that’s life sometimes.
If anything, Sorrentino’s A Strange Commonplace gave me a world to lose myself in, akin to feeling of watching a sad movie when you’re sad. I found myself comparing my situation and circumstances to the characters in the novel, feeling grateful for the life that I live. I realized that there has been a sort of safety in our isolation during this last year, and now that the world is beginning to open up, I believe we all need to heed Sorrentino’s warning. The story ends with a scene at a funeral that is so bizarre that when I closed the book I had to ask myself if any of it really happened. Gilbert Sorrentino leaves that up to the reader to decide.