Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as the husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that the marriage can be rescued, ?"The Sky Changes"?records the imaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged throughout the torment of this disintegrating marriage.

No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up...

"I see him now Somewhere out there in that gloaming that we call the Past that Time forgot--his ratty beard and frizzy hair, his hearty grease sandwiches, his rusted bicycle clips. An unlikely hero, your good faces seem to say..."

And so we meet our hero Serge "Blue" Gavotte, a modern-day Candide who quits his job, mounts a piano atop a broken-down pushcart and sets off with wife and child on a visionary quest across contemporary America in search of the "Perfect Musical Phrase." From the dismal plains of the Midwest to the technicolor sunsets of the Southwest, Blue refuses to let...

A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been. Employing direct, elegant sentences, while retaining his characteristic formal inventiveness, Sorrentino evokes this unyieldingly grim Brooklyn boyhood, describing close, familial conflicts that deepen and...