Thursday, May 05, 2005

cheap baubles, utterly gimcrack, completely phony

...Gilbert Sorrentino takes easy shots at pseudo-profundity and the effortless power of jargon to cloud men's minds. These are fun. But he also leaves one shaken, wary of language altogether, unsure whether sentences communicate anything at all. Suddenly, words no longer feel like tokens of meaning or things of beauty but like cheap baubles, utterly gimcrack, completely phony. The satire of Lunar Follies hews so close to the bone that it saws right through it and leaves one crippled.


- From Dirda's review of Gilbert Sorrentino's Lunar Follies, here

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