Under the Shadow

In what is arguably his best book to date, Sorrentino ( Mulligan Stew ) has crafted a novel out of 59 independent, short, surreal tales, most of which are Freudian in tone. The setting of the sketches is never delineated (many of the individual pieces take place within the minds of various characters) and the prose itself reads like archival material or old-fashioned newspaper reports. There is, of course, no single protagonist. The leading character in one story might turn up as a minor one in another or merely be mentioned in passing. Thus does the author expand his fictional society. Yet the characters' actions, desires and relationships are so deftly chronicled, and each story's plot so well integrated, that the work becomes a rare specimen of the genre: an intellectual page-turner (Nov.)