In two sets of 26 brief tales each, Sorrentino (Little Casino
) puts life's losers through their paces. Like ever-widening rings in a pond of purposeful noir cliché, their sad-sack stories, some of which share titles across the book's two parts, intentionally fail to connect: "Pair of Deuces" in the first part, for example, listens in on an aged card player ruminating in a retirement home on his lifetime of runs of bad luck, while "Pair of Deuces" in the second part tracks the hopelessly mismatched couplings of Jenny and Ralph and Inez and Bill over Christmastime. "A Small Adventure" in each part follows the fantasies of several wretched, abandoned wives who set out for a bit of sexual fun and revenge. Elsewhere, man leaves wife for floozie secretary; beautiful woman becomes both an object of desire and a victim of sickness and abuse; a barely acquainted couple decide in a wildly futile stab at romance to meet in a year at Rockefeller Center. Sorrentino's virtuosic vernacular shifts convincingly to match different genders and stations. His erratic permutations on familiar themes are set in an anachronistic everyday and somehow manage to be strange, striking and unsettling even as they deliver doom after doom. (May)
