Here in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, the 73-year-old man standing in front of the 24-hour Bridgeview Diner looks like a storefront lawyer waiting to meet a client. His features, once fierce, with piercing eyes looking out, have gone soft. His black hair has turned gray. After 20 years on the West Coast, he has just moved into a condo in the old neighborhood where he once hung with his childhood friend Hubert Selby Jr. Chances are few people shopping here on Third Avenue will read Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel, Little Casino (Coffee House), a rich evocation of lives lived on these very Brooklyn streets. But then, how many people anywhere have read any of his more than one dozen novels?

He has been writing for nearly 50 years now—since 1953, he says, when he got out of the Army and wrote a long novel ("never published, thanks be to God!"). With each novel—Steelwork, Mulligan Stew, Aberration of Starlight, Blue Pastoral—the critical acclaim grew. He has won Lannan and Guggenheim awards, and Washington Post critic Michael Dirda has called him one of "America's best, little-known writers." But Sorrentino is an experimental writer—a master of postmodern fiction—and not an easy read. His best-known book, Mulligan Stew, was turned down by 28 publishers before Grove picked it up in 1979. "What really bothered me was the tenor of the rejections," he says. "One editor wrote to Mel Berger, my long-suffering agent at William Morris, 'Dear Mel: Thanks so much for allowing me to read Gil Sorrentino's new novel. It may well be the finest novel ever to cross my desk in 20 years of editing. Of course, we can't publish it.' That kind of thing has happened with many of my books."

Seated with PW in a booth inside the diner, Sorrentino sips iced tea and talks with the colloquial cadences of a city dweller who could be Italian, could be Jewish, but is without a doubt a native New Yorker. His father, an immigrant Sicilian, was a marine contractor on the Brooklyn docks. His mother, Irish, warned Sorrentino not to become a writer, he says. He did it anyway, falling in early on with "Cubby" Selby, with whom he began the little magazine Neon; then with Leroi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Robert Creeley and Jonathan Williams; and, in the late '50s and early '60s, with writers from Fielding Dawson to Frank O'Hara to Allen Ginsberg.

In those days, he worked as an editor (for Grove Press) and teacher ( at The New School), living in a two-bedroom, $41-a-month apartment near Tompkins Square Park, on Manhattan's Lower East Side. "Downtown New York was a cauldron of innovation—Black Mountain College had closed, the beat writers had returned from San Francisco and the New York School was just beginning. I lived in walking distance of so many writers, dancers, choreographers, painters, jazz players. Everybody knew everybody. It was an exciting moment."

Little Casino emerged from notebooks that Sorrentino has kept for years. "One day I wrote a chapter—it wasn't in the form it is now, but I looked at it, and it was competent, well-written. It was a vignette. It was the work of a professional writer, which was all right. But it didn't interest me. Then, a few days later, I was looking through my notebook, and I came across the thing. I was not enchanted. Underneath it, I drew a line and made some wise-ass comment like, 'What is this crap all about?' as if another voice was talking about what I had written. And as I was doing this, I thought, I'm going to write the primary text, and then I'm going to write a commentary on the primary text, and I'll use my commentary to comment on earlier primary texts and on other commentaries. In other words—open all the doors," says Sorrentino. "Let the wind blow through the whole book!"

In 52 chapters, Sorrentino tells the stories of Brooklyn children, workmen, immigrants, all "unnamed people," as he puts it, "who may or may not be the same people, who don't necessarily know each other and who all have the same sort of history. So I had a very loose form that allowed for anything. I had to stop it somewhere, so I stopped at 52 chapters—the number of weeks in the year. That determined the length of the book. I don't believe in organic form. All form is utterly artificial." The novel, said PW (Forecasts, Mar. 4), "zooms across time and geography on a dizzy journey of names, memories and tangents."

Sorrentino recently completed two decades of teaching at Stanford University, where he was a kind of postmodernist in residence, giving courses in postmodern American fiction (Burroughs, Acker, Kerouac, etc.) and fiction writing. He disliked California. "I was completely bollixed by the suburban lifestyle. At age 52 I had to learn how to drive. The happiest day of my life was when I sold my car—the last thing I did in California."

And so now, after having lived for most of his adult life in lower Manhattan, Sorrentino is back in Bay Ridge, looking every bit like Flaubert's writer who lives like a bourgeois and saves his wild energy for his art. The old neighborhood pals are long gone or dead, he says, but he's just 25 minutes away from friends in Manhattan.

In recent years Sorrentino has been published exclusively by small presses, including Dalkey Archive, which keeps him in print. "Sometimes, I feel an uncharacteristic self-pity and wish larger houses would publish me—but then it passes. It's momentary; it's the blues. I have great faith in the process of art. When it's going well, it's like Kafka wrote about his story, 'The Judgment.' He felt as if he were 'advancing on water,' it was so easy. He lost track of time. And the story was done."