Thinking About Sorrentino This Morning

He wrote these formally brilliant and harshly compassionate novels (along with much else Crusher hasn't read yet).

Chapters that could stand alone as pieces of flash fiction (decades before the form came into vogue).

Yet which cumulatively constituted these rich, complex, subtle portraits of people in the grip of their longings, their failures, their disappointments, their loves.

His characters tend to fuck themselves and one another up.

Love tends to be polluted by anger and pain.

People don't understand much, communicate less.

No one gets off easy in these stories.

No one's innocent and yet he writes about everyone tenderly, with clear-eyed forgiveness.

Not at all sentimental.

But deeply loving.

He shows, over and over again, what we need forgivenness for and how much we need that forgiveness.

Here's a good introduction.