There is a very real question as to whether avant-garde fiction can survive Gilbert Sorrentino's new novel ["Mulligan Stew"]. There is also a question as to whether the New York publishing community can survive it too, although that, of course, is much less interesting. "Mulligan Stew," instead of consisting of meat and vegetables, consists entirely of literature, of parody and complaint and paranoia and pop-absurdism. It is as if Buck Mulligan was a hero or had written "Ulysses," instead of Stephen Dedalus and James Joyce. But Mr. Sorrentino contains, and reviles, them all.

"Mulligan Stew" is full of Joyce, too much so; and of Nabokov, Flaubert, Proust, Gogol, Flann O'Brien, D. H. Lawrence, Edmund (Bunny) Wilson, Norman Mailer, Henry James, Bernard Malamud, the Marquis de Sade, Thomas Dekker, Sylvia Plath, John Updike, Anaïs Nin, Zane Grey, Erica Jong, William H. Gass, various Latin Americans, everybody else I haven't mentioned, plus the rest of us—the entire service class of careerist bookchat. It is as if all of Lionel Trilling's bad dreams about the teaching of modernism had been stuffed inside a single typewriter. (p. 244)

Among the many literary artifacts that "Mulligan Stew" parodies are the mystery novel, the pornographic novel, the western, the 17th-century masque, the 20th-century publisher's catalogue, female erotic poetry, book reviews, art criticism, writers' notebooks, monographs on mathematics, baseball scorecards and astrology charts. The masque, as one might expect, owes a lot to "Ulysses" in "Nighttown" and goes on too long. Most of the parodies, in fact, go on too long, but they are so funny that I can't imagine how to cut them, and neither could Mr. Sorrentino. One exception is the brief parody of erotic poetry, which is such liberated rubbish that it made me cry. Mr. Sorrentino has been accused, and accuses one of his characters, of misogyny. The charge should have been good taste. (pp. 244-45)

To summarize the action in "Mulligan Stew" is to make a fool of oneself in public. So what else is new? Lamont, an experimental novelist of the obscure school, seldom reviewed and never read, is writing a "new wave" murder mystery. This means that he deposits several characters borrowed from F. Scott Fitzgerald into a twilight zone invented, perhaps, by Alain Robbe-Grillet, and makes them talk like Dashiell Hammett….

Add faith, inauthenticity, flashback, interior harangue, identity crisis, paranoia, dream, fracture, puns, sex, bile, death and footnotes—"Mulligan Stew" is a combination of incest and cannibalism. It shows up for cocktails, in the library, dressed like the Death of the Novel, a suicide-kit of modernism. I found it hilarious. It is also full of rage.

It rages against the packagers and merchandisers and pedagogues of the sensibility as a commodity. Mr. Sorrentino, a novelist and poet of extreme and alarming seriousness, is just as angry as he is clever. (p. 245)