[Mulligan Stew] is a crazy quilt of popular culture, "sub-literary" genres, and unusual narrative voices. Its basic story of a novelist writing his most recent work is interlaced with all variety of playful, parodic, and fictive allusions. Eventually this motley production exemplifies Sorrentino's main concern: "Surfaces, I'm interested in surfaces," he remarked in a 1974 interview. "For me, life is right in front of you. Mysterious because it is not hidden. I'm interested in surfaces and flashes, episodes." While many surface glints and flashes in Mulligan Stew spring from popular forms and suggest the "folk mind," many also spring from more sophisticated sources. The end product is more than a mere collection of superficialities: it is a metafiction that is more vital and accessible than much serious contemporary fiction, and more mimetic than "popular" formulaic art.

The overall framework for Mulligan Stew, however, is a conventional one, revealed through letters which the main character, Antony Lamont, writes…. This is the "realistic" level of Mulligan Stew—the straightforward, poignant story of a writer struggling to "find himself" both personally and artistically.

Mingled with this conventional dramatic situation are a number of other, less usual documents that surround Lamont's life, influencing it slightly or greatly. They exemplify Sorrentino's drawing upon popular, nonliterary forms to make "art." Lists are used, as in Sorrentino's other novels, but to a much greater degree here. For example, there are five pages of book and magazine titles…. There are, in addition, examples of evangelists' advertisements; writers' school brochures; capsule book reviews; a will; phrases from publishers' rejection letters (as well as a number of rejection letters in their entirety); pornographic poetry …; and a scientific article…. Even a masque … is included. Sorrentino's "rebarbarization" [utilizing techniques from a popular or even primitive art form] is not only diverse but diachronic as well.

In addition to these often hilarious but sometimes self-indulgent parodies of commonly occurring cultural artifacts, the text and notebooks of Lamont's most recent novel, Guinea Red, are included. (pp. 140-41)

Yet the most unusual instance of "rebarbarization" in Mulligan Stew is Sorrentino's use of a science fiction parallel world to show us another side of his novelist, Antony Lamont….

This portrayal of another world interacting with the supposedly real one resembles that in much science fiction—it suggests the existence of a mythical plane (another dimension, time period, alternate or parallel world) which interacts with the depicted or implied actual world…. [This] special kind of ploy is at the center of [Mulligan Stew], and in a way subsumes all the verbal pyrotechnics which Sorrentino's other novels have displayed. (p. 142)

Sorrentino draws from three basic variants of the serious science fiction/metafiction novel: Pynchon's "realistic" fiction that seeks to uncover an informing—sometimes fictive, sometimes paranoid—structure beneath the commonsense phenomenal world (similar to much of the Strugatsky brothers' writing); Robbe-Grillet's novels that suggest there is no objective reality, only different versions of consciousness (much like the themes and concerns in the work of Stanislaw Lem); and finally the self-consciously metafictional Borgesian story that explicitly concerns writers and creators of fictions and posits an infinity of parallel universes…. (p. 143)

As in Gravity's Rainbow and The Crying of Lot 49, an underlying and informing structure to reality is anatomized, a system whose workings are as arcane and byzantine as those of PISCES or "Achtung" or the Tristero. As in Robbe-Grillet, there are endlessly self-reflexive sections that in Flaubert's words (quoted by Albert Guerard) are "dependent on nothing external … held together by the strength of … style, just as the earth suspended in the void, depends on nothing external for support." (I am thinking of Sorrentino's extended stylistic experiments such as the chapter written entirely in Shakespearean English.) Too, as in the metafiction of science fiction, there is a sense of infinite universe. (pp. 143-44)

What finally is so impressive about Mulligan Stew is that it achieves a convincing kind of mimesis while simultaneously showing that experience is not, ultimately, transcribable. The glimmers, glints, flashes, fragments, and episodes as well as the operative para-world very much mimic the sensory bombardment an average American citizen must endure every day, complete down to the evocation of the common feeling that there must be a comprehensible system underlying this at once complex and superficial congeries of events. But still, like the characters from Lamont's Guinea Red/Crocodile Tears, the characters and events of Mulligan Stew are—the structure constantly reminds us—only a highly selective, fictionalized offering….

Mulligan Stew is, on one hand, serious fiction made more lively and interesting by its assumption of popular elements. On the other hand, it is a metafiction that parodies itself, presenting a metaphor for the fiction-writer's situation of never possibly knowing or being able to show all sides to his characters. On the third hand—this is acceptable since we are discussing science fiction here—it is a kind of fiction that has a faithfulness to phenomenal reality in a world in which we are bombarded with conceivabilities turning into actualities. But finally what Mulligan Stew most strongly attests to is that when fiction does not work under the burden of mimesis, it is freed to do exciting things. Sorrentino ends his novel with a quotation about Cezanne that no doubt explains his own aesthetic approach: "He desired a synthesis that would allow him to decorate nature with the forms and colors that existed nowhere except in his own secret thought. Thus, his last painting nowhere shows forth nature's splendors, but instead, is a failure precipitated by his surrender to the pleasures of the imagination."… Sorrentino's similar surrender is, ultimately, our gain. (p. 144)