Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
"Mulligan Stew" is a novel by Gilbert Sorrentino that intertwines three distinct plot lines, centering around the character Antony Lamont, who is struggling to write his fifth novel, "Guinea Red." The narrative unfolds through fourteen chapters that are complemented by various forms of correspondence, journal entries, and articles, creating a multifaceted exploration of the writing process and the nature of fiction. Lamont's frustrations and paranoia escalate as he grapples with his characters, Ned Beaumont and Martin Halpin, who themselves navigate a complex personal and professional relationship, including themes of love, betrayal, and ambition.
The novel is characterized by its self-referential style, as characters often reflect on their roles and the absurdities of their existence within Lamont's narrative. Sorrentino's work challenges traditional notions of character and plot, presenting figures that blur the lines between author, character, and reader. Notably, the characters often speak in stylized language, revealing their personalities and the artificial constructs of fiction. "Mulligan Stew" is lauded as Sorrentino's masterpiece, representative of the avant-garde literary movement of the 1960s and 1970s, which sought to redefine the boundaries of narrative and push the limits of language in literature.
Mulligan Stew by Gilbert Sorrentino
First published: 1979
Type of plot: Modernism
Time of work: 1971-1975
Locale: New York City and surroundings
Principal Characters:
Antony Lamont , a pretentious novelist with no talentPomeroy Roche , a literature professor who plans to use one of Lamont’s novels in a courseSheila Trellis , Antony’s sister, a literary criticDermot Trellis , Sheila’s husband, a novelistMartin Halpin , a book publisher who is a character in and the narrator of Lamont’s current novelNed Beaumont , Halpin’s friend and business partnerDaisy Buchanan , a character in love with BeaumontCorrie Corriendo , a Latina magician and debaucherBerthe Delamode , Corrie’s friend and business partner
The Novel
Mulligan Stew has three interwoven plot lines: the story of Antony Lamont and his struggle to write a novel; the story of Ned Beaumont and Martin Halpin, characters in the novel Lamont is writing; and a third story about the private lives of Beaumont and Halpin when they are not directly employed in Lamont’s novel. The fourteen chapters of Lamont’s novel are interspersed with his and Halpin’s correspondence, journal entries, scrapbook clippings, and articles from magazines.
Lamont struggles to write his fifth novel, Guinea Red (later retitled Crocodile Tears), an absurdist murder mystery. He receives a letter from Roche, who is planning a literature course that might include one of Lamont’s works. Lamont is flattered and offers Roche access to any or all of his work. Lamont’s sister, Sheila, who has been one of his best critics, marries Dermot Trellis, whose novels Lamont considers commercial trash. With remarkable lack of tact, Lamont tells Sheila what he thinks of her husband’s work, then discovers that Dermot knows Roche. He asks Dermot to put in a good word for him, but after the correspondence from Roche grows distant, and Lamont’s work is dropped, Lamont suspects that Dermot has sabotaged him. As Lamont continues to struggle with his novel, his attacks on Dermot become more virulent, and Sheila distances herself from her brother.
Lamont becomes desperate as his new novel grows in directions he never anticipated. Letters to a poetess of bawdy verse whom he has tried to seduce and to his former mistress illustrate just how divorced he is from reality. At the end of his story, Lamont is totally paranoid, desperately turning to a sleazy businessman to help raise money to publish the novel he thinks he has just finished.
The second plot line concerns Martin Halpin and Ned Beaumont, longtime friends and co-owners of a publishing company. Lamont’s novel opens as Halpin waits for the police to arrive at the lonely upstate vacation cabin where he believes he has just murdered Beaumont, although he cannot remember many details. He does remember Daisy Buchanan, the woman who was in love with Beaumont. It becomes apparent that Halpin also loves Daisy, although he denies having any motive to kill Beaumont. He mentions two “implausible” women whom he believes are the cause of the tragedy: Corrie Corriendo and Berthe Delamode.
In the series of flashbacks that form Lamont’s novel, readers learn that Beaumont had been carrying on an affair with Daisy Buchanan. Daisy’s husband, Tom, is resigned to his failed marriage and offers her a divorce so that she can marry Beaumont. Beaumont becomes involved with two Latinas whom he met when he mail-ordered their pornography. Corriendo and Delamode ask for his assistance in setting themselves up as clairvoyants in New York, and after several sexual encounters with them, he is so driven by lust that he buys them a saloon, the Club Zap. He distances himself from Daisy, who consoles herself by having an affair with Halpin.
Trying to help Daisy and Beaumont, Halpin goes to the Club Zap to confront the two sex kittens. Coincidentally, Daisy arrives at the club to beg Corriendo and Delamode to release their hold on Beaumont. In their office, the two seductresses work their charms on Halpin and Daisy, sweeping them into an orgy of wild and perverted group-sex acts. In one last desperate attempt to discredit the evil duo, Halpin and Daisy bring Ned to the Club Zap. Once again, they are outsmarted by the two clairvoyants, and Halpin whisks Daisy out of the Club Zap in the midst of her nude, lewd dance, leaving Beaumont to the wiles of Corriendo and Delamode.
Beaumont, who has been complaining about the stupid lines that Lamont writes and the drafty cabin where he lies dead, finally packs up and leaves the cabin and Lamont’s novel. Eventually, Halpin receives a letter from Beaumont, who has joined a colony of characters from different novels awaiting new jobs, and Halpin leaves the cabin to join him.
The Characters
The characters of Gilbert Sorrentino are not realistic but instead represent fictional conventions. In Mulligan Stew, Sorrentino opposes the idea of characters as whole, autonomous subjects and makes the point that each is simply a creation of language. Antony Lamont is a dramatized figure of the author who loses control of his book. He is not so much a portrait of the conventional author as a parody of him. At one point, Halpin speaks two parts, his own and Beaumont’s, since Beaumont has left the novel because of Lamont’s incompetence. Yet his words were supposedly written by Lamont, so in effect he is being Lamont as well. Meanwhile, the reader is aware that all three are fictitious figures tangled together in the artificial language of the book.
The characters are revealed primarily by their own words, which are spoken in dialogue or written in letters or journals. Lamont reveals himself in his novels, letters, journals, and scrapbook, but in addition, readers have the attitudes of other characters toward him, as indicated in their letters. Lamont’s own created characters, Halpin and Beaumont, complain about his writing and work habits. Although the reader agrees with their assessment of Lamont, when Halpin is talking about fellow characters in the novel Guinea Red, there is a certain irony between his view and the reader’s. It seems that when Halpin speaks the lines written by Lamont, he is mistaken, but when he speaks his own thoughts beyond the confines of Lamont’s novel, he is in accord with reality as the reader recognizes it.
Each of the characters in Sorrentino’s novel has a distinct pattern of speaking or writing that reveals character. Lamont illustrates his ineptness in the poorly written Guinea Red and reveals his arrogance and pretentiousness in letters. Daisy Buchanan’s coy letters, dotted with phrases such as “Yummy!” and self-deprecation such as “don’t pay any attention to me,” delineate her as a frivolous woman who plays a childlike role to please men. Madame Corriendo speaks with a Hispanic accent and sings songs in a strange polyglot language when she is not threatening or bragging. Beaumont’s ghost, which inexplicably appears in Lamont’s novel despite the fact that Beaumont is still alive, speaks an exaggerated poetic idiom sprinkled with bizarre metaphors in a rich Irish brogue. Perhaps the most dazzling artificial language occurs in the “Interview of the Month” that Halpin reads in the magazine Art Futures and clips for his journal. A staff member poses questions to Mr. Barnett Tete, America’s most famous collector and all-around patron of the arts. Mr. Tete replies at length to each question in a strange mixture of business jargon, inappropriate metaphors, nonsequiturs, personal prejudices, and clichés.
Many of the characters in Mulligan Stew are borrowed from other writers’ novels. Helpin, who is taken from James Joyce’s novel Finnegans Wake (1939), runs into a man named Cliff Soles, who says he worked in the same Joyce novel as well as in one of Lament’s earlier novels. Lament is from Irish writer Flann O’Brien’s novel At Swim-Two-Birds (1939), which had a strong influence on Mulligan Stew. Characters from novels of Dashiell Hammett and F. Scott Fitzgerald are present, and literary allusions abound.
Critical Context
Gilbert Sorrentino was among the literary avant-garde of the 1960’s and 1970’s, along with other writers such as Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, John Barth, William Gass, and LeRoi Jones. They shared an interest in the power of words and their multiple technical possibilities, a theme running throughout Sorrentino’s work. This group is perhaps best known for attacking the conventions of the traditional novel such as linear plot lines, “real” characters, and language subordinated to the story. They, and especially Sorrentino, believed that form is more important than content and even determines content.
The Sky Changes (1966) and Steelwork (1970), Sorrentino’s first two novels, ignore time sequence and scramble the past, present, and future. His next novel, The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things (1971), satirizes the New York art world of the 1960’s, a world of which he was a part. Each chapter is devoted to one of eight characters, and the novel proceeds by digression, anecdote, asides, and lists. This was followed by Splendide-Hotel (1973), a short book of twenty-six sections, each one based on a letter of the alphabet. Mulligan Stew, considered Sorrentino’s masterpiece, was published to rave reviews, and he has continued to dazzle his public with novels that are experimental in different ways. An artist of great seriousness and ability, Sorrentino has given his readers new ways to think about language and literature.
Bibliography
Greiner, Donald J. “Antony Lamont in Search of Gilbert Sorrentino: Character and Mulligan Stew.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 1, no.1 (Spring, 1981): 104-112. Analyzes the ways in which Sorrentino enlarges the traditional role of character.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. The Life of Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977. Traces major movements in American fiction, with emphasis on modernism.
Klinkowitz, Jerome. Literary Disruptions: The Making of a Post-Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975. Looks at Mulligan Stew in the context of the literary movement of its time.
Tindall, Kenneth. “Adam and Eve on a Raft: Some Aspects of Love and Death in Mulligan Stew.” The Review of Contemporary Fiction 1, no.1 (Spring, 1981): 159-167. A close reading of Sorrentino’s masterpiece.