Sorrentino wallops The Waltons, 11 Aug 1998
This novel definitely destroys the sappy Waltons-style familial myths that dominate so many books and movies about the Depression. Sorrentino captures the self-destructiveness of his novel's unhappy, uneducated, unloved characters quite well, a self-destructiveness stemming from their quite brutal environment. I liked Sorrentino's use of two formal methods--via his omniscient third-person narrator--to report on his characters' grim mental states: his eschewal of direct quotes, instead using only paraphrases (e.g., "Grandma said that...") to capture the characters' loss of individuality; and his narrator's frequent reporting of the characters' thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. However, Sorrentino's vivid and masterful writing style doesn't quite conceal the novel's near-total lack of positive character development. Red, Grandma, and most of the other characters begin the novel screwed-up and merely become progressively worse, with no epiphanies. Of course, why should epiphanies occur to characters who have been too busy surviving day-to-day to develop even rudimentary senses of self-awareness?) In short, anyone who wants to know, in often graphic and brutal detail, how a dysfunctional childhood can actually damage a child should read this novel.