The Norwegian freighter episode, speaking of human interest, was actually a trip I took with my ex-wife, with whom I remained deeply if ambivalently attached. She died recently of breast cancer. She always used to complain that I didn’t put her into my stories. So here she is, now that it’s too late.

    Like a circus ringmaster or a loquacious talk show host, Sukenick flits in and out of his narralogues, sometimes appearing in the first person, sometimes in the third. Characters argue with him, or talk about him behind his back. He becomes a Henry Milleresque sexual braggart proclaiming that a character’s lewd exploits are actually based on Sukenick’s "explosive sexuality" following a reading at the University of Iowa Fiction Workshop. In another guise, he’s a sour expatriate drawing a startling parallel between the looted ruins of Rome and his dying mother robbed of her medical insurance in Reagan’s supply-side America. He can also be found in the Colorado Mountains (Sukenick is an English professor at the University of Colorado, Boulder) contemplating the apocalyptic symbolism of a raging snow storm while fretting about the C.I.A.’s interest in one of his novels.
    What is the net effect of this hyperactive authorial gamesmanship? Without personally knowing Sukenick, for instance, can we be certain that the postscript about his ex-wife’s death is any more "true" than the assumed fiction that precedes it? The subtitle of his book is "Truth in Fiction," and it seems clear that literary truth for Sukenick isn’t about documentary mimesis. Rather, it’s being faithful to our innate sense of creativity and artistic vision: "the moment of truth in fiction is the moment of composition." Sukenick still has at least one foot in the 1960s counterculture revolution. He fervently believes that writing should be a radical life-affirming enterprise, or what his teaching assistant Waldo refers to as "Sukenick’s yahoo ideas about art and social wellbeing, his corny conviction that art in the long run could only justify itself by helping to create a culture that abetted the richness of common experience and encouraged social justice."
    Waldo is a wonderfully sly creation. Appearing in four of the book’s narralogues, he has a love/hate relationship with Sukenick, who is Waldo’s professor, mentor and literary guru. Waldo is the sort of disingenuous campus leftist that Sukenick can’t resist satirizing:

[Waldo’s] favorite thing was to methodically seduce as many of the coeds in his classes as possible, the better to politicize them. It was one of the advantages of being a low paid, no-benefit academic temp. Besides, he could double dip by using the seduction adventures in writing pornography to supplement his income. He also liked to get drunk and drive fast.

    In the book’s introduction, Sukenick admits to having been stung by left-wing critics who felt his work "didn’t come to grips with political reality." Waldo’s character seems in part a response to what Sukenick perceives as leftist hypocrisy and tone deafness toward the arts. Throughout the book, leftists and neoconservatives alike are skewered as narrow-minded ideologues. Waldo is more than a poseur, however. He’s able to take to heart what Sukenick teaches him. In a delicious twist of poetic injustice, Waldo eventually becomes a famous novelist by aping his teacher’s writing style. Sukenick, meanwhile, remains at the university, languishing as "an author of the kind of literary fiction nobody was much interested in any more."
    It’s hard not to see Waldo as representative of hot young writers like David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, both of whom have brought a domesticated form of postmodernism to the bestseller list. Sukenick might be inclined to shake his fist at the heavens and wonder why his own work -- which would surely appeal to the Wallace and Eggers crowd -- hasn’t met with similar success over the years. Certainly Narralogues and his extraordinary 1999 novel, Mosaic Man, prove that Ronald Sukenick is writing today with the kind of lucidness and artistry that few authors attain in the course of their careers.
                                                                                      - Bob Wake