Library Journal 9-15-70
"The life described is gutsy; it is harsh; it is often overpowering in its sadness, squalor, and pettiness. And yet Sorrentino captures the poetry and the beauty as well. Highly recommended."

Kirkus Reviews 8-1-70
"[Steelwork is] a kind of kinetic scrapbook of sketches, portraits, ephemera from a section of Brooklyn during the years 1935 to 1951. The glancing, non-chronological arrangement and the fascination (in many cases the brilliance) of individual pieces mute the bitterness but also tend to obscure causal relationships so that what comes through most clearly is a general sense of souring as poverty and expectations fade together. Ethnic, economic and especially period distinctions are impressively subtle, with no romanticism but the original; and the brief, essential characterizations could scarcely have more appropriate effectraucous, tender boys whose faces are forgettable but whose growth into suffering and bigotry is not."

Washington Post Book World 6-14-92
"[Steelwork] offers the usual Sorrentino pleasures: bitter humor, earthy realism, self-aware narration, long lists (one chapter enumerates various sexual myths), a sense of nostalgia that is frequently undercut, and an altogether addictive style."

Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review 11-8-70
"Powerfully evocative."

Shaun O'Connell, Nation 6-21-71
"Artful, compressed and striking."

Book Description
paperback of Sorrentino's classic early novel

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Like a series of snapshots, this novel presents a picture of a particular Brooklyn neighborhood between the years 1935 and 1951, covering the Depression, World War II, the beginnings of the Cold War, and the Korean War. In short, colorful, dramatic episodes, the book details the collapse of a basically decent, homogeneous, and honorable group of people into a greedy, ignorant, and slipshod conglomeration, corrupted by money made available by the war economy. The neighborhood as a whole is the protagonist, although there are many characters who become familiar. Moving the way memory does, the narrative skips from episode to episode in no conventional time sequence, projecting indelible flashes of the past as they strike the mind. Gilbert Sorrentino has beautifully encompassed a section of America in this very human, funny, intelligent novel which re-creates perfectly the mood and the time of its inhabitants and its past.

"Artful, compressed and striking." (Shaun O'Connell, Nation 6-21-71)

"Powerfully evocative." (Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review 11-8-70)

"[Steelwork] offers the usual Sorrentino pleasures: bitter humor, earthy realism, self-aware narration, long lists (one chapter enumerates various sexual myths), a sense of nostalgia that is frequently undercut, and an altogether addictive style." (Washington Post Book World 6-14-92)

"[Steelwork is] a kind of kinetic scrapbook of sketches, portraits, ephemera from a section of Brooklyn during the years 1935 to 1951. The glancing, non-chronological arrangement and the fascination (in many cases the brilliance) of individual pieces mute the bitterness but also tend to obscure causal relationships so that what comes through most clearly is a general sense of souring as poverty and expectations fade together. Ethnic, economic and especially period distinctions are impressively subtle, with no romanticism but the original; and the brief, essential characterizations could scarcely have more appropriate effect—raucous, tender boys whose faces are forgettable but whose growth into suffering and bigotry is not." (Kirkus Reviews 8-1-70)