Kirkus 3-1-66
"The Sky Changes is not the glad, mad trip of Kerouac's 'On the Road' but a bitter, more adult insight into hip America."


Gwendolyn Brooks, Book Week 5-8-66
"Gilbert Sorrentino is a poet, and The Sky Changes is poetry influenced by an insight both agitated and clear."


Richard Elman, Commonweal 12-5-69
"The Sky Changes is the best fiction of divorce I have ever come across, a truly moving shattering experience."


Washington Post 4-6-86
"Composed with dazzling and precise verbal dexterity, The Sky Changes is replete with sadness for lost love and despair over a cheapened American culture."


Los Angeles Times Book Review 4-20-86
"Though its tone is dominated by despair and disillusionment, The Sky Changes also offers the pleasures of Gilbert Sorrentino's intense concentration and the poignancy of those few moments when redemption seems possible."


Book Description
Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as the husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that the marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the imaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' failures and are dragged throughout the torment of this disintegrating marriage. No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work. And no other novel so perfectly captures the moral bankruptcy of the United States as a background to divorce.

ANNOTATION

The author's first novel is a searing account of a desperate family's cross-country car trip through the plastic vastness of the American auto-and-motel landscape.

FROM THE PUBLISHER