The Abyss of Human Illusion by Gilbert Sorrentino, Christopher Sorrentino

argument that conflated the protagonists of both novels as the same depraved dandy. But that was that—the English Decadence, the professor learned, led nowhere but to a lifetime in, let’s say, northern Iowa. That would never do.
    And so he moved, with some flattery, here and there, some to-ing and fro-ing and faculty lunches and dinner parties, into the outer precincts of the romance languages department, and Vallejo became the center of his new book, a neohistorical study of the imagery in Trilce, that got him an offer from a very good private university, after which it was adiós to Vallejo, and the French poets were suddenly hauled from the wings, where they had, perhaps, been sitting for some time with Max Beerbohm and the Earl of Surrey.
    In his new post, he modestly requested of the creative writing program if he might teach a course in literary translation, under its auspices of course, and his growing celebrity made this a cinch, especially since he offered to teach it in addition to his regular course load. So there he was, a writer, in effect, at last. He was very much “like” a writer, even, with his beret and faded denim shirts, his bicycle and worn corduroys. Well
    He married a graduate student some two years later, a washed-out young woman of great sensitivity, who made a first–play splash with a little one-acter called ¡Ay Caramba! “Its intermittent sizzle comes from its winningly disingenuous juxtaposition of Hebrew linguistics, Twelve-Step dogma, the CIA , and the ties between them,” asserted the Village Voice, with guarded enthusiasm. They are both middle-aged now, and the professor’s wife has all but given up writing and has begun showing her photographs at a “discriminating” gallery in town. The professor now teaches but one course a semester, a freshman seminar in the English Decadence, in which he assigns his own book, self-deprecatingly, to be sure. He loves the fact that his bluntly sexual chapter on Teleny makes his students look at him with a surprised respect. And, not to forget, he is writing poetry again, and publishing it in the literary magazine of the English department, Redwood Review.

— XXXVII —
    H e’d finally got a job checking freight for the King Assembly Agency, working on a North River platform of the Pennsylvania Railroad, with whose checkers and car loaders the assembly agency worked in tandem.
    The weather had grown increasingly colder as January progressed, and one morning, as he walked into the violent wind blowing up Fortieth Street from the river, he knew that this day, the first truly cold day on his new job, would be astonishingly cruel. And so it was.
    His marriage had been steadily disintegrating, even though it was barely more than a year old. His wife looked at him, or so he thought, with a passive, almost friendly, benign contempt, although he had no idea why: perhaps he was wrong. He certainly could not have furnished any “proof” or examples of this contempt, but it was there, he knew. It was there. He believed that one day soon he’d be given a sign of some sort to prove, to his satisfaction, that his wife happily despised him, and always had, that their marriage was teetering on the edge of collapse, and that she was ready to take advantage of any catalyst to give it a careless push.
    Al, the foreman, took a look at him in his absurdly inadequate clothing, and gave him a woollen watch cap to pull over his ears, his ears and his stupid head, the head of what Al had, on this bitter day, called, dismissively, a “college boy.” The cap kept his head from freezing, but did nothing for his body or his feet, numbed into two chunks of icy flesh from the frigid concrete floor of the platform. This was his true initiation into the world of brutally hard work, “honest,” as they say, work.
    The sign would arrive and he would see it or feel it deeply; there would be no doubt of it. Then, only then, armed with this certainty, he could confront his