In Aberration of Starlight Gilbert Sorrentino uses procrastinated seduction not as voluptuous delay but as a gamble that just wasn't in the cards….

This is a tease novel, then, and not very gratifying at that. Tom is a bore and Marie is banal. Instead of discovering or inventing compensations that would free them, as characters, from the anonymous pattern of libido and denial, they back off into the twaddle that surrounds them. Their heads, and what little is in them, dominate the narrative and keep on coming through direct, without much of the narratorial intervention that could render shades of feeling they feel but can't express. Indeed, the narrator, who shows up rarely, seems even more buried in the stuff of their lives than they are…. A list of Marie's favorite poems reveals her awful taste, but not why she likes them—which a sensitive narrator could have...