Mulligan Stew, Gilbert Sorrentino's last novel, was an over-stuffed, aggressively avant-garde portmanteau bulging with allusions to James Joyce and Flann O'Brien; it enjoyed not only critical success but some popularity as well. Barely a year after publishing that behemoth, the prolific Sorrentino has produced a different kind of triumph—a tightly focused novel [Aberration of Starlight] that is by turns funny, sexy, and sad….

The verbal extravagance and formal pyrotechnics of Mulligan Stew are here; so is Sorrentino's enthusiastic but unsentimental view of the human sexual urge and his hilarious compassion for the self-deceptive daydreams of ordinary Americans. Aberration of Starlight begins with laughter, but ends in tears. Its haunting theme is the spiritual devastation wrought by life's compromises and disappointments.

Garrett Epps, "Fiction: 'Aberration of Starlight'," in Saturday Review (copyright © 1980 by Saturday Review; all rights reserved; reprinted by permission), Vol. 7, No. 12, August, 1980, p. 62.