The final novel from the postmodern American master. Titled after a line from Henry James, The Abyss of Human Illusion consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion—an elegiac paean to the bleak world Gilbert Sorrentino so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters—the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present.