Trance

Judges Citation

Trance is a fever dream in which magical thinking masquerades as privileged knowledge, hateful indifference as motherly love, and a presidency effortlessly collapsed into the blackest of comedy routines. Within Sorrentino's crazed Looking Glass, a sentimental Alice loses her head to exquisitely dysfunctional visionaries. Blinded and entranced, she—like the oblivious proletariat who are targeted for liberation—is the first to suffer collateral damage. The humor, irrepressible, is devastating, the voices pitch-perfect, the novel's moral focus admirably sustained. A luminous cautionary tale.