Lunchroom

From the Archives, No. 1

I’ve been occupied with various tasks, to say nothing of my fixation on the repellent activities of my government, so I haven’t found time to post lately, and next week I’ll be traveling. Tut, tut, I have been remiss.

What I thought I’d do instead is reprint one of the short stories I’ve published over the last thirty years. If all goes well, I’ll make these reprints a regular feature of Scarcely Human.

This story, “Lunchroom,” appeared in Fence (v.2, no.2) in 1999, the first of three stories I’ve published there (each under the auspices of a different fiction editor -- Jonathan Lethem, who accepted this one, Ben Marcus, and Lynne Tillman). Rereading it for the first time in years, I think it’s pretty good. I remember very little about writing it, and I can no longer open any of the files containing drafts, corrections, etc.¹ Around the time I was working on it I’d been busily trying to learn some literary theory and criticism, so I do recall mashing together passages taken from various writings and reworking them to create the excerpts from the narrator’s “mysterious ‘work,’” as Mrs. Reise refers to it in the story.

The lunchroom, its denizens, and much of what happens in it is drawn from my own experience attending I.S.70 on West 17^th Street in Manhattan from 1974-77, although Nathan Hale Middle School, where the story is set, was located on Baltic Street in Brooklyn, around the corner from where I was living when I wrote it. Lethem, in fact, went to school there and undoubtedly saw many things similar to the ones I witnessed across the river during the same period.

For fun, I uploaded the story to ChatGPT and asked it to create an afterword. I present it beneath the story without comment.

LUNCHROOM

It may seem unlikely that I wrote the bulk of my award-winning monograph while residing in a pup tent pitched uncertainly in a corner of the lunchroom at the Nathan Hale Middle School in Brooklyn. It was, admittedly, an expedient, and one which presented forseeable difficulties. I naturally had first applied to those artists’ colonies well-known for taking a solicitous approach to writers and their seemingly incompatible desires for both uninterrupted solitude and camaraderie. Who can truly understand a writer? These colonies were, at any rate, unhelpful. My applications were each “carefully considered” and then rejected. It seemed that the limited billets available had each been awarded to former daily newspaper columnists attempting to write boisterously touching novels and memoirs about the immanent wisdom of large, abusive families.

I hit upon the school because of its nearness to the sublet I was about to be thrown out of. I’d grown used to the neighborhood and its amenities. It sat on level ground that was excellent for the long, ruminative walks I liked to take in the afternoons. It was quiet after dark and on winter evenings the faint smell of wood smoke filled the chill air. There was a dry cleaners, a butcher’s, a mediocre bookstore, a coffeehouse with a solemn and meditative atmosphere, and an excellent pasticceria. I didn’t mind staying there. It seemed to me that Nathan Hale’s lunchroom would provide the economical housing I required.

The school’s officials were willing to accommodate me. They’d previously “had” a poet and a muralist, losing one to budget cuts and the other to a non-profit organization. Also, both had insisted on going home at night, while I wanted only to remain on the premises to complete my work. I was introduced to Mr. Baumann, who presided over the lunchroom during the four forty-five minute lunch periods when it was heavily used (there was also a before-school breakfast session, but this was a smaller group altogether and these students tended to sit torpidly over their sugared cereals, huddled together in their poverty). It was he who told me to pitch my blue and yellow tent in the “C” section near the rear of the lunchroom.

“I think you’re nuts, by the way.” he said.

“Oh?”

“I personally would have pitched my tent in the auditorium. At least the little bastards are quiet during the cartoons.”

“But how, Mr. Baumann, would that fulfill Henry James’ dictum that ‘the best things come...from the talents that are members of a group; every man works better when he has companions working in the same line, and yielding to the stimulus of suggestion, comparison, emulation’?”

“I don’t know, but don’t let them come crying to you is all. That’s what got the mural guy. He thought it was hearts and minds all the way. He let them clean his brushes. He let them paint his sky in. They showed him. See that?” He gestured at a grey expanse of wall. “That’s what’s left of the famous mural. We had to paint it over. Don’t give the little bastards an inch.”

I soon adapted to living in the lunchroom. Each morning I drew fresh water from the drinking fountain in the corridor outside. I cooked my food over a hotplate I’d borrowed from the teachers’ lounge. My tent was pitched near the Candy Shack, a little corrugated cardboard structure that was painted to look like a log cabin. An attendant rested her elbows on the plywood shelf set in the window that had been cut into its front. I sat outside my tent at one of the tables, busy at my work. Around me, the noisy kids went on with their unkind business. Three boys held a smaller boy down and ground mashed potatoes into his exposed abdomen.

“No!” He begged. “I’ll give you a million dollars. Not in front of Judy Martinson!”

This was a pimply blonde girl wearing a zippered sweatjacket, the hood pulled over her head, sucking dispassionately on a straw inserted into a can of Hi-C. I wrote:

The response to violence in our time has been the invocation of names, a standard tactic in formal structuralism and very explicitly within the work of Levi-Strauss, which might be termed the ‘school bully’ syndrome, i.e., deployment of a terminology that creates far more ideas than are useful smothers the opponent’s rationale, a gambit which nevertheless does nothing to stem public and private corruption of rhetoric.

Clad in his habitual beige turtleneck sweater, a whistle hanging from a cord around his neck, Mr. Baumann gestured like an old fashioned compère from his station behind a standing microphone and under a clock hung high on the wall and protected by a kind of wire-mesh catcher’s mask. Feedback whistled through the speakers mounted at fifteen foot intervals on the walls.

“Now,” said Mr. Baumann. “Here is the top of the hour report on the news. Julio Colon has been a bad boy, I theeeenk. Is Julio here? Where the fuck is the little putz? Well then, where’s Christopher Schkrutz? Christopher?”

A fat boy stood up. His shirtfront was decorated with ketchup. “Here I am, Mr. Baumann,” he called.

“Ahoy there! The whale has sounded and opened his blowhole!” Mr. Baumann smiled. “Is it true, Mr. Christopher Schkrutz of class 7B1, that you were observant enough to notice that Julio Colon was lingering near the cloakroom in Mr. Lapidus’ class?”

The lunchroom exploded: “Ooooooooh!” There was a clatter as a stack of plastic lunch trays was heaved from a tabletop.

“I didn’t say that,” said Christopher Schkrutz.

“The cloakroom from which things were later discovered to be missing, and you say you think Julio Colon took them?”

“I didn’t! I didn’t say that!” said Christopher Schkrutz.

“Last time: Julio Colon! Julio Colon!” There was no response. “Miss DiGiovanni, you will please make out a cut slip for Mr. Colon and notify his parentuh, singular, immediately.”

A hand emerged from an aperture neatly sliced in the cinderblock wall, signalling a high sign.

“Thank you Mr. Christopher Schkrutz of class 7B1. Let us observe once again the consequences of the unspeakable arrogance of the clandestine informer.”

No sooner had Christopher Schkrutz sat down than a hail of green peas began drumming against his skin and then his notebook as he held it up to protect himself. A group of boys grabbed him, one reaching deep into his Toughskins and yanking a six inch length of underpant into view. More boys joined them to hoist Christopher Schkrutz by the exposed panties and hang him from a bolt extending from the wall. He dangled there as they threw food and books at him. I wrote:

Adorno holds that the participants on either side of such a conflict share an actual state as hapless chattel. Such harsh judgment may provide dry humor, but it also makes it difficult for scenes that are filled with slapstick and pratfalls--note that in low entertainment, from burlesque routines to Universal Pictures releases in the 1940s through the present day, a consistent motif has been that of the dispute between the physical thug and the rhetorically deft, with the deftness of rhetoric generally triumphing.

I had free access to the telephones, provided that I made only local calls, and frequently contacted my former graduate advisor, Professor Courage, for advice and inspiration. I could picture him sitting in his Upper West Side brownstone, its cluttered study overlooking the lachrymose cherry tree in his back yard that wept its blossoms over the uneven flagstones of the walk and the mossy neo-classical statuettes that lined it.

“You’re doing good work,” he reassured me. “I’m glad you don’t suffer from any illusions about the desirability of a willed alienation from the culture. You’re on the job. As am I. Two classes this semester, can you believe it? Looks like Europe’s off the calendar until summertime. All those damn tourists.”

Michael Scott approached me, a rangy boy in Special Ed.

“What yo name?”

“Andy.”

“I Mikoo Ska.” He invariably introduced himself. “Check it out.” He pulled his shirtsleeve up to expose a blunt and inscrutable design on his forearm.

“Used a raser,” he said.

“You used a razor?”

“Naw, a raser.” He pulled the nub of a gum eraser out of his pocket. “Took all night.” I pictured the slight rocking motion he must have made, effacing his own skin for hours in a welfare hotel. A girl next to me began drawing on the back of my shirt with a felt-tip pen. I felt wild curlicues, flowers blooming on my shoulder blade.

“Check it out,” said Mikoo Ska, thrusting his face in mine and opening his eyes wide. A floating blob of blue bobbed in the white of one eyeball.

“My sister done it for me.”

“What?”

“Stuck a bickpen in my eye.” He pulled a Bic out of his pocket. “Bug you out and shit, right? Couldn’t see for three hours neither. Missed Baretta. Yo, do my fuckin homework.” I wrote:

In some transubstantiative cases, ‘low’ physical brutality is contrasted with ‘high’ balletic physical responses that substitute themselves for rhetoric by dint of the superior intelligence that underlies them (see The Gold Rush, the Marx Brothers’ oeuvre [particularly the lemonade stand set-piece in Duck Soup], and in a more recent incarnation, the works of Jackie Chan)--these to be taken seriously as the ritual duty dances with violence, revolving around a central (in this case spatial) trope, that they are intended to be.

Five kids ran out the kitchen door, quantities of apples gathered in their arms. They took up position near one of the walls and began heaving the apples at the point where the wall and the floor met. The apples exploded, emitting coronas of milky pulp that clung to the wall.

I met with Dr. O’Brien, a psychiatrist under contract to the school district, to discuss my relationship with the children. Mr. Frankenmuth, the principal, was concerned about the school’s citywide ranking, and seemed to think that Dr. O’Brien and I should “put our heads together.” Dr. O’Brien’s office was devoid of any items that might indicate the personality of its occupant, except for the large glass ashtray on the desk, brimming with twisted butts. Dr. O’Brien himself seemed on the edge of disintegration; a paunchy, florid man whose skin slumped limply over the bones in his face. His whole body, in fact, seemed to be made up of slack lengths of dense material--sand perhaps--molded and restrained by its clothing.

“Do any of the children complain of having trouble sleeping?”

“No.”

“Appetites: they eat?”

“It is a lunchroom.”

“So it is. Drug use?”

“I don’t know.”

“Adult behavioral modeling?”

“Pardon me?”

“Do you yourself take drugs in their presence or with their awareness?” He cocked his head and arched an eyebrow.

“No.”

“Artist, are you?”

“I’m a theorist.”

“No drugs?”

“No.”

“Guns in school? Knives? Weapons of any kind?”

“I don’t know.”

Dr. O’Brien noted something on a yellow legal pad.

“You’ve spent quite a lot of time in an academic environment, I take it,” he said mildly, without looking up. No keepsakes, no trophies or autographed baseballs in the room.

“Yes.”

“A theorist.”

“Yes.”

“Quite a rather unconventional milieu, academia.”

“I suppose.”

“What made you want to live in a lunchroom? Do you like the idea of being near the children? Or is it just schools you like?”

“I like the children.”

“Do the children confide in you regarding sexual matters?”

He smiled broadly then; it gave his face the appearance of a rumpled bed being stripped. There were no diplomas or certificates framed on the walls, no citations or awards. He bent to his pad, shaking his head slightly as he wrote.

“Ho-hum,” he said. “I don’t know what I’m even doing here. Talk therapy was still the big thing when they created this position. Well, I guess something has to justify the bills around here.” His accompanying gesture took in the whole of his characterless office. No framed photos of children, or a wife. He continued: “Basically a soft science, folks. Psychology, that is. It’s good for the economy, it creates jobs, it fills beautiful modern office buildings. But I’m a physician, an M.D. I can name the bones of the foot. Astragalus, oscalcis, metatarsal, phalanges. Muscles? No problem: Annular ligament, peroneus. Don’t stop me now. Abductor pollicis. I can go on and on. That’s why, ultimately, you end up in my incredibly expensive and superbly trained presence. I don’t deal with ideas, I deal with time-tested facts, imparted to me over the course of many grueling and costly years of apprenticeship. Now go do your little theory thing.”

I wrote:

This theory of the comic effect of the trangression of taste and morality and an inevitable subsequent backlash of revulsion and an almost puritanical thirst for centrally controlled progress is close to Freud’s position. The lesson here is thus repeated. I am in no way attempting to detract from the many accomplishments of the uncompromisingly brutal descriptions of the squalor of life presented in the works of Riis, Crane, Sinclair, et al., but from their didactic intent. The prophetic language integration attempted by them fell far short of the mark in the ebbing of an era that seems comparatively peaceful by twentieth-century standards. As in medieval literature, the characters cannot fail to at least attempt to deliver the heroine--American Society--from adversity, yet the authors themselves cannot agree on what Derrida means when he refers to an ‘organic model.’

Six boys grouped around a table had stacked bookbags and lunchboxes they’d covered with someone’s dirty parka in a fair simulation of a shrouded corpse. They chanted: “Rise, Stephan, rise! Rise, Stephan, rise!” One boy reached out to those on either side of him, attempting to link hands.

“Get off, faggot.”

“Faggot ass motherfuck.”

“We continue now with our top of the hour report,” said Mr. Baumann. “You give us twenty-two minutes, we’ll give you the world. Now shut up, you heartbreaking little products of broken homes.”

“Rise, Stephan, rise!”

“Rise, Stephan, rise!”

Michael Scott sauntered up, a zag-toothed grin on his face.

“What yo name?”

“Andy, Michael.”

“I Mikoo Ska.”

“What’s with Stephan?” I asked.

“He there say they startin a ligious cult,” explained Mikoo Ska.

“Miss Wolin, in the library, is unhappy with the notion of your greasy little hands all over her books,” said Mr. Baumann. “So from now on the library is to be known as the Place of Filmstrips. You will learn about brushing your teeth and safely crossing the street there and no more.”

“Yo, I saw this fuckin movie?” said Mikoo Ska.

“Yes?”

“Bet. It was like Thrillkill you know?”

“Yes.”

“Knowm sayin?”

“Yes.”

“Dude like busts out with a chainsaw an shit. Cut a lady’s boobies off an shit.”

“Yes?”

“You seen it?”

“Yes.”

“You a lyin fuck! Get me candy!”

“What kind?” I asked.

“Marathon Bar,” said Mikoo Ska. “Pulled my fuckin tooth out last time.” I got the impression he wanted to get back at it.

“Mr. Correlli has been issued a board reprimand for calling one of the sharper of you little pricks a secret fascist,” said Mr. Baumann. “This is what happens when you let your arrogant lack of fear get in the way of things. Learn it and be well, Correlli, wherever you are, you fat phony. I am afraid of every one of you animals and it has always held me in good stead. I never turn my back to write notes on the board. I never hit where it shows. I always leave school in the company of another adult caucasian male, preferably a gym teacher. Moving right along.”

I got up and walked over to the Candy Shack, nearly slipping on a slick of thrown food. Behind the window the attendant waited, a locked trunk next to her on the floor.

“Marathon Bar?” I asked.

“You missed cut-off,” she said.

“No candy?”

“Missed cut-off.”

I wrote:

For example, David Berkowitz (AKA the Son of Sam) stalked New York City in what is in many ways a companion ‘walk poem’ to Whitman’s flamboyant sense of life. There are problems with this analogy, though, including stylistic conflicts between the two men. Charydon examines the way in which Whitman uses irony to undercut the poem’s tendency towards moral philosophy, and at the same time, render any moral proclamations invalid, whereas in the case of Berkowitz he finds that a fierce if arguably misguided morality compelled him to his poetic acts.

Mrs. Reise and Mrs. Reiser, two English teachers, came over one day, bearing Mandelbrot and a thermos of hot chocolate.

“We were wondering what the nature is of this mysterious ‘work’ you’re doing,” said Mrs. Reise, breaking a chunk off the loaf with powerful-looking hands.

“You’re so quiet and secretive about the whole thing.”

“Not in a bad way or anything.”

“We just want to be able to answer the kids’ questions about it, when and if they ask. It’s a tough age for them.”

“We have lots of answers for them about lots of things when and if they ask.”

“We’re still waiting. For them to ask, I mean.”

I opened one of the notebooks in which I was writing.

Mrs. Reiser: “Oh, penmanship.” It sounded like an invocation.

“Penmanship.”

“Who can read that? I can’t read that.”

“A pharmacist maybe could read that.”

“How about you just tell us about it, OK?”

“Is it gripping...memorable...powerful?”

“An instant classic?”

“Fiercely moral...redemptive?”

“Does it bear the sort of relation to its age that The Catcher in the Rye did to its?”

I mended the inevitable wear and tear to my tent using a bicycle tire repair kit. I ignored graffiti, though some of it was quite witty. My food I left open to plunder, but my books I concealed behind the acoustic panels of the lunchroom’s dropped ceiling. I borrowed a broom from the custodians and kept the area around the tent swept clean. Sometimes I allowed students to nap inside the tent. None ever expressed curiosity about my work.

I grew accustomed to Michael Scott’s visits, in particular. One day he brought a kitten concealed under his jacket, unzipping so that I could have a look at it. It was a tiny creature, unweaned, its eyes and nose crusted over.

“I’m a drop it in the soup,” he said.

“Is it soup today?”

“That’s they callin it. Later.” He headed toward the kitchen doors, his unsentimental burden bulging in his jacket. Shortly afterwards, Michael Scott disappeared.

I wrote:

It is no accident that as this form wanes, or at any rate as prevailing interpretations of its near-ritual intent mutate with the passage of time, serial killers have become almost as popular as rock stars, if not individually at least as a genre or subject for widespread discussion. But there are indications that such frivolous spectatorism manifesting its desires in an orgy of voyeuristic bloodletting runs its course in the event of systematized violence at a societal level.

“There will be no more hands on demos in Friedman’s sex ed class,” said Mr. Baumann. “Mr. Friedman was indeed led out in shackles as so many of you were heard relating in your ignorant little monkey voices. Let the tribal grunts fall silent, let us put the story to rest because this is Baumann’s Gospel during Baumann’s Happy Hour. Next person in B Section who throws food gets a mouthful of bloody Chiclets. The body count from last week is so high that we will abbreviate the remainder of our report. Emergency sabbaticals: Miss Salpeter, after the already legendary Graph Paper Outburst. Miss Cookingham, last seen attempting to write on the blackboard with a hand puppet. Miss Bohn, who has apparently been receiving private commands over the schoolwide public address system.”

Two kids swept down either side of the line of garbage cans, a window pole held horizontally between them, the pole pushing the cans into one another and upsetting them. Fresh garbage--chicken bones, half-eaten buns, green peas, smears of apple sauce, greasy brown paper bags, milk cartons and juice cans--was strewn across the floor. More kids joined them to grind the garbage into the floor.

“Board suspensions: Mr. Fischbein, caught masturbating himself under his workbench. Mr. Endick, for catching a girl’s fingers in a piano lid while slamming it violently. Mr. Reda, for throwing a typewriter. Miss Felsenthal, for calling students at home and hissing the word ‘Nazi’ over the wire. I want you to shut up and sit down and listen to your future. This is one of those moments when you get to catch a glimpse of the world in which you’re destined to spend the rest of your little lives. A world of madness and unrelenting insult. Hospitalizations: Miss Rosenberg, after a desk fell on her in the courtyard. Mrs. Bass, after falling off her shoes. Mr. Shique, attempted suicide after trying to teach thirty-five sixth graders to play ‘Cherokee.’ Mr. Geller, for removal of a foreign object from one of his body cavities. So who’s worse? You or them? This is a question for the sociologists, I kid you not.”

I marked time by the decorations that hung in their turn over the four doors of the entrance: pumpkins and witches, cornucopias and manic-looking turkeys, menorahs and wreaths, a balding, moustached black man. Around the time that the two U.S. presidents made their appearance, Mr. Frankenmuth called me into his office to inform me that I was being evicted: unfortunately, he said, the school required the space to install a “cost-effective” video learning center and for an expansion of the Candy Shack so that it could stock school supplies and souvenirs. I didn’t mind: my work was all but done and I had recently made some promising inquiries into the possibility of taking up residence near the Institute for Language Integration in Routine, Michigan; either in a shallow pit, lined with rubber matting, or on the poured concrete floor of a disused stuffed toy factory. I rolled my sleeping bag and struck my tent, put my personal belongings into a knapsack and my manuscript and other research materials into an empty cardboard box, and slipped out at the end of the school day, moving among the children past the six police cars the city benevolently provided each afternoon to see them home safely.

Careless writers become accustomed to creating the carnage that drives their narratives, but--to reference Othello--the good writer knows that despite all questions of representation there is indeed a model for such violence in the greater world; that he is but half-mad, and fully aware of the irony of his words. Certainly love, hope and initiative can be present, both in the world of flesh and the worlds of literature, but these are in fact ironical wraiths, myths structured as artificially as the concept of courtly love.

Afterword: A Retrospective Reading of “Lunchroom,” by ChatGPT 5.2

Christopher Sorrentino’s story “Lunchroom,” first published in 1999, occupies an interesting position in his body of work. Appearing shortly after the novel Sound on Sound (1997²), it demonstrates many of the stylistic and thematic tendencies that would recur throughout his later fiction: an interest in systems of language and interpretation, an attraction to environments defined by social dysfunction, and a fascination with narrators whose intellectual frameworks fail to adequately explain the world around them.

The story is structured around a deliberately absurd premise. A theorist--an academic writer working on a monograph about violence and rhetoric--takes up residence in a pup tent inside the lunchroom of a Brooklyn middle school. From this vantage point he observes a steady stream of cruelty, chaos, and institutional breakdown among the students and staff. The narrator dutifully records these observations in theoretical language that invokes structuralism, Freud, Adorno, and other intellectual authorities.

The result is a sustained juxtaposition between the vocabulary of theory and the spectacle of everyday brutality.

The lunchroom functions as a miniature social system. Students humiliate and assault one another with ritualistic regularity. Teachers and administrators appear exhausted, unstable, or openly contemptuous of their charges. The lunchroom monitor, Mr. Baumann, presides over the chaos like a grotesque master of ceremonies, delivering announcements that combine bureaucratic language with sadistic commentary. In this compressed environment, authority has largely collapsed; violence and humiliation fill the vacuum.

Meanwhile, the narrator continues his theoretical work, interpreting the events around him as examples of larger cultural patterns. His prose invokes traditions of intellectual analysis--structuralism, psychoanalysis, sociological explanation--but the explanatory frameworks rarely illuminate what the reader has just witnessed. Instead, they function as a kind of rhetorical screen.

This tension between interpretation and experience is the story’s central device. The narrator observes the same brutal events as the reader but processes them through a language that seems increasingly inadequate to the task. The theoretical passages do not resolve the scenes they follow; if anything, they heighten the sense that the violence unfolding in the lunchroom exceeds the interpretive tools available to describe it.

The effect is comic, but the comedy is bleak. The narrator is not exactly hypocritical, nor is he explicitly callous. Rather, he appears trapped inside an intellectual apparatus that converts suffering into material for analysis. The children become data points in an argument about violence in modern culture. The story thus satirizes a familiar figure in late twentieth-century intellectual life: the theorist whose explanatory systems promise total understanding but remain curiously detached from the realities they claim to interpret.

At the same time, the story resists presenting the lunchroom as a purely symbolic space. The children’s cruelty has a specific social texture--one that reflects urban school environments of the period, where underfunding, overcrowding, and institutional fatigue often produced chaotic conditions. The behavior of the students is grotesque but recognizable, and the adults charged with supervising them appear both complicit and overwhelmed. In this sense the allegory operates less as abstraction than as exaggeration: a heightened depiction of an already unstable social environment.

Several characters serve as focal points for this environment. Mr. Baumann, the lunchroom supervisor, embodies the authoritarian cynicism that emerges when institutional authority loses legitimacy but continues to exercise power. His announcements resemble a combination of talk-radio monologue and carnival bark, simultaneously mocking and disciplining the children he supervises. The Special Education student Michael Scott--who repeatedly approaches the narrator to display self-inflicted injuries or boast about acts of cruelty--represents another aspect of the same environment: the internalization of violence by those who grow up within it.

The narrator, significantly, never intervenes. His role is observational and interpretive. Even when confronted with disturbing behavior--self-harm, cruelty toward animals, humiliation among the students--he records the events and returns to his monograph. The allegory therefore implicates the narrator himself. His project depends upon the very violence he analyzes.

The story’s conclusion reinforces this dynamic. After months in the lunchroom, the narrator is evicted to make room for a cost-effective video learning center and an expanded candy stand. The bureaucratic logic of the institution quietly replaces him with a new form of educational technology. Having nearly completed his manuscript, the narrator packs up his tent and departs without protest.

Nothing in the lunchroom changes.

This understated ending reveals another recurring feature of Sorrentino’s fiction: a resistance to moral closure. The narrator offers a final reflection about writers and violence--suggesting that fiction merely reflects the brutality already present in the world--but the comment does not resolve the story’s tensions. The lunchroom continues to function as it always has, and the narrator simply relocates his intellectual project elsewhere.

In retrospect, “Lunchroom” anticipates several concerns that would appear in Sorrentino’s later work. Many of his novels and stories explore environments shaped by failed institutions, unreliable narratives, and interpretive systems that obscure as much as they reveal. His narrators often attempt to impose explanatory frameworks--historical, theoretical, or personal--on situations that resist coherent interpretation.

What distinguishes this early story is the starkness of its satirical method. The distance between theory and experience is not merely suggested but dramatized through the structure of the narrative itself. Each theoretical passage attempts to organize the chaos that precedes it, yet the chaos remains stubbornly resistant to explanation.

The allegory therefore operates on two levels. On one level, it depicts a dysfunctional school lunchroom as a microcosm of social disorder. On another, it critiques the intellectual impulse to convert such disorder into systems of meaning. The narrator’s monograph grows steadily more elaborate, but the events that inspire it remain brutally simple.

The story leaves the reader with a lingering question: whether explanation is ever sufficient to account for the violence it seeks to describe.

1. If anyone has a decent, relatively easy method for opening old Word (and even older WordPerfect) files, drop me a line.

2. 1995, actually.