Divorce in America is the subject of Gilbert Sorrentino's relentlessly disturbing first novel. Tracing the New York-to-San Francisco journey of a family as husband and wife try to maintain the illusion that their marriage can be rescued, The Sky Changes records the imaginable damage they inflict upon each other in order to force themselves towards divorce. Along the way, their two children become victims of the parents' stupidity and cowardice, dragged through the tortures of this disintegrating marriage together with the adults.
No other novel in American literature is so narrowly dedicated to recording close-up the devastating pain of a marriage falling apart and the torturous, doomed-to-fail efforts to make it work. And perhaps no other novel so perfectly captures the moral bankruptcy and physical ugliness of the United States as a background to the failures of its characters.