New York City novelist Sam Lipsyte’s previous book, Home Land, starred a people-hating anti-hero named Lewis, still carrying around grudges from high school. Narrating in a letter to his alumni newsletter, Lewis delivered riffs on modern life and elegantly turned put-downs with breathtaking precision and abundant inventiveness.
One character, for instance, with a “faraway look,” conducts an “inner fire drill, as though she were evacuating the premises of herself in a quiet and orderly fashion,” while a 12-step member still dealing coke is described as “an evolutionary cul-de-sac.” The novel’s plot ushered its vividly satirical characters through a sequence of manic set pieces, culminating in a finale that involves a mace – the medieval kind.
The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte, Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 296 pages, $29.95
At first glance, Lipsyte’s newest novel, The Ask, doesn’t seem to offer much thematic progression: It stars a people-hating anti-hero named Milo, still carrying around grudges from college. Early in the novel, Milo loses his job as a fundraiser for a university in New York City, where “people paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company.” Unhappily married with an unruly toddler and nearing 40, Milo’s in charge of acquiring “asks”: “An ask could be a person, or what we wanted from that person. If they gave it to us, that was a give.”
After he’s fired for an ill-considered outburst at an entitled student, he is given an opportunity to regain his position when a wealthy college friend named Purdy, who parlayed a trust fund into an exponentially bigger Internet fortune, specifically requests his involvement in a potentially huge give. The ask, however, comes with a hitch. Milo needs to deal with Purdy’s long-lost son, Don, an uncouth, emotionally warped Iraq War veteran who lost his legs in an explosion.
Like Home Land, The Ask’s sluggish storyline ... is made up for by the author’s scathing insult comedy
Like Home Land, The Ask’s sluggish storyline, which also has an exotic weapon as part of its finale, is made up for by the author’s scathing insult comedy. In a post office line-up held up by foreign-looking customers, Milo, for instance, imagines warning them: “Don’t you worry your behaviour will reduce me to generalizations about why your lands are historically fucked?” One of the wisest characters in the novels is named Vargina, a one-time “crack baby”: “Her mother had named her the word her name resembled. A sympathetic nurse added the ‘r’.”
While the many pleasures in Home Land came solely from the pyrotechnic pithiness found in its narrator’s self-loathing, the writing in The Ask is toned down to create a more grounded portrait of a disappointed person in a less satirically American backdrop – a gentrifying neighbourhood in Queens.
Milo’s re-acquaintance with Purdy, who retains the same “gentle, quasi-Christ-y authority” as he did in his youth and employs other old college friends, allows him to revisit his squandered talent as a painter and the hopeful entitlement that he once possessed, and which he now detests in his job. Meanwhile, Purdy’s volatile, guilt-struck relationship with his biological child is a symbol for the permeable membrane that separates the elites from the hillbillies.
Lipsyte’s novel, ultimately, gives readers a portrait of a character who realizes, as he approaches middle age, that he was given too much and asked too little.
Kevin Chong is a writer based in Vancouver. His most recent book is Neil Young Nation: A Quest, an Obsession (and a True Story).
