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The Ask
Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has “not been developing”: after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major “ask”—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo’s involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo’s sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the “give” won’t come cheap. Probing many themes— or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, The Ask is a burst of genius by a young American master who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.
296 pages, Hardcover
First published March 2, 2010
151 people are currently reading
4,837 people want to read
About the author
Sam Lipsyte
36 books573 followersSam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five book of its year by the Village Voice Supplement) and the novels The Subject of Steve and Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award. Lipsyte teaches at Columbia Universitys School of The Arts and is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Manhattan.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 977 reviews
November 24, 2012
This is not a bad book, Sam Lipsyte has a cute turn of phrase, but it's just not funny at all and makes you feel bad when you're actually reading it so that you feel good when you stop. Ugh. I checked up my list of all time favourite novels to answer the question - well, maybe you just don't like comic novels. Here are the ones on my list with some comic elements:
the fountain overflows
the mezzanine
catch 22
eighty-sixed
trainspotting
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
lolita
You might possibly say that The Mezzanine, Catch-22 and Eighty-Sixed are comic novels rather than novels which have a lot of comedy in them, but you will note that two of these three are about Aids and War & so have that tragic undertow. Only The Mezzanine proudly declares itself to be Light as in light music. The narrator never impales himself on a stapler. He suffers mortal embarrassment in a men's urinal, but he figures out how to overcome his urethric strangulation problem and everything's plain sailing apart from the shoelaces.
Novels which notice everything about Modern Life in America and then jeer loudly at it like The Ask have three terrible giants breathing down their neck; there's Tom Wolfe, who invented this micro-trend the-future-is-already-happening Americans-are-really-absurd stuff way way back in great books like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby which was in like 1965 which was, well, before before; there’s Jonathan Franzen who is doing this sort of stuff in giant novels once every 8 years (and how glad I am he's so slow); and of course there’s David Foster Wallace about whom I would not wish to comment because I haven't read enough but he is the Galactic Warpdrive model of all Noticing Machines. It’s a brave author who sails his skiff into those waters hoping to catch an overlooked eel. And Mr Lipsyte then goes and sets his novel in a not-very-good University, just like about ten thousand novelists have been doing since the 50s – Snow, Bradbury, Barth, Amis, Sharpe, Lodge, Delillo, Jacobsen, Byatt, Tartt, Powers, Smiley, Chabon, Roth, Coetzee, Roth, Roth, Roth… and so you see that even though Mr Lipsyte has a cute turn of phrase, sometimes very cute, nonetheless, I have to report that this stuff has been
DONE TO DEATH
the fountain overflows
the mezzanine
catch 22
eighty-sixed
trainspotting
the curious incident of the dog in the night-time
lolita
You might possibly say that The Mezzanine, Catch-22 and Eighty-Sixed are comic novels rather than novels which have a lot of comedy in them, but you will note that two of these three are about Aids and War & so have that tragic undertow. Only The Mezzanine proudly declares itself to be Light as in light music. The narrator never impales himself on a stapler. He suffers mortal embarrassment in a men's urinal, but he figures out how to overcome his urethric strangulation problem and everything's plain sailing apart from the shoelaces.
Novels which notice everything about Modern Life in America and then jeer loudly at it like The Ask have three terrible giants breathing down their neck; there's Tom Wolfe, who invented this micro-trend the-future-is-already-happening Americans-are-really-absurd stuff way way back in great books like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby which was in like 1965 which was, well, before before; there’s Jonathan Franzen who is doing this sort of stuff in giant novels once every 8 years (and how glad I am he's so slow); and of course there’s David Foster Wallace about whom I would not wish to comment because I haven't read enough but he is the Galactic Warpdrive model of all Noticing Machines. It’s a brave author who sails his skiff into those waters hoping to catch an overlooked eel. And Mr Lipsyte then goes and sets his novel in a not-very-good University, just like about ten thousand novelists have been doing since the 50s – Snow, Bradbury, Barth, Amis, Sharpe, Lodge, Delillo, Jacobsen, Byatt, Tartt, Powers, Smiley, Chabon, Roth, Coetzee, Roth, Roth, Roth… and so you see that even though Mr Lipsyte has a cute turn of phrase, sometimes very cute, nonetheless, I have to report that this stuff has been
DONE TO DEATH
May 25, 2010
When you try to be cute by writing a book with a detestable protagonist and include dialogue exchanges like this:
"I'm not very likable, am I?"
"You're likable enough."
"No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?"
"I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it."
...then you probably should make sure the reader isn't going to agree with you. And though this is a well-written book, loaded with barbed humor (though it only made me laugh about twice), it doesn't really provide much payoff for spending 300 pages with a miserable misanthrope of a narrator.
It hits all the middle age malaise bases: unfulfilled ambitions, unhappy marriage, befuddled parenthood, strained family relationships, vulgar sexual content. It also ends pretty much exactly how you'd expect, in just about the most downbeat manner possible. It's an ugly book, only fitfully amusing, engaging but wearing, ultimately probably not worth the effort. Unless you want to read another book that boils down to, "doesn't the world kinda suck?"
"I'm not very likable, am I?"
"You're likable enough."
"No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?"
"I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it."
...then you probably should make sure the reader isn't going to agree with you. And though this is a well-written book, loaded with barbed humor (though it only made me laugh about twice), it doesn't really provide much payoff for spending 300 pages with a miserable misanthrope of a narrator.
It hits all the middle age malaise bases: unfulfilled ambitions, unhappy marriage, befuddled parenthood, strained family relationships, vulgar sexual content. It also ends pretty much exactly how you'd expect, in just about the most downbeat manner possible. It's an ugly book, only fitfully amusing, engaging but wearing, ultimately probably not worth the effort. Unless you want to read another book that boils down to, "doesn't the world kinda suck?"
August 5, 2016
Lipsyte’s comedy is of the frenetic sledgehammer variety (nothing wrong with that) and his narrator poisonously witty. The comedy is sadly all-too-sitcommy in its overexuberance, despite attempts to establish its own Elkinesque style, and relies overly on hyper-zingy dialogue where every character is a fast-talking asshole, a technique that overwhelms and removes the reader from the simulated reality of this world. In comparison to a similar novel, the superhumanly brilliant Laura Warholic (published three years earlier, not a NYT bestseller) spins relentlessly effective invective alongside more thoughtful, satirically substantial intellectual content, while The Ask leans on the laughs and skimps on the brains. Lipsyte is a talented word-spinner and his prose style is impressively euphonious: clearly he is attentive at the sentence level, weighing his words and sounding his sentences so the phrases tang on the tongue, but the zippy comedy softens some of his skill. Entertaining but by no means an “important” novel of “our times.”
January 9, 2010
The Ask is a weird novel to find yourself really enjoying--it's like getting punched in the face and laughing about it. It's hilarious and dead serious at the same time; on one page you laugh out loud, only to be soberly put in your place on the next by the pitiless resentment and biting cynicism that plagues Milo, Lipsyte's hapless protagonist, who gets fired from his job at the development office of a Manhattan university after mouthing off to an overly entitled student. Then there's all the other failure in Milo's life--the failure to be a successful painter, son, husband, and father--and the added burden when his college friend Purdy (the picture of wealth and success) comes out of the past with a particularly awkward proposition for him.
An early review at the Quarterly Conversation has called The Ask "another unrelenting tour de force of black bile...there is no cushy fictional distance between the world [Lipsyte] describes and the world he inhabits." But even though The Ask ends on the most unnerving note possible--and regardless of whether or not you're repelled by Milo's view that "stories were like people...we pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did," you at least realize (as Milo does) the guilt-inducing fact that there are always people worse off than you, that no matter how low you think you've gone, there are things to feel lucky for. "Everybody wanted to get home," Milo reminisces after he hits rock bottom at his childhood home in New Jersey, where his lesbian mother lives with her longtime lover. "Home could be a ruined place, joyless, heaped with the ashes of scorched hearts, but come evening everybody hustled to get there." A concrete sense of home is what Milo apparently seeks the most, but ultimately he wants a life free of illusions about what "home" really means.
What really won me over in The Ask was not only the razor-sharp writing--phrases like "sexagenarian whippersnappers" and "greeting card ontology" are abundant--but Lipsyte's equally razor-sharp observations about the absurd truths of American life: of the spoiled, uber-connected kids at the university ("they were happy, or seemed happy, or maybe they were blogging about how they seemed happy"); the purgatorial middle class existence he is destined never to leave ("We still did not own the devices that let you skip the commercials. Would we always be part of the slow television movement?"); the satirical, misguided manifestos of child daycare centers; and the sobering realities embodied by war veterans. The Ask avoids tempering the bitterness that comes with all this; instead, it stews in it, even embraces it. It's sort of exhilarating to finish the book seeing Milo "digging in for the long night of here."If he gains anything, it will be peace...maybe.
An early review at the Quarterly Conversation has called The Ask "another unrelenting tour de force of black bile...there is no cushy fictional distance between the world [Lipsyte] describes and the world he inhabits." But even though The Ask ends on the most unnerving note possible--and regardless of whether or not you're repelled by Milo's view that "stories were like people...we pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did," you at least realize (as Milo does) the guilt-inducing fact that there are always people worse off than you, that no matter how low you think you've gone, there are things to feel lucky for. "Everybody wanted to get home," Milo reminisces after he hits rock bottom at his childhood home in New Jersey, where his lesbian mother lives with her longtime lover. "Home could be a ruined place, joyless, heaped with the ashes of scorched hearts, but come evening everybody hustled to get there." A concrete sense of home is what Milo apparently seeks the most, but ultimately he wants a life free of illusions about what "home" really means.
What really won me over in The Ask was not only the razor-sharp writing--phrases like "sexagenarian whippersnappers" and "greeting card ontology" are abundant--but Lipsyte's equally razor-sharp observations about the absurd truths of American life: of the spoiled, uber-connected kids at the university ("they were happy, or seemed happy, or maybe they were blogging about how they seemed happy"); the purgatorial middle class existence he is destined never to leave ("We still did not own the devices that let you skip the commercials. Would we always be part of the slow television movement?"); the satirical, misguided manifestos of child daycare centers; and the sobering realities embodied by war veterans. The Ask avoids tempering the bitterness that comes with all this; instead, it stews in it, even embraces it. It's sort of exhilarating to finish the book seeing Milo "digging in for the long night of here."If he gains anything, it will be peace...maybe.
April 11, 2011
Has anyone else noticed that there is a new grammatical person? We've always had first ("I fell") and second ("You fell") and third ("She fell.") But now we have the first middle-aged white middle-class reasonably well educated underemployed male person, "I fell into a [sea of references], and made a joke about it, but mainly focused on my self-pity and my loathing for my self-pity." Ladies and Gentleman, this is the literary form embodied in The Ask. It could be much worse; it could be 'The Financial Lives of the Poets,' which is the same book with none of the anger at social and economic injustice. As well as the first m-a.w.m-c.r w e.u.m person, it's full of gimmicks, the plot is tenuous at best, and the prose is simultaneously over-caffeinated and under-cooked.
Putting all that aside, though, it has some funny moments and the satire is much more controlled than in The Subject Steve. People say it's 'sad,' but really, for 'sad' you would need to feel something for the narrator other than boredom. It doesn't give you a happy ending, though, that's for sure, and it has that over Financial Lives as well. This book, too, could have ended up with the narrator and his wife putting their marriage back together and living on austerely ever after. Instead, it bears some resemblance to the real world. Hopefully next time Lipsyte will step out of his comfort zone, write (in the third person?) about a compelling man (or group of people or even a woman) in a story which actually involves something other than random happenings and the same old plot twists (marriage fails! man loses job! rich people do something of dubious morality!); and do all this while keeping the satire and the humor. Fingers crossed.
Putting all that aside, though, it has some funny moments and the satire is much more controlled than in The Subject Steve. People say it's 'sad,' but really, for 'sad' you would need to feel something for the narrator other than boredom. It doesn't give you a happy ending, though, that's for sure, and it has that over Financial Lives as well. This book, too, could have ended up with the narrator and his wife putting their marriage back together and living on austerely ever after. Instead, it bears some resemblance to the real world. Hopefully next time Lipsyte will step out of his comfort zone, write (in the third person?) about a compelling man (or group of people or even a woman) in a story which actually involves something other than random happenings and the same old plot twists (marriage fails! man loses job! rich people do something of dubious morality!); and do all this while keeping the satire and the humor. Fingers crossed.
February 17, 2012
I was underwhelmed. It amazes me that this book has been universally acclaimed as hilarious. "So funny you might lose an eye". Really, Vanity Fair reviewer? What does that even mean?
If the shrill bludgeoning of obvious targets that is this book's stock in trade is considered as genuine wit, then God help us all.
Personally, if there were an immediate moratorium on the publication of whining, self-pitying tirades by narcissistic, obnoxious, self-hating losers, I would not be particularly upset.
The only modest amusement I managed to derive from reading this book was trying to decide which obnoxious loser was more annoying - Milo in this book, or the idiot in "The Financial Lives of the Poets". I think Milo was the clear winner.
This is a shrill, ugly, vastly overhyped, book. I don't know why I bothered to finish it, but it was a relief to be done with it.
If the shrill bludgeoning of obvious targets that is this book's stock in trade is considered as genuine wit, then God help us all.
Personally, if there were an immediate moratorium on the publication of whining, self-pitying tirades by narcissistic, obnoxious, self-hating losers, I would not be particularly upset.
The only modest amusement I managed to derive from reading this book was trying to decide which obnoxious loser was more annoying - Milo in this book, or the idiot in "The Financial Lives of the Poets". I think Milo was the clear winner.
This is a shrill, ugly, vastly overhyped, book. I don't know why I bothered to finish it, but it was a relief to be done with it.
June 10, 2015
It’s a war out there. And this book is about war crimes. The kind that happen when failed painters take jobs as development agents for the arts departments of mediocre universities, sucking up to successful wealth-creators to support the drug habits of university arts brats who produce drek. But the tap of money from wealthy donors was running dry, and our failed painter Milo Burke was now a failed development agent.
Milo’s last big “ask” was to Mr. Ramadathan who had mortgaged his electronics store so that his son could “craft affecting screenplays [not even a film!] about an emotionally distant, workaholic immigrant’s quest for the American dream.” It had meant a trip to Mr. Ramadathan’s dusty showroom in an outer borough where only used video game consoles and an old floor fan were on display.
I adored this beginning to Lipsyte’s deeply funny and intentional novel, highlighting as it does a reality of sorts behind the absurd “asks” of college development offices, and the wildly improbable and inappropriate demands of many university students in today’s America.
Lipsyte’s narrator, Milo Burke, is hovering very close to the edge of despair. Despite his confusion and frustration over the strange things people do and say and how we live, Milo is not a cynical man. He loves his wife and son, and wants nothing more than to be able to provide for them. He worries about being a good dad to Bernie, his lumberjack-mouthed preschooler with a foreskin fixation.
A neighbor Milo liked
Antihero Milo hits up his own mother for a decent-sized contribution, whether to his rent fund or his college-fund, we are unsure.
I have to say, literature that gives me great swear words is always a draw. Shakespeare did it, Lipsyte does it.
Milo doesn’t believe in cockamamie conspiracy theories, nor those that say happiness might have something to do with acceptance and love. It’s all part of the trick, the scam to get us to believe that our rage and resentment is our own problem: something we might need to deal with because we look f—ing ridiculous blaming anything outside of ourselves for not seizing every opportunity to find our sources of happiness and love and fulfillment in the wealthiest, if not the greatest, country on earth. A war within; a war without.
Lipsyte keeps the metaphor about war working when he introduces a story about a home invasion featuring Milo and his college buddies, one of whom is his next big “ask,” the interweb magnate Purdy. But Purdy, like all big potential donors, has an “ask” of his own before he concedes to any kind of “give.”
Purdy’s illegitimate son Don is an actual soldier, returned from Iraq, without his legs. He has two new ones, made of titanium, but generally speaking, he did not come off the better for that exchange. He is still angry. He is angry because of the insipid American culture he sees around him, his sacrifice made flesh. Don manages his rage another way from what we know Milo will do. He had different training.
I came on this book because I had a long car trip coming up; I flipped through the mostly ghastly offerings at my local audio library and came across this title. Sam Lipsyte’s name rang a distant bell but I couldn’t remember why. I looked him up on Goodreads to make sure I wasn’t going to get a romance (you know, like “The Proposal”) and saw a very queer video interview that made me sure I was going to borrow this book. I present it to you here: (Goodreaders: go to The Ask bookpage and choose the top video with Mark Savras [guy in blue shirt] with the author.)
Mark Savras is an author and the man behind the blog The Elegant Variation. That blog never really changed very much while I listed it on my own blog for a year or so-—hoping, perhaps, to catch reflected glory. A Milo move, I think now. I watched this darn video clip a couple of times to make sure I didn’t misinterpret what I thought I saw. Savras was really out to lunch, wasn’t he? A little like our boy Milo?
I listened to this Macmillan Audiobook brilliantly read by the author. I am quite sure Lipsyte is the only one who could have read this with the tone it needed to reflect the true confusion and pathos of our antihero, Milo. I saw an Audiofile review complaining the listener had to “pay attention every moment” which seems a queer kind of criticism to me. The audio won a Listen Up Award and a Publisher’s Weekly Award. It is available for Whispersync on Audible.com and I would recommend that choice: you will want to go back and see his jokes in print—he is very funny. And check out that Isaac Babel reference. I plan to.
Milo’s last big “ask” was to Mr. Ramadathan who had mortgaged his electronics store so that his son could “craft affecting screenplays [not even a film!] about an emotionally distant, workaholic immigrant’s quest for the American dream.” It had meant a trip to Mr. Ramadathan’s dusty showroom in an outer borough where only used video game consoles and an old floor fan were on display.
I adored this beginning to Lipsyte’s deeply funny and intentional novel, highlighting as it does a reality of sorts behind the absurd “asks” of college development offices, and the wildly improbable and inappropriate demands of many university students in today’s America.
Lipsyte’s narrator, Milo Burke, is hovering very close to the edge of despair. Despite his confusion and frustration over the strange things people do and say and how we live, Milo is not a cynical man. He loves his wife and son, and wants nothing more than to be able to provide for them. He worries about being a good dad to Bernie, his lumberjack-mouthed preschooler with a foreskin fixation.
A neighbor Milo liked
“could pull off the role of loving and attentive parent with a lit cigarette in his mouth..or in his stubby fingers, which he’d hold with such care away from his daughter’s braids when she charged over to collapse on his lap and file howling grievance against her brother’s style of playhouse play… He was a throwback papa…horseshit of course, but it warmed the cheap parts of me.”That man died with his entire family, “wiped out by a beverage truck on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway” one day, leaving Milo musing that man never had to worry about being a shitty father, leaving debts because of his cancer from cigarette smoking. But Milo still had to worry about being a shitty father because he was alive. Milo was envious of a dead man, an unrepentant cigarette smoker.
Antihero Milo hits up his own mother for a decent-sized contribution, whether to his rent fund or his college-fund, we are unsure.
Mother: "How much?"
Milo: "Ten thousand."
Mother: "Absolutely not...the system’s rigged for white men and you still can’t tap in..."
Milo: "Okay, you wrinkled old spidercunt, have it your way."
I have to say, literature that gives me great swear words is always a draw. Shakespeare did it, Lipsyte does it.
Milo doesn’t believe in cockamamie conspiracy theories, nor those that say happiness might have something to do with acceptance and love. It’s all part of the trick, the scam to get us to believe that our rage and resentment is our own problem: something we might need to deal with because we look f—ing ridiculous blaming anything outside of ourselves for not seizing every opportunity to find our sources of happiness and love and fulfillment in the wealthiest, if not the greatest, country on earth. A war within; a war without.
Lipsyte keeps the metaphor about war working when he introduces a story about a home invasion featuring Milo and his college buddies, one of whom is his next big “ask,” the interweb magnate Purdy. But Purdy, like all big potential donors, has an “ask” of his own before he concedes to any kind of “give.”
Purdy’s illegitimate son Don is an actual soldier, returned from Iraq, without his legs. He has two new ones, made of titanium, but generally speaking, he did not come off the better for that exchange. He is still angry. He is angry because of the insipid American culture he sees around him, his sacrifice made flesh. Don manages his rage another way from what we know Milo will do. He had different training.
I came on this book because I had a long car trip coming up; I flipped through the mostly ghastly offerings at my local audio library and came across this title. Sam Lipsyte’s name rang a distant bell but I couldn’t remember why. I looked him up on Goodreads to make sure I wasn’t going to get a romance (you know, like “The Proposal”) and saw a very queer video interview that made me sure I was going to borrow this book. I present it to you here: (Goodreaders: go to The Ask bookpage and choose the top video with Mark Savras [guy in blue shirt] with the author.)
Mark Savras is an author and the man behind the blog The Elegant Variation. That blog never really changed very much while I listed it on my own blog for a year or so-—hoping, perhaps, to catch reflected glory. A Milo move, I think now. I watched this darn video clip a couple of times to make sure I didn’t misinterpret what I thought I saw. Savras was really out to lunch, wasn’t he? A little like our boy Milo?
Milo, looking at his hands: “I stared at my own hands: soft, expressive things, gifted even, like specially bred, lovingly shaved gerbils.”
I listened to this Macmillan Audiobook brilliantly read by the author. I am quite sure Lipsyte is the only one who could have read this with the tone it needed to reflect the true confusion and pathos of our antihero, Milo. I saw an Audiofile review complaining the listener had to “pay attention every moment” which seems a queer kind of criticism to me. The audio won a Listen Up Award and a Publisher’s Weekly Award. It is available for Whispersync on Audible.com and I would recommend that choice: you will want to go back and see his jokes in print—he is very funny. And check out that Isaac Babel reference. I plan to.
July 20, 2023
ne me dites pas "pauvre charlie tu as lu un livre qui ne t'a pas plu c'est dommage..." non j'ai sciemment choisi de lire un livre dont je savais qu'il parlerait des problèmes d'un homme cis hétéro blanc médiocre classe moyenne sans la moindre intelligence émotionnelle ni considération pour sa femme et de ouin ouin trop dur il perd son travail car il a insulté une élève ben sinon il peut aller se faire voir et moi avec franchement qu'est-ce qui me prend de tenter de lire des trucs pareils j'ai lu la moitié et je mérite toute la gêne, tout le malaise, tout le dégoût qui ont été miens face à ces blagues vaseuses et nauséeuses, ce style pataud, qui fait tout pour se rendre léger et n'en est que plus pesant bref lisez aussi peu de romans écrits par des hommes que possible et bonne journée à vous
July 6, 2010
Did not love it and at times didn't like it. It's satire, sure, but everything is strained with ironic distance and studied disdain, including the narrator's regard for himself. Maybe this generational bitching is just a couple years outside of my sweet spot, but I found myself aching for something post-ironic or with some faint sense of authenticity ("Is that like the faint smell of death lurking around KFC's Double Down?" an early piece of rejected draft dialogue from The Ask might counter). It's exhausting to watch such a talent stiff arm away anything that might start to resemble true feelings or emotions, but maybe that's my own naivety or privileged position talking.
If this is hipster literature, we're in for a bumpy ride, because this kind of thing, in less sure hands than Lipsyte's, is utterly intolerable and self-indulgent to the point of nausea. The best thing I can say is that Lipsyte kept me reading a book full of characters I strongly disliked involved in scenarios that had only a meager connection to "real life" and spouting dialogue with just enough post-modern hi jinx to distinguish it from particularly cantankerous message board entries.
I was reminded of Martin Amis's Money, which similarly annoyed me, but, let's face it, I was a baby in the 80s and wasn't in a strong position to call B.S. on satire of that decade. If you loved Money, you'll probably like The Ask.
If this is hipster literature, we're in for a bumpy ride, because this kind of thing, in less sure hands than Lipsyte's, is utterly intolerable and self-indulgent to the point of nausea. The best thing I can say is that Lipsyte kept me reading a book full of characters I strongly disliked involved in scenarios that had only a meager connection to "real life" and spouting dialogue with just enough post-modern hi jinx to distinguish it from particularly cantankerous message board entries.
I was reminded of Martin Amis's Money, which similarly annoyed me, but, let's face it, I was a baby in the 80s and wasn't in a strong position to call B.S. on satire of that decade. If you loved Money, you'll probably like The Ask.
June 25, 2011
Sam Lipsyte is a great prose stylist, but this book was about 100 pages too long. It only had enough plot for a short story, but was stretched into a novel. His writing style made about 200 pages highly readable and enjoyable, particularly due to the author's humor. But because of the book's minimal plot, an extra 100 was pushing it. It's a prime example of the stereotypes that genre fiction writers and readers have about literary fiction: a focus on style rather than plot and character development. Those things certainly developed, but at a very slow pace. I much preferred Lipsyte's last novel (Home Land) over this one.
August 22, 2020
Heartbreakingly funny.
April 10, 2010
I was Sam Lipsyte's bitch for the first 60 pages of his novel "The Ask." I mean, he really had me in the zone. I was ready to sell my stuff, buy a psychedelic bus, and follow him on a book tour until the restraining order caught up with me somewhere near Missoula.
Then I became exhausted. Sam Lipsyte is so freaking hilarious, too freaking hilarious, that I actually started to drown as I slogged through his super clever sentences and whack, sarcastic dialogue. I couldn't follow the thin plot (really just seemingly an excuse to make said sentences more than a story begging to be told); I couldn't remember the lesser characters. Have you ever ended up at an after bar with a bunch of strangers, only to find out they are all trying to become professional comedians? Ugh.
Milo is an office grunt, trying to raise funds for the arts department of the mediocre New York City university where he works. This is not his forte. His memories of what it was like when he still thought he could make a living as an artist are too fresh. His wife isn't very amorous -- she says she's "touched out." His very young son is a smart ass who attends a special hippie school and has a neglectful babysitter.
Then Milo gets fired. Then he gets a second chance: He must secure a donation from a high falootin' donor -- or Ask -- who has requested Milo solicit his cash. Milo knows this smug richie rich from college, and this becomes a madcap adventure of late night phone calls, candy shops and amputees. Chaos ensues.
You should shelve this book on your toilet tank and use it the way you would "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader": Open it. Read a really hilarious paragraph out of context. Chuckle. Refile, flush and wash hands.
I just tried this experiment and landed on this interaction between Milo and Purdy, the biggie Ask.
"That's the one. He's impressive. What my dad used to call a comer. You must hate his guts."
"He's okay."
"Sure he is. Anyway, that's what he gave me to believe, when I met him at this sort of art happening. An historical reenactment of the dotcom bubble. Some guy rented a loft and hired actors to pretend to be designing websites. Have to say he nailed the details, the clothes, the snacks, the drugs, the toys. Thought I was in a time machine."
See? You should see the one about the hangover.
So what's wrong with this? Nothing in small doses. But it all reminds me of those early months with my boyfriend when we were always "on." "The early banter months," one could call them. Always trying to outwit the other one. One night I showed up at his house. He was in plaid pajama pants, vanilla candles flickering, a season of "Nip/Tuck" from Netflix. I started in with the joking and poking and prodding and he said the best thing he could have said. Something about us taking the night off from sparring. Could we just be quiet? He was too tired to play along. It was such a relief.
Sometimes I wished Lipsyte would just be quiet. Just for awhile.
Then I became exhausted. Sam Lipsyte is so freaking hilarious, too freaking hilarious, that I actually started to drown as I slogged through his super clever sentences and whack, sarcastic dialogue. I couldn't follow the thin plot (really just seemingly an excuse to make said sentences more than a story begging to be told); I couldn't remember the lesser characters. Have you ever ended up at an after bar with a bunch of strangers, only to find out they are all trying to become professional comedians? Ugh.
Milo is an office grunt, trying to raise funds for the arts department of the mediocre New York City university where he works. This is not his forte. His memories of what it was like when he still thought he could make a living as an artist are too fresh. His wife isn't very amorous -- she says she's "touched out." His very young son is a smart ass who attends a special hippie school and has a neglectful babysitter.
Then Milo gets fired. Then he gets a second chance: He must secure a donation from a high falootin' donor -- or Ask -- who has requested Milo solicit his cash. Milo knows this smug richie rich from college, and this becomes a madcap adventure of late night phone calls, candy shops and amputees. Chaos ensues.
You should shelve this book on your toilet tank and use it the way you would "Uncle John's Bathroom Reader": Open it. Read a really hilarious paragraph out of context. Chuckle. Refile, flush and wash hands.
I just tried this experiment and landed on this interaction between Milo and Purdy, the biggie Ask.
"That's the one. He's impressive. What my dad used to call a comer. You must hate his guts."
"He's okay."
"Sure he is. Anyway, that's what he gave me to believe, when I met him at this sort of art happening. An historical reenactment of the dotcom bubble. Some guy rented a loft and hired actors to pretend to be designing websites. Have to say he nailed the details, the clothes, the snacks, the drugs, the toys. Thought I was in a time machine."
See? You should see the one about the hangover.
So what's wrong with this? Nothing in small doses. But it all reminds me of those early months with my boyfriend when we were always "on." "The early banter months," one could call them. Always trying to outwit the other one. One night I showed up at his house. He was in plaid pajama pants, vanilla candles flickering, a season of "Nip/Tuck" from Netflix. I started in with the joking and poking and prodding and he said the best thing he could have said. Something about us taking the night off from sparring. Could we just be quiet? He was too tired to play along. It was such a relief.
Sometimes I wished Lipsyte would just be quiet. Just for awhile.
January 4, 2010
Sam Lipsyte, author of the cult favorite Home Land, is back in fine form with his third novel. In The Ask, Milo Burke is a not-very-lovable loser (think Paul Giamatti playing him in the movie, and you'll get the idea), who's approaching middle age with nothing much to show for it but a bachelor's degree, a failed career as an artist, and a crummy job as a development officer at Mediocre University in New York City. Unfortunately for Milo, he's never quite perfected the art of The Ask -- the delicate process of cultivating potential donors for large sums of money. Even more unfortunately, Milo loses his temper with the bitchy daughter of an Ask (the word is also a noun), and his crummy job evaporates. This state of affairs doesn't help his marriage, which has stagnated into one of those where the parties can't seem to remember why they got together in the first place.
Lipsyte spins this scenario into a comic narrative that somehow manages to incorporate internet zillionaires, meth freaks, helicopter parenting, the Iraq War, and Astoria without ever coming close to losing its footing. To make matters even better, Lipsyte is more than capable of coming up with full paragraphs that will make you do a double take just to admire them. For example, about the aftermath of a home invasion robbery:
"But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves."
And if you're looking for a redemptive narrative of dawning acceptance and enlightenment, look elsewhere, because Lipsyte doesn't make it easy on himself, or on the reader, by taking the easy way out at the end of this one. Fortunately for Lipstye's audience, neither he nor and Milo buys into the rose-colored, easy-listening pablum of works like American Beauty. This book hurts at the end, but it's worth it.
Lipsyte spins this scenario into a comic narrative that somehow manages to incorporate internet zillionaires, meth freaks, helicopter parenting, the Iraq War, and Astoria without ever coming close to losing its footing. To make matters even better, Lipsyte is more than capable of coming up with full paragraphs that will make you do a double take just to admire them. For example, about the aftermath of a home invasion robbery:
"But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves."
And if you're looking for a redemptive narrative of dawning acceptance and enlightenment, look elsewhere, because Lipsyte doesn't make it easy on himself, or on the reader, by taking the easy way out at the end of this one. Fortunately for Lipstye's audience, neither he nor and Milo buys into the rose-colored, easy-listening pablum of works like American Beauty. This book hurts at the end, but it's worth it.
December 26, 2012
Usually after I check out a pile of books from the library, I read the first chapter of each one to try to figure out where to start. After I read the first chapter of The Ask, I was hooked and didn't want to put it down! There were several moments in the beginning where I laughed like an idiot.
Here are a few:
"I'd ask for American flags, stick them on upside down in protest against our nation's foreign and domestic policies."
This is probably only funny because I do the exact same thing, and had no idea anyone else thought this way. Passive protest!
Sometimes it is just the word choice:
"Cooley rose [and] petted his mustache with a kind of cunnidigital ardor."
Yeah, pretty sure I've never seen cunnidigital in print before.
The book starts out funny. And then it gets painfully funny. Milo, the protagonist of sorts, is kind of a loser. At first it is funny and entertaining, but then it turns darker and gets harder to laugh about. I think in the end the humor balances back out again, but you have to be willing to really wade through it with him.
"It's when they stop trying to destroy you, my mother once said, that you should really start to worry."
And the best moment:
"We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons."
I will definitely be reading other books by Sam Lipsyte. ETA: I did read his volume of short stories, set to be out in March 2013, and came back and added a star to this review. The stories were good, but not as good as this novel.
Here are a few:
"I'd ask for American flags, stick them on upside down in protest against our nation's foreign and domestic policies."
This is probably only funny because I do the exact same thing, and had no idea anyone else thought this way. Passive protest!
Sometimes it is just the word choice:
"Cooley rose [and] petted his mustache with a kind of cunnidigital ardor."
Yeah, pretty sure I've never seen cunnidigital in print before.
The book starts out funny. And then it gets painfully funny. Milo, the protagonist of sorts, is kind of a loser. At first it is funny and entertaining, but then it turns darker and gets harder to laugh about. I think in the end the humor balances back out again, but you have to be willing to really wade through it with him.
"It's when they stop trying to destroy you, my mother once said, that you should really start to worry."
And the best moment:
"We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons."
I will definitely be reading other books by Sam Lipsyte. ETA: I did read his volume of short stories, set to be out in March 2013, and came back and added a star to this review. The stories were good, but not as good as this novel.
January 18, 2010
Sam does it again. This novel takes an unassuming (and seemingly unfunny) premise about a dude who wrangles large financial donations for a school and turns it into an outright laugh riot. Not only is this just as funny as the amazing Home Land but it also showcases Lipsyte's ramped-up, amped-up ability to deliver killer sentence after killer sentence. This might turn out to be my fave of 2010. Yeah--I'm already saying it.
October 28, 2011
They say an infinite number of monkeys with an infinite number of typewriters and an infinite amount of time will eventually reproduce the complete works of Shakespeare. In the case of this book I estimate you’d need one monkey and about six weeks.
Horribly clichéd literary American novel: set in a university, failing main character, shrewish wife having an affair, precocious child who has no love for his own father, ruminations on college days, a sense of impotence, concerns about his virility... if you can think of an overused, predictable, done to death staple of the typical well-educated, well-fed, male novelist's attempt at writing 'the great American novel', then so can this author; and he’s put them in this book. All of them.
What it feels like is a writer who’s been jotting down various opinions, ideas and aphorisms over a fair amount of time, and when he found his notebook was full, decided to force them all into a story, whether they wanted to go or not. A lot of scenes felt like their only purpose was to engineer an opportunity for him to drop in one of his bon mots about Hamlet, or PTSD, or playing in a rock band into the book. Very random.
The plot is wafer thin and doesn’t go anywhere and our hero is useless at everything. Which of course is intentional. There is even a comment in the book about what a terrible character he’d be if someone wrote a story about him, what with the self-pitying, dull, tedious life he leads. Haha, jokes on us I guess.
Whether it’s actually an intentionally challenging post-modern masterpiece you’ll have to decide for yourself. What I can assure you is that it is an extremely boring story, and there's no forgiving that.
Horribly clichéd literary American novel: set in a university, failing main character, shrewish wife having an affair, precocious child who has no love for his own father, ruminations on college days, a sense of impotence, concerns about his virility... if you can think of an overused, predictable, done to death staple of the typical well-educated, well-fed, male novelist's attempt at writing 'the great American novel', then so can this author; and he’s put them in this book. All of them.
What it feels like is a writer who’s been jotting down various opinions, ideas and aphorisms over a fair amount of time, and when he found his notebook was full, decided to force them all into a story, whether they wanted to go or not. A lot of scenes felt like their only purpose was to engineer an opportunity for him to drop in one of his bon mots about Hamlet, or PTSD, or playing in a rock band into the book. Very random.
The plot is wafer thin and doesn’t go anywhere and our hero is useless at everything. Which of course is intentional. There is even a comment in the book about what a terrible character he’d be if someone wrote a story about him, what with the self-pitying, dull, tedious life he leads. Haha, jokes on us I guess.
Whether it’s actually an intentionally challenging post-modern masterpiece you’ll have to decide for yourself. What I can assure you is that it is an extremely boring story, and there's no forgiving that.
August 1, 2015
Dark, darker, darkest. The attitude/voice/style here are blacker than the blackest coal mine but not only have all the canaries died...they never existed.
Milo Burke, whose job is to get rich people to donate money to a third rate New York university, is fired and then temporarily "rehired" because of his long-ago college friendship with a megawealthy guy who's thinking of giving. It's "the ask" versus "the give", but of course never that simple.
Lipsyte is witheringly whipsmart and his lash cuts deep into every conceivable aspect of modern American life. His observations are often precise and telling. An example: "She was a generically stunning woman: there were hundreds just like her in this part of the city, perfect storms of perfect bones, monuments to tone and hair technologies. Around here she was almost ordinary but you could still picture small towns where men might bludgeon their friends, their fathers, just to run their sun-cracked lips along her calves."
On every page you gasp, laugh out loud or cringe, but eventually the bleakness of spirit and Milo's human ineffectuality become wearying, rather than compelling.
As satire it is a bracingly up-to-the-minute evocation of today's American heart of darkness but as story it becomes, eventually, just depressing.
Milo Burke, whose job is to get rich people to donate money to a third rate New York university, is fired and then temporarily "rehired" because of his long-ago college friendship with a megawealthy guy who's thinking of giving. It's "the ask" versus "the give", but of course never that simple.
Lipsyte is witheringly whipsmart and his lash cuts deep into every conceivable aspect of modern American life. His observations are often precise and telling. An example: "She was a generically stunning woman: there were hundreds just like her in this part of the city, perfect storms of perfect bones, monuments to tone and hair technologies. Around here she was almost ordinary but you could still picture small towns where men might bludgeon their friends, their fathers, just to run their sun-cracked lips along her calves."
On every page you gasp, laugh out loud or cringe, but eventually the bleakness of spirit and Milo's human ineffectuality become wearying, rather than compelling.
As satire it is a bracingly up-to-the-minute evocation of today's American heart of darkness but as story it becomes, eventually, just depressing.
May 7, 2013
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte is a book that demands to be read twice. So I probably shouldn't review it after reading it only once. I really feel that in order to feel like I read the book at all, I should read it again.
Nevertheless, the general sense of it is clear. Milo Burke is a fund-raiser (one who gets "the ask"-money, favors, etc. from potential donors) who loses it with a donor and so loses his job. He drifts free-fall in an ironical haze alongside his 4 year old son Bernie and adulterous wife in outer-borough Queens. (I have to admit I admired his wife's sang-froid about her adultery, their marriage, life).
The book is like a tv show on crack-it even out-does HBO. Bernie gets a chance to get his job back but aside from the skeletal plot guides, the book is more like an hallucination than a narrative. Bernie is, as he says, not likable-at the same time, he's uncomfortably close to our own disavowed "post-capitalist" selves.
Don't ask me what I mean. Read "The Ask" and find out.
Nevertheless, the general sense of it is clear. Milo Burke is a fund-raiser (one who gets "the ask"-money, favors, etc. from potential donors) who loses it with a donor and so loses his job. He drifts free-fall in an ironical haze alongside his 4 year old son Bernie and adulterous wife in outer-borough Queens. (I have to admit I admired his wife's sang-froid about her adultery, their marriage, life).
The book is like a tv show on crack-it even out-does HBO. Bernie gets a chance to get his job back but aside from the skeletal plot guides, the book is more like an hallucination than a narrative. Bernie is, as he says, not likable-at the same time, he's uncomfortably close to our own disavowed "post-capitalist" selves.
Don't ask me what I mean. Read "The Ask" and find out.
July 21, 2010
I read this book because one of my heroes (Michael J. Fox) praised it, and then I read a positive book review in the NYT. At first I found it laugh-out-loud funny, but after I got used to the author's style, I felt like I was stuck at a cocktail party with a drunken bore. The narrator sort of reminded me of Dennis Miller because so much of the book's humor was based on "rants" and that is funny for awhile, but it does get old.
The story is based on the premise of a guy employed at a small college in NYC and its "asking" department, whose sole function is to acquire large donations of money from wealthy people to keep the school running and expand the campus. The protagonist is one of the askers and he is a professional ne'er do well whose marriage is failing as fast as his career path. Along the pathway to his defeat, he runs across old friends and enemies, but there is no one in this book that you would want to share a park bench with. It's hard to get excited about a book with no discernible hero.
The story is based on the premise of a guy employed at a small college in NYC and its "asking" department, whose sole function is to acquire large donations of money from wealthy people to keep the school running and expand the campus. The protagonist is one of the askers and he is a professional ne'er do well whose marriage is failing as fast as his career path. Along the pathway to his defeat, he runs across old friends and enemies, but there is no one in this book that you would want to share a park bench with. It's hard to get excited about a book with no discernible hero.
May 29, 2010
This book reminded me of that Dorothy Parker quote, (I'm paraphrasing here): "There is a helluva lot of difference between wit and wise-cracking; wit has some truth to it but wise-cracking is just calisthenics with words." I felt that way about this book. Mr. Lipsyte is a clever writer, but I felt like he was more concerned with me knowing that than telling a story. The main character is so consumed with self loathing that it's difficult to muster any sort of sympathy or understanding for how he got to where he is.
April 12, 2011
I picked up The Ask because a) it is a NYT bestseller, b) I enjoyed Lipsyte's last book Home Land, and c) because it has a very long and compelling blurb list on the back of the book. I would now like to ask said blurb authors the following questions:
1) Do you typically enjoy books with completely unlikeable protagonists?
2) Do you find repeated, somewhat degrading sexual fantasies about co-workers/friends/strangers interesting?
3) Did you understand the point of this book?
4) Are you depressed?
To me, The Ask was a long, pointless trudge through the life of a sad, emotionally stunted man with no redeeming value or point. Lipsyte makes a few clever jokes here and there, but I "did not read Lipsyte and rejoice" (The NYT Book Review) or find many passages "So funny I might lose an eye" (Vanity Fair). Readers beware: this is 296 pages of your life that you can never get back. Don't say I didn't warn you.
1) Do you typically enjoy books with completely unlikeable protagonists?
2) Do you find repeated, somewhat degrading sexual fantasies about co-workers/friends/strangers interesting?
3) Did you understand the point of this book?
4) Are you depressed?
To me, The Ask was a long, pointless trudge through the life of a sad, emotionally stunted man with no redeeming value or point. Lipsyte makes a few clever jokes here and there, but I "did not read Lipsyte and rejoice" (The NYT Book Review) or find many passages "So funny I might lose an eye" (Vanity Fair). Readers beware: this is 296 pages of your life that you can never get back. Don't say I didn't warn you.
August 11, 2019
Not for everyone but a great read. Lipsyte's writing is a joy to read; rich and satisfying, fresh and funny. The plot is good, too, but the ending fell flat for me. Maybe the ending was realistic but in a highly unrealistic book it seemed disappointing. Milo is a sad kind of everyman/shlub who is presented with an opportunity for greatness but of course there is a catch. The genius of this book is the language and phrasing--you'll enjoy it tremendously if you can avoid caring about anyone in the book.
May 16, 2015
You know that thing about the frog and the pot of boiling water - that if you put the frof in the pot and heat it slowly, it doesn't notice what's happening and gets boiled alive (vs. frog that will hop out when dropped into already boiling water)?
I feel like the satirist - the real satirist, the deep satirist - is that contrary frog that NOTICES the gradual rise in temperature, and CHOOSES still to stay in the pot. That's how Lipsyte strikes me, here - he is willing to sacrifice his own froggy flesh that we might see more clearly the pot we live in, and the flame that seeks to boil us all.
In my own writing and reading and teaching, I gravitate to work that is unsparing. Lipsyte doesn't merely cut to the bone, he portions out the marrow inside and insists that we eat it. This guy is a badass for real.
I feel like the satirist - the real satirist, the deep satirist - is that contrary frog that NOTICES the gradual rise in temperature, and CHOOSES still to stay in the pot. That's how Lipsyte strikes me, here - he is willing to sacrifice his own froggy flesh that we might see more clearly the pot we live in, and the flame that seeks to boil us all.
In my own writing and reading and teaching, I gravitate to work that is unsparing. Lipsyte doesn't merely cut to the bone, he portions out the marrow inside and insists that we eat it. This guy is a badass for real.
April 30, 2010
This book was so self-conscious and over-trying to be clever it was hard to care about the characters. It just felt hipper than thou. Every internal character thought was a reference and/or rant. There was no insight. There were a few sparks of human feeling within interactions between the main character and his son, but these were few & far between. Would not recommend reading this unless you want to be clobbered over the head by the author's ironic-bitter-weary main characters that have little to no redeeming qualities.
November 7, 2019
The beginning was really funny (and sad) but after about two thirds through I got tired of the characters not developing and their situation devolving. Lipsyte is very intelligent and witty, and kudos to you if you get all his jokes. I’m sure so many of his jokes went right over my head, but oh boy will you feel full of yourself when you get some of them. Ha! Ultimately, I thought Don, a minor character, was the most interesting, though I didn’t like the direction his story took. The plot is mostly just a vehicle for satire and who cares what happens to them anyway... not me.
August 29, 2012
Out of 300 pages the first 200 is pure joy to read followed the last 100 of sheer disappointment. I like the wit and language of the book and the broad range of issues it is trying to touch. But I do not think it achieves the necessary depth in any of them. Also the moral of the story is too black and white for me. I know that it is a satire and should not be taken too seriously, still the last part of the book spoiled it for me. Reminded me Garry Shteyngart, but not quite that standard IMHO.
April 4, 2010
Clever, sometimes too clever, in love with hating himself (author and narrator), and soooo self-absorbed. A product of his generation, I suppose, but I find it hard to care. Lipsyte's dialogues are fantastic, but then comes the inner dialogue that leaves a bile-y taste in my mouth. He's a shit, I'm a shit, we're all destroying each other. We live miserably ever after. Eh.
February 3, 2010
I just recommend watching the author read. It perfectly captures how fucking absurd and hilarious this book is.
July 1, 2022
For a while I got some pleasure out of this; I would read a few pages at a time when I wanted something light and humorous. I made it halfway thru before chucking it aside. Unfortunately the book never really grew on me, and instead it began to grate on me. The main problem was that all of the characters speak in the same dry, deadpan, snarky voice. Now to be fair to Lipsyte, some of the dialogue is pretty darn funny, but scattered sections of amusing dialogue are not enough to build a good novel out of.
It is not that there is no plot, there is one and it focuses on Milo, a young man with a wife and kid, who works in a (completely unbelievable) university fundraising office. He is having trouble at work, but the possibility of salvation appears in the form of Purdy, his old college buddy who has become a rich, famous entrepreneur. Purdy however wants something from Milo in exchange for his generosity: he wants his help in dealing with a tricky personal matter, the existence of an illegitimate son who lost his legs in the Iraq war. But this story is just a framework for Lipsyte's sarcastic, sophomoric repartee, which failed to move me.
It is not that there is no plot, there is one and it focuses on Milo, a young man with a wife and kid, who works in a (completely unbelievable) university fundraising office. He is having trouble at work, but the possibility of salvation appears in the form of Purdy, his old college buddy who has become a rich, famous entrepreneur. Purdy however wants something from Milo in exchange for his generosity: he wants his help in dealing with a tricky personal matter, the existence of an illegitimate son who lost his legs in the Iraq war. But this story is just a framework for Lipsyte's sarcastic, sophomoric repartee, which failed to move me.
May 10, 2010
This book proves that my ability to absorb negativity is still as great as ever. I bought it on the strength of its mention in a NYTimes article about Gen X reaching mid-life crisis age.
This was also an experiment in reading using the iBooks app on my iPad. My observations:
- The iPad is just heavy enough that it's hard to read comfortably lying down.
- I felt a tingling in my left arm after holding the iPad for a while. I should exercise more.
- Adjusting the screen brightness is very handy
- Around 2/3rds the way through the book the iPad's charge ran out, so I was tethered to my bed where the charger is for the rest of it.
- The highlighting/bookmarking thingie looks like a real highlighter. I think I even noticed it change color as the ink "dried" but that could have been a side effect of looking at a lit screen for hours.
- The dictionary look up is quick and handy.
- I feel the strange italic script used in places in the iBook app is a middlebrow affectation.
- There is too much meta information on the screen showing what page I was on and how far through the book. Half way through the book I realized I could turn off the distracting book controls.
- It's very distracting when your "book" alerts you to new mail and tempts you with Facebook and Twitter or a game of Solitaire. So unless you are really into it or have just taken some ADD medication, it's easy to drift away to some higher bandwidth form of entertainment..
- I think the text is brown-ish instead of black like those weird sepia-inked editions of the classics I find at used book stores sometimes.
- The Kindle and iBook prices are the same and less than half the hard cover price.
Anyway, about the book itself. It's another one of those books with a thoroughly dislikable protagonist and a plot that only exists enough to hang one-liners or extended riffs on. Since the one-liners and riffs are so damned clever I wish I'd come up with them I didn't mind so much.
Back in the olden days I think novels were supposed to have characters readers could identify with, but now (maybe since Confederacy of Dunces maybe?) it's enough to have a character who exists in a cartoony version of the target demo's life and who is unburdened by the need to be either liked or self-aware.
The big thing with this book is that the character hasn't developed much beyond his college mindset, so the fun comes when he bumps up against archetypes like (1) the morally ambiguous Internet zillionaire, (2) the Gen-Y temp who spouts cultural references, (3) assorted successful grown-up posers, (4) a Gulf War vet as proxy for "real life." So it exists in a space somewhere between Encino Man and Hot Tub Time Machine.
After a while the negativity wore on me. The jokes are hilarious but the level of self-pity required for a character to utter them is almost too much.
I can think of three people I would recommend this book too, and they will know who they are. The rest of you won't be able to handle it.
This was also an experiment in reading using the iBooks app on my iPad. My observations:
- The iPad is just heavy enough that it's hard to read comfortably lying down.
- I felt a tingling in my left arm after holding the iPad for a while. I should exercise more.
- Adjusting the screen brightness is very handy
- Around 2/3rds the way through the book the iPad's charge ran out, so I was tethered to my bed where the charger is for the rest of it.
- The highlighting/bookmarking thingie looks like a real highlighter. I think I even noticed it change color as the ink "dried" but that could have been a side effect of looking at a lit screen for hours.
- The dictionary look up is quick and handy.
- I feel the strange italic script used in places in the iBook app is a middlebrow affectation.
- There is too much meta information on the screen showing what page I was on and how far through the book. Half way through the book I realized I could turn off the distracting book controls.
- It's very distracting when your "book" alerts you to new mail and tempts you with Facebook and Twitter or a game of Solitaire. So unless you are really into it or have just taken some ADD medication, it's easy to drift away to some higher bandwidth form of entertainment..
- I think the text is brown-ish instead of black like those weird sepia-inked editions of the classics I find at used book stores sometimes.
- The Kindle and iBook prices are the same and less than half the hard cover price.
Anyway, about the book itself. It's another one of those books with a thoroughly dislikable protagonist and a plot that only exists enough to hang one-liners or extended riffs on. Since the one-liners and riffs are so damned clever I wish I'd come up with them I didn't mind so much.
Back in the olden days I think novels were supposed to have characters readers could identify with, but now (maybe since Confederacy of Dunces maybe?) it's enough to have a character who exists in a cartoony version of the target demo's life and who is unburdened by the need to be either liked or self-aware.
The big thing with this book is that the character hasn't developed much beyond his college mindset, so the fun comes when he bumps up against archetypes like (1) the morally ambiguous Internet zillionaire, (2) the Gen-Y temp who spouts cultural references, (3) assorted successful grown-up posers, (4) a Gulf War vet as proxy for "real life." So it exists in a space somewhere between Encino Man and Hot Tub Time Machine.
After a while the negativity wore on me. The jokes are hilarious but the level of self-pity required for a character to utter them is almost too much.
I can think of three people I would recommend this book too, and they will know who they are. The rest of you won't be able to handle it.
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