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The Ask: A Novel, by Sam Lipsyte
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Review
“If you've heard anything about Sam Lipsyte, you've probably heard that he's funny. Scabrously, deliriously, piss-yourself funny (his characters would no doubt find a dirtier, and funnier, way of putting it), drawing audible snorts even from the kind of people, such as the people in his novels, who are way too cool to laugh out loud . . . Lipsyte's prose arrows fly with gloriously weird spin, tracing punch-drunk curlicues before hitting their marks--or landing in some weird alternate.†―Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Review of Books“Lipsyte shakes his comic cocktail of sarcasm and bitter impotence to eloquent effect: briefcases on wheels are ""luggage for people not going anywhere,"" and a Manhattan salad bar consists of ""go-goo for the regular folk, these lumpy lumpen lunches."" Milo is repulsive, hilarious, and devastatingly self-aware, but it is his country that is Lipsyte's real subject.†―The New Yorker“So let's read Lipsyte and rejoice; let's celebrate the laugh-producing Milo Burkes who are all too rarely brought to us by brave and bitter men--let's celebrate the canny, well-educated yet perpetually failing furtive Internet onanists, the dark, half-crippled, doughnut-gobbling man-apes of the literary world, who cast their lumpen shadows across the rest of us. These are the kind of unlikeable, lovable protagonists we miss; these are the self-loathing, mediocre secret geniuses who can set our people free.†―Lydia Millet, The New York Times Book Review“[The Ask] is a biting, bilious and often brilliant book . . . It started, for me, as a comic, bad-boy outing on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride. It concludes somewhere much darker and richer than a theme park. 'Heavens to Betsy,' I murmured when I finished. 'What a book.'†―Karen Long, The Plain Dealer“Lipsyte's brand of absurdity is deeply rooted in the now. The recession, text messaging, reality TV--all are up for grabs. What's particularly effective is Lipsyte's acerbic yet subtle approach . . . But he's never simply bitter; one can always sense a yearning in this book, even at its most acidic moments . . .†―Kimberly King Parsons, Time Out New York (five stars)“Sardonic, brilliant . . . Lipsyte skewers everything from precious preschools to academia, displaying an effortless grace and style all his own.†―People (three-and-a-half stars)“An off-kilter and hilarious novel about work, war, sex, class, children--and Benjamin Franklin.†―O, The Oprah Magazine“The riffs on fatherhood, work, and sex in Sam Lipsyte's unsparingly comic novel The Ask explode like a string of firecrackers--so funny you might lose an eye.†―Vanity Fair“It's customary for radically sardonic, corrosively funny writers to put in time as mere cult icons, but enough already: everybody should read Sam Lipsyte.†―TIME“One of the greatest black-humorists alive, Lipsyte has gone unnoticed for far too long. With his third novel, about the painfully hilarious adventures of a failed painter in a dead-end job, he should finally get the acclaim he deserves.†―Details“[The] gift is Lipsyte's writing: a chewy, corrosive, and syntactically dazzling prose style that doesn't so much run across the page as pick it up and throttle it. A-†―Leah Greenblatt, Entertainment Weekly“Acrid, hilarious, and hard to put down.†―The Must List, Entertainment Weekly“It's not easy to write a really funny book about such anxiety-producing topics as love, death, failure and our currently terrifying economy, but that's exactly what Sam Lipsyte has accomplished with his terrific new novel, The Ask . . . This novel isn't afraid to show the darker side of life, but while The Ask can be a bone-chilling read, it somehow still makes you laugh out loud.†―The Observer's Very Short List“If you're the sort of person who underlines amusing or thought-provoking lines in books, you best gird yourself, as Lipsyte is an inexhaustible fount of eloquent prurience, deftly mingling high- and low-mindedness.†―Rob Harvilla, Village Voice“With this novel, Mr. Lipsyte has proven himself to be one of the most unapologetic voices of contemporary literature. He mines the sexual frustration of Philip Roth, combines it with the paranoia of Don DeLillo and fills the space in between with a cast of characters as absurd and enigmatic as anything in a Thomas Pynchon novel . . . The Ask is a hilarious book about failure; a scathing unhappy comedy obsessed with a culture that's obsessed with obsessions.†―Michael Miller, The New York Observer“There's probably not a living American writer who has so comprehensively mined the comic possibilities of that particular anguished, hapless combination of the overeducated and the underachieving as Sam Lipsyte. Against all odds, his heroes refuse to succeed, and they and we are rewarded with the endlessly entertaining spectacle of their nonstop humiliation.†―Jim Shepard, Bookforum“Another savage, hilarious black comedy from Lipsyte . . . Once again, Lipsyte creates a main character whose lacerating, hyper-eloquent wit is directed both outward at the world--sardonic commentary on parenthood, class privilege, sexuality, the working world, education, ideas of Americanness and much more--and inward; Milo spares himself no degradation, no self-loathing, nothing. As it goes on one can't help noticing, beneath the fevered playfulness, a deeply earnest moral vision akin to that of Joseph Heller or Stanley Elkin.†―Kirkus Reviews (starred review)“Lipsyte's pitch-black comedy takes aim at marriage, work, parenting, abject failure (the author's signature soapbox) and a host of subjects you haven't figured out how to feel bad about yet. This latest slice of mucked-up life follows Milo Burke, a washed-up painter living in Astoria, Queens, with his wife and three-year-old son, as he's jerked in and out of employment at a mediocre university where Milo and his equally jaded cohorts solicit funding from the ""Asks,"" or those who financially support the art program.†―Publishers Weekly (starred review)“Lipsyte's third novel, a darkly humorous story of sons and fathers, is both his most realistic and convulsively hilarious to date . . . Lipsyte's razor-sharp eye filets dying America (a fractiously culty daycare; a reality cooking show set on death row; the scarified plaguescape of a lonely first generation social networking site), throwing off brilliant riffs and exhilaratingly steep dives from frontal lobe to perineum, sauced with yummy dollops of white liberal guilt . . . Yet for all his wit, Lipsyte's narrator is not above it all but deeply, messily down in it: the casual miracles of parenthood, the deepening thrum of mortality, the grim perdurance of a shaky marriage, 'warm with that feeling of wanting a feeling that maybe had already fled.†―David Wright, Booklist (starred review)“Lipsyte endows his narrator with a sharpness of wit and dexterity of language arguably unmatched in contemporary fiction.†―Alice Gregory, More Intelligent Life“[A] dark humorous satiric novel, a witty paean to white-collar loserdom.†―The New York Times Book Review (Editor's Choice)“The Ask is a novel deeply in tune with the asks and the gives of the current economy, and with a city whose boroughs are full of the walking wounded . . . It comes out in the author's supremely distinctive voice, particularly his knack for brutal curlicues of prose--extravagant linguistic flourishes that only make the lonely truths hidden inside more piercing.†―Dan Kois, New York Magazine“The Ask eschews the shopworn conventions of modern fiction; it offers a rare and welcome departure from today's contrived, über-plotted novels written for the big screen. Here is a satire in its purest form . . . Lipsyte possesses the syntactical dexterity of a top brain surgeon . . . [and] manages, with breathtaking success, to render Milo's life so plausibly and with such sureness of hand and that the novel's wildest developments seem as inevitable as they are believable.†―Kirk Davis Swinehart, Chicago Tribune“Sam Lipsyte's way with words is exceptional, his ability to turn a phrase dazzling . . . [The Ask] is powerful and certainly speaks to our times.†―Carlo Wolff, The Boston Globe“This melancholy book about a failed college fund-raiser is surely one of the best novels of the year.†―Frank Bures, Star Tribune“2010 will also be remembered as the year when, thanks to a single book, the literary merit of that somewhat neglected beast, the comic novel, could no longer be denied: Sam Lipsyte's relentlessly and hilariously brilliant The Ask.†―Geoff Dyer, The Guardian“Sam Lipsyte wants you to shit your pants. By that I mean parts of The Ask are so sphincter-looseningly funny that you will want to invest in some adult undergarments before reading it. As the author of several previous novels, including the Believer Book Award–winning Home Land, Lipsyte has cultivated a well-earned reputation as our preeminent chronicler of the absurd.†―Andrew Ervin, The Believer
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About the Author
Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five books of its year by the Voice Literary Supplement) and the novels The Subject Steve and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the first annual Believer Book Award. He is also the recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship. He lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.
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Product details
Paperback: 320 pages
Publisher: Picador; First edition (March 1, 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0312680635
ISBN-13: 978-0312680633
Product Dimensions:
5.5 x 0.7 x 8.5 inches
Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
Average Customer Review:
3.3 out of 5 stars
80 customer reviews
Amazon Best Sellers Rank:
#150,337 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Readers who have problems with this book seem to want it to be a sort of book it sets out to undermine (eviscerate?) and side-step. It's a Bartleby-like book that prefers not to take novelistic conventions seriously because it perceives them as complicit in a rigged game. It sees our narrative tropes generally as advertisements for a striver culture implanted in a system of social stasis, society's humanistic romance tarting up an inhumane struggle to feel good about the collateral damage of empire. Yes, it's funny. Yes, it's satirical. Yes, it's characters are jokes. The whole book is an elaborate and revelatory joke. It isn't supposed to "hook you" into its contrived plot or help you transcend the darker feelings about America's simultaneous victory and decline. It's a toboggan ride of hilarious rage along a slippery slope of brilliant language, destined to slide to a stop just past one's awareness that rage isn't meaningful. It's Candide for hipsters. It's true that the ending isn't satisfying. I wouldn't want it any other way.
Many reviewers have given a variety of opinions, so I will confione myself to an issue I have with the novel. It should have been written as a group of short stories, like Lipsyte's "The Fun Parts," and not as a novel. The ostensible protagonist, Milo Burke, is much too weak. He is as forgettable as the mediocre liberal arts college for which he tries to make money. Lipsyte manages to create a few humorous scenes in his novel, but the vast majority of scenes are simply bleak because Milo is not really there. He's the anti-hero who is perpetually at someone else's mercy. This gets tiresome and unfunny. Lipsyte does mange to touch on some important issues, how we raise our children for example, but in order for this novel to work for me, Milo needs to grow a pair.
Author Sam Lipsyte looms large as a star in the "N+1" firmament and is a well-regarded author of several short novels. Slate.com voted "The Ask" one of the best books of 2010. I think "The New Yorker" liked it, too."The Ask" depicts the crummy, vacuous, trite, dead-end life of middle-aged schmuck. He is a glorified paper-pusher expected to be a sycophant grateful for employment in a crummy, third-rate, pretentious New York university. Milo Burke disdains his crummy, vacuous, trite dead-end job. He ends up living in a crummy basement as a crummy, vacuous, trite helicopter parent appendage to his precocious and ever obnoxious kid and his rank, self-absorbed, smug wife.The protagonist, the bitterly satirical Milo, apparently believes he is sort of a SNAG (sensitive new age guy) version of Charles Bukowski's alter-ego, Chinaski. Unlike Chinaski, however, Milo is an ineffectual, self-obsessed post-Yuppie whose artistic pretensions and vaguely bohemian ambitions have been thwarted by his own banal and insipid personality. Also unlike Chinaski, Milo is unable to use drugs, porn and lowlife pretensions to great effect. He doesn't even sneer or spit.Predictably, a dude like Milo bobbing about in modern American office-land, has been virtually fore-ordained to follow a relentlessly downward trajectory but he's unable to capitalize on that. When, in the office, he makes a few lacerating comments to an "ask's" daughter, pegging her as a pompous flake he fails to follow-up with a Chinaski-like flip-off to the office manager. Almost immediately, he is out-on-the-street but has no "cred" for having made a valiant effort to fight the PC police and Make a Point. He gains a brief reprieve from the dreaded oblivion of unemployment, but job security is contingent on his ability to secure a major monetary donation for Mediocre University from a former (very wealthy) college friend, Purdy. If this grail can be obtained, all will be well back in his office cubicle. Maybe his wife won't even be so "all touched out". But, in the end success eludes poor Milo and he takes a proletarian-type job (like Chinaski in the Post Office) working as a part-time deck builder."The Ask" has a somewhat juvenile and flippant cast, perhaps by intention. Its glib and facile. The book is rife with absurd juxtapositions which are intended to be humorous (they often are). It is filled with bizarre characters (Milo's pretentious, lesbian mother; Purdy's "love child" Don, an Iraq War veteran with tandem titanium legs; Vargina, with the giant boobs; Purdy, the rich "ask" himself and his "Pulp Fiction" sidekick, Michael Florida; and a host of others), intended to display the idiocy of modern American life (he succeeds). The story and the manner of its telling, is imbued with the Ira Glass ("This American Life") approach. That is, it has a vague aroma of patronizing sanctimony to it (probably not the author's intent).This book is like a Generation-X version of Woody Allen and its protagonist is most strongly reminiscent of the character Woody portrays in "Annie Hall." Despite some similiarities of intent and style, the book lacks the panache of Woody and the sting of Bukowski. Lipsyte succeeds by employing relentless sarcasm as a form of social commentary, but maybe that's because popular culture is so inane and therefore is so easy to satirize.
"The Ask" by Sam Lipsyte was named one of the New York Times 100 Notables Books of 2010. And it is easy to understand why after reading this dark, eloquently written masterpiece that takes the reader on an adventure through the life of several what I would call sad and complicated characters.Milo is the primary character in this book. He is employed at a second or possibly third-rate univertsity in their Development department tasked with "asking" for money from potential donors who could make large "gives" to the Arts program. Through a series of somewhat odd and random happenings, Milo is fired from this position but is later reinstated in order to make one more very big ask of a former college roomate and friend who he has lost touch with over the years. His friend Purdy is fabulously rich but equally odd in so many ways and the rest of the story takes the reader through the craziness of this "ask" and Purdy's subsequent demands of his old friend. There is also a really good set of threads about Milo's relationship with his wife and his son that mimic a lot of experiences that I am sure the reader has had as well.Overall I was incredibly impressed with the writing style of Lipsyte. His use of words was both eloquent and funny. You find yourself laughing out loud and also cringing. He is able to make vivid in the reader's mind images that in some cases you really don't always want to make vivid. He puts words together that likely shouldn't go together but when they do you say "wow that was genius."I highly recommend The Ask for any strong reader of contemporary literature. If you want a funny and sensitive read--this one is definitely a must-read.
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