An unflinching, war-mongering America forms the landscape of Sam Lipsyte's latest novel, ' The Ask', allowing him to explore the bleak reality of all that his country has lost in the last decade
'IT'LL BE okay," says the small boy at the heart of Sam Lipsyte's latest novel, The Ask. "It'll be okay," three-year-old Bernie Burke says, and the heart of his father, the hapless Milo, sinks ever deeper into the ground.
Milo suspects that the boy has picked up this “cheap pep” from conversations between his parents about what they are going to do, about how they are going to cope with the “crabbed, moneyless exhaustion” that has become their lives. Now the boy has started to spout it, usually when he senses that his father is in a panic – which is often. Panic, it seems, comes to stay when you’re pushing 40 and newly unemployed, with a resentful wife, a young child, a long march of empty days and a fondness for sugared doughnuts, root-canal painkillers and office-themed porn.
Readers of Lipsyte's two previous novels will not be surprised to find, in The Ask, another overwhelmed, underachieving loser as the central character; his scathing satires on the falsehoods of American culture as seen through the bleary leftovers of Generation X are what made Lipsyte an underground hero, especially with the publication of Home Landin 2005.
But there has been nothing underground about the reception for The Ask, which was published earlier this year in the US and now appears on this side of the Atlantic from Old Street Publishers. What's impressing and unsettling readers is the unblinking, unflinching portrait of post-meltdown, war-mongering America which Lipsyte builds via the rubble of Milo's little life, and via the mercenary dynamic which drove his failed career as a university fundraiser.
When Milo is offered his job back, on the condition that he secure a tricky and precious donation (an "ask", as American fundraising parlance has it, hence the book's title), by keeping tabs on a troubled young veteran of the Iraq war, he is forced to confront some very ungenerous truths about the society in which he lives. And what is uncovered, for all the laughs – through all the laughs – is darker and more sobering territory than any into which Lipsyte has steered his fiction thus far: territory of sadness, of shame, of fear. It's a comic novel of loserdom, yes, but it's also possible that The Askis the first great novel exploring the bleak reality of all that America, in the past decade, has lost.
“I was drawn first to that idea of ‘the ask’ just as a little piece of language, to the wrongness of using the word that way,” says Lipsyte. “But as I started to follow it, I began to see how that dynamic of the ask and the give replicates itself not only in the character’s work-life, but in his home-life, and in the way that many characters interact, and even in the way that nations can interact.”
It’s a dynamic in which some backs are scratched while others are stabbed – a dynamic of expecting, of embezzling, of wheedling and wrangling – which seems a long way from the instruction to ask not what your country can do for you. And it’s a dynamic which is almost jarringly current – territory more comfortable for the satirist, perhaps, than for the writer of literary fiction. This is part of the reason that strong satire has recently thrived online and onscreen in the United States, rather than on fiction lists. Lipsyte is one of the writers who’s changing that; he’s not afraid to write about what’s happening right now.
“I think you can [write about the now], as long as you don’t feel you’re in a race with the internet,” he says. “Or with televison. And there are ways you can write about a broader, more durable feeling in the air that does last for a while, without having to be precise about what kind of phone everyone is carrying.”
Besides, he says, the fear that many writers and publishers have about very contemporary material – that events might outstrip a novel and render it dated – was not one Lipsyte truly had to entertain as he created a narrative shadowed by the awareness of Afghanistan and Iraq.
“I wasn’t worried that this war was going to end,” he says, with a grim smile. That element of “the now”, he says, has stayed static “maybe even long enough for a novelist”. And while not many novelists are tackling it yet, Lipsyte has seen its presence in the work of some of his undergraduate students at Columbia University, where he teaches fiction – the work of those students, that is, who at 24 or 25, are already veterans. “It’s been pretty wild reading their stuff,” Lipsyte admits. And, unsurprisingly, it has not been such a comfortable experience. “You always feel a little strange critiquing it,” he laughs.
"Saying, well, I know your buddy died in your arms, but this sentence describing it is really terrible." They are everywhere in The Ask, these lost boys; it is at its core a novel about childhood and the many ways in which it can be cut short, and the many ways in which its fears and its insecurities repeat themselves, like pieces of "cheap pep", through all the struggles and the failures and the indignities of life as a grown-up, or life in an allegedly-grown-up society.
“I’d be a liar if I said that this book had nothing to do with the fact that I’ve had kids since I finished the last novel,” says Lipsyte. “And in the scenes with Bernie, I wanted to get to all the weirdness that happens when a child you’ve created suddenly acquires language and an identity that’s not part of you.”
The book has been described as a generational cri-de-couer, but that's not how Lipsyte sees it. The "Gen-X jester" has broadened his gaze. "I see it more as the interaction of these generations who have had different experiences in this country," he says. "Different expectations of what this country would deliver, and who have been meted, by this country, out to different destinies. And who are having difficulty trying to find a way to talk about this all – to talk to each other – as it eats away at them."
“It’ll be okay,” Bernie would probably say. But Bernie’s three years old.
