The Ask

One must have both a love of black comedy and patience for a mediocre reading to enjoy Sam Lipsyte's third book. In some respects it's truly hilarious, but one has to pay attention every moment. Milo, a fund-raiser at a minor university, is fired for underachievement. He's given a last chance to find a major contributor, but that leads him to a tangle of intrigue. The story touches on war, sex, class distinction, family relationships, humiliation, and numerous other topics. Milo is repulsive and hilarious at the same time. The book is almost brilliant, but the writer should have left the narration to someone else. His voice is humdrum, weak, and monotonous to the extent that one begins to lose track of the plot and then has to go back to re-listen. This is a great book for cynics, but Lypsyte the reader doesn't do justice to Lypsyte the writer. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Starred review from October 5, 2009
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. Milo’s latest target is Purdy Stuart, a former classmate turned nouveau aristocrat to whom Milo quickly becomes indentured. Purdy, it turns out, needs Milo to deliver payments to Purdy’s illegitimate son, a veteran of the Iraq War whose titanium legs are fodder for a disgruntlement that makes the chip on Milo’s shoulder a mere speck of dust by comparison. Submission is the order of the day, but where Home Land
had a working-class trajectory, this takes its tone of lucid lament to the devastated white-collar sector; in its merciless assault on the duel between privilege and expectation, it arrives at a rare articulation of empire in decline.