The Ask

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.

Starred review from November 1, 2009
Another savage, hilarious black comedy from Lipsyte (Home Land, 2004, etc.).

Now in his early 40s, Milo Burke has given up his youthful dream of art-world stardom for a sad but steady gig as a development officer at a second-rate university in New York City. But then the spoiled daughter of a fat-cat donor demands a favor, he resists, and she—this young woman doesn't know much, but she does know the score—points out that he is"actually the bitch of this particular exchange." Milo's reply contains"nothing an arrogant, talentless, daddy-damaged waif wants to hear about herself," and he gets canned. To help make ends meet for his (possibly wayward) wife and young son, he takes odd jobs, including a brief and memorable stint as assistant deck-builder to a man whose cherished big idea is a show that features celebrity chefs cooking last meals for the condemned on Death Row. Then he gets a mysterious reprieve from a major potential donor—an"ask," in development parlance—who specifically requests that the university detail Milo to court him and his money. But what will it cost to get his old job back? Before long Milo finds himself serving as a queasy mix of factotum, bagman, client state and sounding board to his old college buddy Purdy Stuart, who assigns him the task of delivering hush money to Purdy's secret illegitimate son, a legless and spectacularly embittered Iraq War veteran. 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.

The author's most ambitious work yet—a brilliant and scabrously entertaining riff on contemporary America.

(COPYRIGHT (2009) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

October 15, 2009
Lipsyte's new novel, following his cult hit, "Home Land", is narrated by another of the author's trademark middle-aged losers: Milo Burke, a development officer at a mediocre college in New York City. Burke's assignment is to reel in Purdy Stuart, a fabulously wealthy tycoon who went to school with Burke 20 years ago. In development jargon, Purdy is "The Ask," and this is Burke's last chance to secure a major "Give" before the global financial system collapses. Lipsyte is a comedian with a rant for every facet of city life. As in "Home Land", the recurring topics are failure in America and the failure of America. How did we become the bitches of the First World? The humor is a hipster mix of pop and high culture, but the incessant joking eventually overwhelms the story line. VERDICT A treasure trove of brilliant asides and one-liners, this never really comes together as a coherent novel. Still, Lipsyte's fans will be looking for it.Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles

Copyright 2009 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from December 1, 2009
Lipsytes third novel, a darkly humorous story of sons and fathers, is both his most realistic and convulsively hilarious to date. Milo Burke, who learned long ago how to refine raw guilt into sweet, granulated resentment, spills some of his bitterness on an entitled waif at the college arts department, the same school he once attended and is now employed by as a fund solicitor. Fired for hate speech, Milo gets an unexpected second chance when old college friend and dot.com millionaire Purdy names him to broker a major behest but with some very tangled strings attached that reach into their heady youth. Lipsytes razor-sharp eye fillets dying America (a fractiously culty day care; 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, Lipsytes 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. Seriously funny, Lipsyte sits alongside such illustrious Daves as Gates, Eggers, and Foster Wallace on the self-conscious shelf, but with a heartfelt brilliance all his own.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2009, American Library Association.)