In The Parlance of Our Suffering Set

Sam Lipsyte’s fourth book, The Ask, is a novel about language. In his previous novels, especially the cult classics Homeland and The Subject Steve, Lipsyte demonstrated his knack for linguistic pyrotechnics and riotous satire. In The Ask, Lipsyte one-ups himself by picking up the defibrillator and delivering an electric shock to the dictionary, daring language to behave inappropriately, outrageously. This book is terrific fun because Lipsyte's sentences are merciless and misbehaving.

Once a student of Gordon Lish, Lipsyte writes sentences that grab the reader by the collar and holler, “This is the way things are!”  For example, America did not merely win the Cold War, it “dick-smacked the Soviets.” And the fall of the Soviet Union was not merely “the death of analog,” but “the beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.” In this way, like Thomas Pynchon or David Foster Wallace, Lipsyte the master phrasemaker gives us tidy frames for our most unwieldy concepts.

There’s a good story here, too. Milo, a white, male New Yorker with an office job—he works in fundraising for Mediocre University, hence “the ask” of the title—is coming undone. He has a starter family, a three-and-a-half year old son and a full-time working wife, but his anxieties about everything from work to sex to child rearing careen him into one of those bad trips that threaten to ruin everything for good. In order to get his job back—he’s fired in the first chapter—Milo’s trying to land a Big Give for the university from his old college buddy, Purdy, a wildly successful member of the ruling class.

Meanwhile, Lipsyte performs his verbal acrobatics, bending and contorting his sentences into delightful jokes and surprises. Here he is on childrearing: “Then there were the hidden costs, like food.” On effective CEOs: “Slaying those dread dragons Health Plan and Pension wherever they preyed upon the margin.” Or on our illusions of individual dignity: “Stories were like people. We pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did.”

Indeed, it is not so much Lipsyte’s story that matters—it’s his words. This novel is at its core an investigation into how language works in the Age of Information. Beneath Milo’s surface despair and beneath the wordplay, Lipsyte is earnestly exploring how we navigate our infodemic world, post-9/11, post-dot com boom and bust, post-the commercialization of everything from environmentalism to natural childbirth to enlightenment itself.  Consider Milo at the Internet: “How fucked and wondrous an age this was, wherein I could boot up my desktop with a couple of names or notions in mind... and plug them all into various amateur encyclopedic databases. Every man a Newton, a Diderot. Even now I skimmed an article about Diderot, online, for no reason. Bernie was asleep, Maura just a few feet away on the sofa with her laptop and headphones. She might as well have been in French Guiana.”

Moreover, Milo is the Everyman Failed Artist. He suffers precisely because his limited powers of expression have failed him, because, though bright and talented enough, he has failed to make sense of his world. Without an original voice, all is lost. Even in his soft artistic rebirth at the novel’s end, his current canvas featuring “giraffe bukkake” is not going to bring about the clarity he so desires. The world is simply too fucked up, or rather, Milo is too fucked up. As Lipsyte might put it, no amount of “stone-ground crackers and pony cans of pumpkin beer” is going to help.

But forget about Milo. The novel’s real accomplishment is Don Charboneau, Purdy’s abandoned, legless, Iraq-War-vet son. While too often Lipsyte’s characters all speak Lipsyte and all of his characters are similarly witty and eloquent and fascinated with wordplay, Don Charboneau is an original. He’s found his voice:

“The close friend I mentioned before. Her name was Vasquez. Fucking Vasquez. Got an RPG right in the teeth. Can you picture that? Probably not. Yeah, so, that’s what happened to Vasquez. She was right ahead of us and I saw her head explode off her neck, about three seconds before our Humvee blew off. I bet you really care.”

Don’s tone here—aggressive, aggravated, angry—expresses what Milo has been driving at: that in the end our stories go unheard.

The Ask is a subtle investigation into a linguistic world whose “references are all over the place.” It’s a novel with its despair thinly veiled as irony, and its irony doubled-back as sincerity. Its epigrams are nifty—"We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons." And its Zen koans are stoic—"I was digging in for the long night of here." And though most stories go untold and most voices unheard, Sam Lipsyte’s found a way to make his mental music ring out. His star is rising, his song worth hearing.

>The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 304 pages.