Books |
The Ask
Sam Lipsyte
By
Published: Apr 05, 2010
Category:
Fiction
If a novel is 296 pages and 200 pages of it produce more laughs per page than anything you’ve read since Shining City and it costs $16.50 on Amazon, which means you’re basically spending $10 for wet-your-pants funny before you start to turn against it…. well, what would you do?
Me, I’d get my mitts on The Ask. (The Kindle edition is $12, which brings the cost of 200 pages of projectile laughter down to $8).
What’s so funny about a book that begins:
America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic’s whoremaster days were through. Whither that frost-nerved, diamond-fanged hustler who’d stormed Normandy, dick-smacked the Soviets, turned out such firm emerging market flesh? Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of mad dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves.
Okay, so Sam Lipsyte has just driven out the Glenn Beck fans. Or rather, his narrator has. Which would be fine with Milo Burke, a self-described “diseased fuck” who is really not bitter — “I loved people, all people, except for the ones with money and free time."
Milo is 39, married, the father of a three-year-old boy. He lives in Astoria, Queens (not even Brooklyn!) and works in the development office (translation: he’s a fund-raiser) at what he calls “the Mediocre University at New York City." Why Mediocre? Because it’s the kind of school where "people paid vast sums so their spawn could take hard drugs in suitable company, draw from life on their laptops, do radical things with video cameras and caulk."
It’s “a good shitty job.”
But because Milo is "one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office," he blows it. Big time.
And yet, after his spectacular firing, Mediocre calls him back — his college friend, Purdy Stuart, is thinking of making a large donation to Mediocre. The catch: he’ll only do it if the intermediary is Milo.
Thus, “the ask.” As Milo explains: “An ask could be a person, or what we wanted from that person. If they gave it to us that was a give."
Much is at stake here. Milo’s vocational future, for one thing; he has nothing to fall back on but his painting, which isn’t dazzling enough to break through the white noise of the New York art scene. His marriage, for another. (Watching a romantic movie on television with his wife, he murmurs, "We used to hate this together." Because she’s his wife and not, say, the wife of someone straight and successful, she replies, "Maybe we can get back to that place.") And maybe even the fate of talented people in the New World Order.
Ooo, that sounds serious. Shouldn’t go there. Maybe this book is actually About Something. (This happens a lot in comedies, if you’ve noticed — the laughs are cover for a seriousness you don’t always find in so-called serious books.) But let me not wail about life in an empire whose glory days are now sepia-toned and how there are no respectable jobs for over-educated, too-hip-for-the-room Xers, and how all that remains is kissing the ass of Purdy Stuart, who took his father’s money and made more.
Let’s get back to the yuks.
Purdy is now married, and his wife’s struggling to get pregnant. He, meanwhile, is intent on philanthropy. That is: “I enjoy finding younger female artists and helping them at that crucial stage when their asses are firm and unblemished.”
Why has Purdy reentered Mario’s life? Because although he may be “the give,” he has an “ask” of his own — a task that, he’s decided, only Milo can perform. The dance between these old “friends" is amusing in the extreme. And so, for a while, is Purdy’s “ask.”
And so, for a while, is the pre-school that Milo’s kid attends, and the teachers, and the parents. So, too, for a while, is Milo’s efforts to rekindle romance with his wife. So is everything about the college.
And so is pretty much everything Lipsyte writes — he’s got a gift for bitter humor. (Do you think having one of your novels published on September 11, 2001 could have anything to do with that?) The problem: You can only take so much of it. In my case, 200 pages. Well worth a ten-spot.
