{"id":27830,"date":"2019-04-23T10:00:19","date_gmt":"2019-04-23T15:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/?p=27830"},"modified":"2026-01-16T20:18:36","modified_gmt":"2026-01-17T02:18:36","slug":"killing-joke","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/killing-joke\/","title":{"rendered":"Killing Joke"},"content":{"rendered":"

Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist friends are wont to do. \u201cYou\u2019ll like it,\u201d he said. And then, in response to what may have been something unpersuaded in my aspect: \u201cIn the first place, it\u2019s extremely funny.\u201d Now, an ardor for the antic, a weakness for that weakest of rhetorical maneuvers (the joke<\/em>), a more general wearied impatience with the familiar Franzenish self-delectation of serious<\/em> writers, even the obviously good ones\u2014none of this is anything to brag about. Even I would admit that a susceptibility to the comic sentence, artful and barbed, is nobody\u2019s idea of an unerring standard. But this friend, he had my measure. He knew what I believed in.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure,\u201d I said. \u201cOK.\u201d<\/p>\n

And this is how I found myself plunging into the kind of heedless idiot novel-love with which many of you are likely familiar. The occasion was Sam Lipsyte\u2019s 2004 book, Home Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Lipsyte has a new novel out called Hark<\/em> (we\u2019ll get to that), and in the notices I\u2019ve read\u2014many of them a bit disappointed, if also, to me, a bit petulant (we\u2019ll get to that too)\u2014people talk about Lipsyte\u2019s previous novel The Ask <\/em>(2010) as his breakthrough, his arrival, his major<\/em> statement<\/em>. It\u2019s a great book, sure: skewering and desolate, especially unmerciful in its attention to those armies of the grotesquely monied busily despoiling new-millennial New York. But it is not his masterpiece. For propulsive lunacy and tottering demented grandeur\u2014as well as for nihilistic farce, Bush-era vituperation, vigorous self-despising, Jersey in-jokes\u2014you can do no better, I promise, than Home Land<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The premise of the novel could not be simpler: Home Land<\/em> takes form as a series of \u201cupdates\u201d sent to a high school alumni association by one Lewis Miner, aka \u201cTeabag,\u201d a graduate of the class of \u201989, who, as he tells us at the outset, \u201cdid not pan out.\u201d As conceits go, this one is pretty threadbare. But it allows Lipsyte the latitude to fabulate an entire narrative edifice\u2014meandering, \u201cplotted\u201d in the truly loosest senses, lurching toward its end at a 15th Reunion party\u2014out of his very greatest novelistic gift, which is, for want of any more Latinate designation, the riff. (In this, he resembles no one so much as Paul Beatty, another ultra-gifted contemporary comic novelist.) I mean no disparagement at all when I say that Home Land<\/em> is a good deal more like a 250-page Lenny Bruce routine, spangled with bursts of Rothian grandiloquence and the staccato crackle of Grace Paley dialogue, than it is a well-wrought urn of deliberative domestic fiction. It gallops and careens, characters accruing and entangling, riffs begetting further riffs, in a baroque succession of digressions and micropolemics tending to the bitter, the despairing, the delirious.<\/p>\n

Those riffs sound like this:<\/p>\n

Which reminds me, I\u2019ve yet to comment on the latest issue of Catamount Notes<\/em>, wherein it was announced that my old flame Bethany Applebaum is making a mint helping the doltish progeny of the rich gain admittance to our nation\u2019s leading universities. Bravo, Bethany! Tuck those little one percenters in all safe and cozy. Keep that ruling-class razor wire sharp and shiny!<\/p>\n

Bethany, your father was head of the lathe workers local. Would he pop and lock in his grave knowing you\u2019ve dedicated your life to helping these entitled cretins? You busted your hump to get to Cornell. All that panic and self-cutting, those blood-speckled scrunchies on your arm. Is this your way of giving back to the gate-keepers? Or is your cynicism a huge holy shimmering thing no mortal could view in its entirety?<\/p>\n

Please write in and let us know!<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Or again:<\/span><\/p>\n

Philly Boy, congratulations on your continued success at Willoughby and Stern. You\u2019ve always been a persistent guy, Phil, a real plugger, whether the task at hand was to find a hole in rival Nearmont\u2019s vaunted line or a fag to bash after the Friday night game \u2026<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also fairly certain at least a few of our contemporaries shared my fantasy of cornering you in Eastern Valley\u2019s dank shower room and firing a hollowpoint round into your skull. We could picture the startlement in your eyes, the suck and flop of your dead-before-it-hits-the-floor body hitting the floor, your brain meat chunked, running out on rivulets of soapy water across the scummed tiles, clogging up that rusted drain the school board never saw fit to replace. Your pecker would be puny with death.<\/p>\n

We\u2019d never do such a thing, of course, not like those suburban murder squads of today, those peach-fuzz assassins in mail-order dusters who lay down suppressing fire in cafeterias \u2026<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The temptation to keep quoting and do nothing else\u2014except perhaps pause over the rich effects of words like \u201cprogeny,\u201d \u201cscrunchies,\u201d \u201chollowpoint,\u201d \u201csuppressing fire\u201d\u2014is, for this reviewer, great. I hope you can see why. There are few writers I know so feverishly allergic to the bloodless sentence, the ossified idiom, or for that matter more spectacularly agile in the resistance to \u201cconforming to usages that have become dead,\u201d as Emerson puts it\u2014even when, as here, that resistance risks callousness, obscenity, cruelty, or any of the other disavowed affects proper to the empires of American optimism.<\/p>\n

Lipsyte is nothing if not a nervy, traducing sort of writer, and I take this to be part of what it means to think of his ludicrous virtuosity neither as ornament nor flourish but as a bedrock element of what has been, for him, a years-long effort to bring the submerged and awful violences of the ordinary American scene into queasy-making clarity: to contest, in the Emersonian mode, the consolatory conventionalities of a poisoned world that wishes not to know overmuch about its own malignancy. Hark<\/em>, as we shall see, revisits and revises just this project.<\/p>\n

Granted, this may not be your thing. Hyperverbose loserish white-guy freakouts, tuned to the bleak and the lewd, are by now their own sorry genre, and you may well have developed a distaste for it. Fair. Nothing, at this point, is easier than claiming \u201ccritique\u201d as an alibi for more garden-variety sorts of (typically male) odiousness. It\u2019s certainly the case that none of this would cash out as much were Lipsyte\u2019s vision not appreciably wider and more acute, and were the aspects of character he portrays not themselves, as Home Land <\/em>puts it, \u201cacquired in provinces of real human pain.\u201d<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n We Are All King Lear\u2019s Children<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Daniel Swift <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

Lewis, for instance, has lost his mother, dead from cancer before the book opens, and that loss throws into cold relief all his accumulated failures\u2014of nerve and of decency, at work, love, life. Her failures had been grander and braver: a late arriver to \u201970s feminism, she wrote plays, convened reading groups of like-minded Jersey suburban women, \u201cbecame a witness to what she\u2019d come to conclude was her bondage.\u201d \u201cLaugh at it now, Catamounts,\u201d Lewis says, \u201cGod knows my father did, but it was dangerous and new to Hazel, and what can you admire more in a person than the will to danger?\u201d For all his undisguised perviness and anarchic discursive vigor, Lewis knows himself to possess no such will, and none of the scalpel-sharp world-despising of the novel would cut the way it does were it not superseded by what we might too blandly call its shame\u2014a corrosive self-contempt, which, let me hasten to add, is of a variety that Lipsyte has no interest either in redeeming (as in the familiar Apatowian arc) or in heroicizing (in the tired guise of the damaged but valiant male antihero).<\/p>\n

In Lipsyte\u2019s corner of the North Jersey cosmos, misery is blighting\u2014the worst of us just pass it around, pass it along\u2014not improving. And it is also, for all its putative universality, cruelly ill-distributed out in the mortal world, broken up as it is into its grief-gathering subdivisions of color, of sex, of money. Sharpened clarity on this point makes it satire, and not just existential bellyaching.<\/p>\n

For most of us non-oligarchs, then, the livable options are not many, and they are not great. \u201cWe\u2019re at a crucial juncture in the history of our homeland, Valley Kitties,\u201d Lewis perorates in the frantic conclusion. \u201cIt\u2019s now or never. It\u2019s now and<\/em> never. We must choose once and for all: police state or police state!\u201d If you like a novel that makes a churning and batshit litany out of such soul-sickness, while not quite <\/em>being able to muffle its own sentence-making joy, you\u2019ll maybe like Sam Lipsyte.<\/p>\n

\n

As I say, I love<\/em> Sam Lipsyte, and nothing at this point is likely to push me off my mark. His new novel is called Hark<\/em>, and while it\u2019s not as satisfying as a lot of his previous ones, I don\u2019t think, there is still a great deal to recommend it. The sentences, for instance, are very much his.<\/p>\n

Hark<\/em> is the story of the small cadre of souls who gather around Hark Morner, the inventor of a set of techniques called \u201cmental archery\u201d\u2014something between Pilates, meditation, TED-talkish pseudophilosophizing\u2014whose great, and, Hark insists, sole, purpose is to help people focus. Over the course of the novel, its central characters enable, and bear witness to, Hark\u2019s ascent from self-help pamphleteer to corporate inspiration-monger to something less manageable and more, it seems, messianic. A message board commenter, who will have a large role to play in the plot, says,<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a personal philosophy, maybe a little self-helpish (and damn, can\u2019t we all use a little self-help\u2014the fucking corporations and the government and the fascists and the tech lords aren\u2019t going to help us, trust me), but it\u2019s a really powerful message that uses archery as a metaphor.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of ripe comedy to be plucked from the collision of planetary collapse and ever more uncontested oligarchic dominion with the improving bromides of \u201cpersonal philosophy,\u201d Goopish affirmations, vigorous stretching. \u201cNow, we need a fresh song,\u201d one tech overlord assures Hark. \u201cA vibrant life poem with which to propel ourselves into a succession of profitable quarters.\u201d<\/p>\n

There are, I think, three particularly striking things about Hark<\/em>. First, it is not in the fanatical first-person. It features a multitude of centers of narrative consciousness, and this makes for a story that feels more spacious\u2014less claustrophobically compulsive\u2014than many of Lipsyte\u2019s others. Second, and in direct relation to this, there is a spaciousness in the novel\u2019s regard for what we might call its characters\u2019 practices of belief. Hark himself, for instance, remains something of a well-drawn cipher in the book, a vivid blur, and in Lipsyte\u2019s novel-wide willingness to demure from mercilessness, to withhold satirical fire and thus preserve some unvoided space of mystery about him\u2014this unfunny man who professedly neither gets nor traffics in irony\u2014we can feel a deliberate and, to my mind, telling recalibration of the novelist\u2019s own marrow-deep impulses toward mockery. Page after page, and often through the lens of the hapless Fraz, the most familiar of Lipstye\u2019s quasi-despairing middle-aged men, the novel turns over a new and startling question: What if a killing and all-devouring irony isn\u2019t<\/em> the way to survive the world?
\n<\/p>\n

\n
\n

In Lipsyte\u2019s work, you will find a writer striving to be unbeguiled by the prevailing fantasies proper to imperial liberalism, as it totters toward its terrible planetary ruin.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/figure>\n


\nBut then, in a not-at-all-metaphysical way, the world may not be ours to survive. And this, for my money, is the third curious thing about Hark<\/em>. The novel takes place about a dozen years in the future. One mark of this is Tovah Gold, one of Lipsyte\u2019s most splendid creations, who first appeared in some shorter fiction, including the breathtakingly great \u201cClimber\u2019s Room.\u201d There she had been in her late 30s, navigating the plummeting awfulness of dating New York men and wanting children; here, she has twin 10-year-olds with Fraz, is the breadwinner, still writes poetry, sustains a nondismissive wariness in respect to \u201cHarkism\u201d throughout. But that time-tracking device is appended to others, which make for a kind of background noise in the novel\u2014until, a little bewilderingly, that noise is much of what there is to hear.<\/p>\n

We learn that not only has the planet deteriorated in predicted and predictable ways, and not only has an ascendant oligarchy further absented itself from the collective life of the species. We discover, too, in respect to all this, that Europe has for some time been convulsed by a vast bloodletting. \u201cWar is everywhere,\u201d Fraz writes in ad copy for Mental Archery<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Europe is about to be conquered by a group many call the Army of the Just, a force made up of the same mix of veterans, conscripts and soldiers of fortune that have filled the ranks of marauding armies for millennia. That this horde claims no particular religious or political ideology beyond the abolition of poverty and oppression, and includes members of diverse races, religions and creeds who have gathered from around the world and sworn to fight both globalist power structures and ethno-nationalist movements across the continents is especially startling.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You don\u2019t say? By the end of the novel, that war has begun its transatlantic migration.<\/p>\n

Reviews I\u2019ve read have complained that as the book heaves toward its conclusion it grows scattered and a shade arbitrary. I\u2019m not going to tell you that\u2019s wholly unfair. I will say that Lipsyte seems to me to be trying to think his way into something obscure but pressing, something at the dark edges of the frame of the world of his striving city dwellers. I don\u2019t just mean the climatological terror that we have lately found many, many ways of narrativizing, across idioms, genres, media. I mean, rather, the unnerving twinned conviction that the brutalizing arrangements of the global present\u2014with its misery quintiles of sex and color and money\u2014cannot hold<\/em>, and that the thing required to uproot that arrangement will be, when it comes, of an unimaginable scope and scale of violent horror: a full fucking hemoclysm<\/em> (thank you, Sam Lipsyte, for teaching me this term) from which ultimately very few are likely to be spared, no matter their conscious consumption, their preference for diversity in the ranks of overlords, their devout recycling.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe fact is,\u201d one of the novel\u2019s tech-bro titans tells Fraz, \u201cI myself spend a lot of money on philanthropy. As does my company. But we\u2019re not interested in any large-scale, systemic shift in how things are done on the planet. For that, the downtrodden are really going to have to come and take our fucking shit and kill us. And so far they are too scared to try. Actually, it\u2019s getting kind of boring.\u201d<\/p>\n

Near the very end, we meet a pregnant young woman who gets high with Fraz, and remarks that she\u2019s been in Europe. \u201cEat shit,\u201d she tells him. \u201cI\u2019m a vet. I was in Ibiza. Saw the deathpits. I was on a nuke squad in Mallorca. I\u2019m just trying to get through the day.\u201d Boredom, then, or horror.<\/p>\n\n

\n\n
Related readings<\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n
\n \"\"<\/a> <\/figure>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n\n
\n Reviews<\/a>\n <\/div>\n\n
\n B-Sides: John Galt\u2019s \u201cAnnals of the Parish\u201d<\/a>\n <\/h5>\n\n
\n \n \"\" <\/a>\n \n Ursula K. Le Guin <\/a>\n <\/div>\n \n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n\n \n

I\u2019d be a poor reviewer if I claimed for Hark<\/em> the singular achieved power of Home Land<\/em>. It is a thing considerably weirder and more diffuse, its riffs semi-chastened, though it is still outlandishly funny. And some readers, especially partisans of the cool Cuskian formalism many of my contemporaries seem to admire (though I do not), may find turns like the above overdrawn, rote, an apocalypticism too easily come by. I do not find them so, but then I am an avowed sucker for what Lipsyte is selling.<\/p>\n

Still, nothing in the novel suggests to me that it\u2019s wrong to believe Lipsyte is always worth reading. In every bit of his work, you will find a writer striving to be unbeguiled by the prevailing fantasies proper to what I will just go ahead and call imperial liberalism, as it totters toward its terrible planetary ruin\u2014fantasies about the benevolence of power, the sure victory of comity over antagonism, upheaval without suffering, change without blood, all boats rising, a thousand points of light. His characters look around and see (or try not to see) worlds offering less and less in the way of noncataclysmic \u201coutcomes,\u201d as the few remaining Pinkerite techno-optimists might have it. This, in Hark<\/em>, is where their listing toward some renovated possibilities for belief comes from. Who are you to say they\u2019re wrong? Who am I to laugh?<\/p>\n

This article was commissioned by\u00a0Nicholas Dames<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist friends are wont to do. \u201cYou\u2019ll like it,\u201d he said. And then, in response to what may have been something unpersuaded in my aspect: \u201cIn […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":27843,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2497],"tags":[259,1298,863,146,1095],"pbpartner":[],"section":[1132],"pbseries":[],"class_list":["post-27830","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews","tag-humor","tag-liberalism","tag-literary-fiction","tag-satire","tag-simon-schuster","section-literary-fiction"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nKilling Joke - Public Books<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. 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Not that long ago, a novelist friend urged this novel on me, the way your novelist\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/killing-joke\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Public Books\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/pages\/Public-Books\/201143656634392\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2019-04-23T15:00:19+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2026-01-17T02:18:36+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/www.publicbooks.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/04\/money-battle-e1555959368173.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"1860\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"1331\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Imani Radney\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"Imani Radney\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/365b0e14e4631d98547aaccb15d08035\"},\"headline\":\"Killing Joke\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-04-23T15:00:19+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-01-17T02:18:36+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/\"},\"wordCount\":2810,\"publisher\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/#organization\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2019\\\/04\\\/money-battle-e1555959368173.jpg\",\"keywords\":[\"Humor\",\"Liberalism\",\"Literary Fiction\",\"Satire\",\"Simon & Schuster\"],\"articleSection\":[\"Reviews\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/\",\"name\":\"Killing Joke - Public Books\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/killing-joke\\\/#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/www.publicbooks.org\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2019\\\/04\\\/money-battle-e1555959368173.jpg\",\"datePublished\":\"2019-04-23T15:00:19+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2026-01-17T02:18:36+00:00\",\"description\":\"Some things you fall for a little too fast and a little too hard. 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