Customer Reviews

The Ask: A Novel

5 star:		(14)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(11)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

The humor in this book is as dark as it comes, and the writing is delightfully nasty. Centered around Milo Burke, a married office drone with a 3-year-old son, the title of the book comes from asking donors for money to support the "Mediocre College at New York City", where Milo toils each day. Milo is terrifically, hysterically bitter, with a horrible and wonderful gift for offensive words and phrases. The story follows Milo as he faces a myriad of challenges in his daily life.

There is no part of this book that is uplifting except for the humor itself. I actually laughed out loud several times, and bookmarked a few of the choice phrases for later reference. I particularly enjoyed the laser-like precision of Milo's views on life with a 3-year old, which are really, truly, a spot-on and honest look at the frustrations (and joy) of being the parent of a young child in these times.

I would recommend this book to most of my friends, but not to my mother. I don't think she's ready for this type of language.

I was in New York and read a review of the book in the Village Voice. At the Atlanta airport I decided to buy the book on my Kindle and started reading it. Within minutes I was sitting in the airport and was laughing so loud that I must've looked nuts. Bottom line: if you are kind of feeling a little bitter about life right now - and who isn't with this economy - you need to read this book. It's as acidic and dirty as they come, but you're guaranteed to laugh!

It's neither unfair nor unkind to say that Lipsyte is not a fiction writer. He's a satirist who uses the novel format to tumble along from one lampoonable scenario to the next. However, in this prior work, the ad hoc silliness of his plots eventually break the snark barrier to leave the reader with something truly imaginative.

"The Ask" does not do this. Lipsyte keeps his feet on the firmament of bitter social satire, delivering something that is more Celine than surreal. His main character/narrator is an aging Gen Xer, an overweight archetype of the generation whose members didn't have it to begin with and still don't, unless they inherited it and invested it well. Lipsyte's narrator did not inherit. Despite his privileged upbringing, the narrator has nothing going for him except for his brilliant vocabulary and overwrought fantasies about parenthood. Lipsyte's keen eye for the most repugnant permutations of hipster cultural currency and late-day yuppie striving is unreal. Even though the novel is set in Queens and Manhattan, everyone 30-40 will find something recognizable. It is a fun game. When he gets going, Lipsyte can flip out dialogue and diatribe that makes the book worth reading.

However, fans of social satire will notice that Lipsyte pretty much contents himself with the low-hanging fruit: reality TV, ideological day care disasters, Internet porn, bitter Iraqi vets, corporate greed, Bushwick, over-priced hind milk, male infantilism, postmodern critical theory, meth . . . everything you'd expect to find in the Great Unamerican Novel. It's been done. It's all over the "interweb," a term the narrator loathes. See, e.g., [...] (pretty much the same satirical game done just as well).

Lipsytes knows this. As with narrators past, he deprecates his own sourness through his narrator. The narrator's self-pity is equally matched by the incredible barbs that other characters catch him with. Sometimes you get a sense that Lipsyte is honestly tired of squeezing out over-polished snark. My question is: what can the guy do next? Maybe Lipsyte could use his insight to write real social criticism or write something imaginative? Or maybe he should forget it and go to law school or something.

When was the last time you read an American novel narrated by a perfectly calibrated, put-upon American everyman who was wholly unlikable but hysterically and mischievously funny, the tool of an author who found the perfect narrative setting -- in this case, a college development office -- from which to skewer and satirize the entirety of American culture?

Sam Lipsyte's The Ask put me in mind of nothing less than Joseph Heller's two great works of literary and cultural satire, Catch-22 and Something Happened. In The Ask, everything and everyone is evil and stupid in the most banal of ways -- simply because the culture calls upon everyone to act contrary to the way they know things should be. It's not only that politically correctness has run amok; it's that social relationships, even down to the nuclear family, have been shattered and atomized and digitized and because everything has been blown up into hyper-reality when there's no core reality.

The Ask tells an utterly ridiculous story featuring ridiculous people who are all the object of ridicule at their own hands and at the hands of their creator, Lipsyte. That the story is so real, and that you can't put it down, makes it all the more urgent and of our time. I can't think of another novel that so captures this cultural, economic, social, and political moment in America than Sam Lipsyte's The Ask. Isn't this what we want from our art, our literature?

Hilariously funny, bitterly precise, each word a perfectly sharpened dagger. "The Ask" manages to be all at once resigned, despairing, and hopeful; about grim hatred and bottomless love. It manages to present a "compleat sampler" of 21st-century American types: in no particular order, the disfigured Iraq veteran; the septuagenarian mother seeking lesbian pleasure after her two-timing husband has died; the utopian young college grads implementing new age childcare theories in a dingy basement day-care setting; the privileged barely aging heir, toned wife, and assorted bodyguards throwing money around; the development office of Mediocre University with its ever-capable office manager "Vargina"; the generation Y fundraiser who lives in a cage in Brooklyn in order to afford NYC rents; our narrator a once-aspiring semi-talented artist who loses his fund-raising job because of his endearing but self-destructive tendency to tell the truth; his adorable son "Bernie," whose almost-four-year-old malapropisms are heartbreaking in their precociously accurate sweetness. All of this is just perfectly calibrated and impossible to put down. Great book.

I love a black, satirical, self-loathing comedy, but I didn't love this. I'm fine with the nasty characters (and can even sympathize with some of them), but I found myself dragging through this book. The story sort of wandered, and while I guess there was some direction, it just wasn't compelling enough for me. Yes, this book has great writing and fantastic quips and mini-scenes, but there wasn't enough glue between them to keep me hooked. And after you've read the 20th funny back-and-forth sitaution, you start to find it hard to pay attention to all 4 pages of it, because by this time you're just not that vested in the story line. For a self-loathing novel, suggest How To Be Good, by Nick Hornby, which I couldn't put down.

"The Ask" is a novel of today, could only have been written in this era of unprecedented economic discrepancy coupled with two wars and immediacy of information transmission. In Milo, Lipsyte has created a perfect hero of our times, who, slightly befuddled after failing in his dream as a painter, finds himself employed as a development officer for a mediocre third level university, and his intrinsic honesty renders him pretty much a failure at that too. Basically, that's the setup and more can be learned from liner notes and other reviews. What sets this apart from other contemporary novels that have explored today's shocking economic landscape is the black humor, the pitch-perfect dialogue, and a generosity of spirit that makes Milo a three dimensional man.

People think this novel is hilarious; I can see their point, I suppose. Lipsyte's trying, at least, to satirize *something*, and the other reviews pretty much cover the topics of his scorn.

That said, I appreciated this novel more as a parody of a certain kind of work -- think Chuck Palahniuk -- where men have problems and those problems are all women's fault. Really, if The Ask accurately reflects the anxieties of middle-aged male Gen-Xers, you'd expect Freudian analysis to be making a killing these days -- nearly everything about this novel reflects Milo's emasculation anxieties and difficulties with his mother. I mean, let's just count the ways:

Milo begins the novel working for a woman he disrespects but lusts after. It becomes clear, later on, that she's aware of his lust, but thinks it so unworthy of notice she's not offended by it. Milo is outshone by a successful fund-raiser, a flashy fellow (code homosexual -- there are no actually gay men in this novel) that everyone loves, and a slacker who secretly assumes that Milo is both gay and into him. Milo loses his job, early in the novel, because some entitled daughter of a wealthy donor pushes him into an invective-filled tirade. Having lost his manlihood/means of providing for his family, his relationship with his wife quickly disintegrates, causing Milo's wife to run off with her trainer, who we are initially led to believe is actually gay (so, you see, he's not just cuckolded, he's cuckolded by a "gay" man). Milo attempts to seduce the mother of a child in the same day care as his son, but fails miserably (Lipsyte makes sure to describe the look on her face as one of disgust and pity). His mother abandons him emotionally for her late-in-life sexual conversion to lesbianism. At his lowest point, he attempts to participate in a threeway with his slacker co-worker and an unknown woman, though only in a very minor way, which the woman rejects all the same.

That is, thankfully, only the first half of the book. The rest has to do with Milo's attempts to get his old job back. You can guess how well that goes.

It is no doubt part of the "satire" that everyone in The Ask is better off without Milo, including the reader. Lipsyte denies us even the possibility of a bohemian illusion, or, I found, the satisfaction of having read a worthwhile novel.

I am totally fascinated by the disparity in reviews for this book (as well as how few there are!) -- and I have decided that each reviewer is reflecting his/her perfectly legitimate world view.

Certainly Mr. Lipsyte's world view is feverish and dark, with elegant spills and cascades of language abutting a general viciousness about the state of the world and humanity. And his mordant humor leavens the wicked and whip-smart smacks and slabs and slings of outrageous fortune that beset Milo Burke, our protagonist. I give Mr. Lipsyte points for his love and fearless use of idiom and syntax, and an aria-like ability to spin disquisitions at a tremendous velocity before bringing them back to earth. Plus, great dialogue from a 3-year old.

Yet in the long run, despite the energy in his writing, the language begins to thrum, as if style collapses into a kind of literary pattern recognition. And the characters are relentless in their unforgiving, ungiving nastiness. How thrilled are we, really, when surprising plot twists are in service -- exclusively -- of such misanthropic bile...?

He's a terrific, smart writer using his gifts to tell powerful stories that bludgeon his characters to pieces, and thus elicit only a cool, distant appreciation from his readers. Some may like their cup of tea laced with battery acid, but it's not to my taste.

"The Ask" by Sam Lipsyte was named one of the New York Times 100 Notables Books of 2010. And it is easy to understand why after reading this dark, eloquently written masterpiece that takes the reader on an adventure through the life of several what I would call sad and complicated characters.

Milo is the primary character in this book. He is employed at a second or possibly third-rate univertsity in their Development department tasked with "asking" for money from potential donors who could make large "gives" to the Arts program. Through a series of somewhat odd and random happenings, Milo is fired from this position but is later reinstated in order to make one more very big ask of a former college roomate and friend who he has lost touch with over the years. His friend Purdy is fabulously rich but equally odd in so many ways and the rest of the story takes the reader through the craziness of this "ask" and Purdy's subsequent demands of his old friend. There is also a really good set of threads about Milo's relationship with his wife and his son that mimic a lot of experiences that I am sure the reader has had as well.

Overall I was incredibly impressed with the writing style of Lipsyte. His use of words was both eloquent and funny. You find yourself laughing out loud and also cringing. He is able to make vivid in the reader's mind images that in some cases you really don't always want to make vivid. He puts words together that likely shouldn't go together but when they do you say "wow that was genius."

I highly recommend The Ask for any strong reader of contemporary literature. If you want a funny and sensitive read--this one is definitely a must-read.