PositivePublic Books...I love Sam Lipsyte, and nothing at this point is likely to push me off my mark. His new novel is called Hark, and while it’s not as satisfying as a lot of his previous ones, I don’t think, there is still a great deal to recommend it ... Reviews I’ve read have complained that as the book heaves toward its conclusion it grows scattered and a shade arbitrary. I’m not going to tell you that’s 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’d be a poor reviewer if I claimed for Hark the singular achieved power of Home Land. It is a thing considerably weirder and more diffuse, its riffs semi-chastened, though it is still outlandishly funny. And some readers...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. Still, nothing in the novel suggests to me that it’s 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...
