If you’d rather follow a tight-knit plot than luxuriate in conspicuously deluxe prose, Hark may not be for you ... [Lipsyte's] sentences are the thing. They can go anywhere and be anything, except boring ... That’s not to say there’s no story in Hark, but it’s loose—a series of wild set pieces ... Irony becomes sincerity that doubles back, eating its own tail. It’s a style that only works with prose of the highest caliber—fluid and alert, deeply moral, unafraid to be lyrical or detour into the rudest humor. The satire is 10Xed, vicious and humane because the author’s self-recognition is clear. In Hark, little shards of phrase gleam with goofy malice, as Lipsyte perfectly embodies an exasperated Gen Xer enduring these ridiculous, teeth-gritting times ... Hark’s sendup of human greed, stupidity, and pathetic pre-apocalyptic longing delivers real empathy in an era of fake concern ... Flashes of this regard dot Lipsyte’s riotous novel like stars, bright and isolated. It’s not like compassion can save us. But it is something to focus on.
Hark is split into halves, the first of which is extremely funny ... the story unravels some in Part 2 ... Many of [Hark's riffs] are dazzling, but hardly all of them, and Hark is in the book a lot ... [Some riffs can be] Meta, sure. But meta-boring is still boring ... Lipsyte tries to give his characters cleaner moments of salvation before wrapping things up, but this being a Christ allegory tucked inside a satire, it’s safe to say it doesn’t end terribly well for anyone. It’s a shame. Not only because so much of Hark is brilliantly alive, but because everyone in it could use a bit of mercy.
The universe of Hark looks pretty familiar, although politics, the bane and boon of most contemporary satirists, receives little more than a lazy, glancing shot ... Lipsyte often seems trapped in a voice and sensibility that he no longer entirely believes in ... Lipsyte’s writing has a habit of disappearing up its own…never mind ... I have nothing but sympathy for the [political and social] predicament out of which this book arises, and nothing but impatience with its way of addressing that predicament ... A metaphor may be a place for cows to graze, but this is bullshit.
This premise proves to be fertile ground for Lipsyte’s masterful satirical style ... With short chapters that shift abruptly in time and perspective, Hark barrels forward in what is less a plot’s steady progression than a series of digressive, accumulating riffs. The form works, not least because it mirrors the activity of Hark himself, whose whole routine began as a comedy act performed at company retreats ... At his best, Lipsyte’s jokes can be side-splitting—but not every joke lands ... At worst, [the book's jokes] extend Hark’s satirical viciousness to undeserving targets, which neutralizes its political force ... These missteps aside, the increasingly madcap absurdities of Hark... are in service of a moral vision ... [Hark] sculpts the shittiness into something both transporting and exacting, if not unerring. Of course, this won’t save us. But it’s a start.
[Hark's] lack of focus (pun intended) proves troubling to the reader — how can she engage with a text whose central figure has such little substance? ... Ultimately, this is a book about the dangerous rise of sincerity. Or of earnestness. Or the limitations of Gen-X cynicism. Or the merits of Gen-X cynicism. Or the futility of man’s search for meaning. Or something. The biggest problem with Hark’ is not that it lacks the antic energy of Lipsyte’s past efforts, but that Lipsyte, in broadening his scope to include matters both societal and domestic, often loses the thread. Even his riffs are rambling. Where is the reader left in all this? Exactly.
The book abruptly shifts gears at the midway point, and starts to slip out of Lipsyte’s hands ... the factionalism [in Hark's group] feels poorly sketched, taking oxygen from the day-to-day details that make the first half of the book so rich. It’s a shame that Hark comes to this. It begins as an energetic and compassionate satire of what we choose to pay attention to and why. Lipsyte’s vision of the political nature of having no politics feels spot-on, and his sentences are as sharp as ever. That the novel has so many good things going for it makes the back half’s hard landing hurt all the more.
There’s class conflict ... There are funny throwaway jokes ... There are also tossed-off subplots that could serve as the premises of other novels entirely ... Hark is of a piece with Lipsyte’s earlier books, and page by page as funny and inventive as any of them. But ... the hopscotching between characters makes it a diffuse affair: some of the cast and their subplots are more captivating than others, and a few receive attention that’s scant to the point of vanishing. As with Pynchon, these culs-de-sac and dwindling eddies are welcome if disposable features in the comic landscape but only so long as they amuse and provoke—which they do, mostly. The narrative frame is more perplexing ... As a plot device, Harkism clears more ground than it fills. The novel succeeds in spite of it, growing weirder as it goes on ... An apocalyptic Christ allegory bursts out of what at first seemed to be a character-driven comedy about mindfulness and its co-option. Along the way, there are riffs on Trump-era America, all the funnier in a book whose alternative history erases the Trump presidency.
So much of the novel’s comic firepower—and it’s a very funny, if frustrating novel—comes from Lipsyte's assaults on the kind of middle-class despair that goads people Hark-ward ... Lipsyte’s lament for our dehumanization is clear: We’re too easily corruptible, too easily manipulated by 'the screens, the screens, the screens.' But when it comes to identifying the place where our humanity resides in this techno-sociopolitical mess, he has a harder time finding the target ... The flaws in Hark are of the trying-too-hard, swinging-for-the-fences sort. De-centered, Trumpish times—when every social norm seems to have been upended—have given Lipsyte plenty of satirical fodder. Indeed, the well is practically bottomless, and finding humor in it—that isn’t just meme-speak and Twitter zingers—is an accomplishment. We need more Lipsytes. But in the process, the novel becomes subject to the same sense of distraction that it’s meant to poke fun at.
Author Sam Lipsyte presents a hero for our times in Hark, a meditation on belief and optimism pushing up against political upheaval. The writer’s scope has widened from his previous novel, the superb Gen-X character study The Ask. Indeed, here’s the latest instance of a seasoned, acerbic novelist suddenly on the hunt for a target...vying to make sense of the absurd present. Yet Hark’s vibe ranges from timeless to dated, even as it strains to hit post-2016 notes ... The novel playfully explores what draws this miserable, diverse group to nonsense, but its foundation—a listless ensemble without a spark in the bunch—crumbles. Which is a real shame, because fans of Lipsyte...will pick up traces of his best work. He’s particularly good in the abstract in Hark, building out his premise and shaping a god complex for an 'end of men' world ... Lipsyte, in the most general sense, understands how figures like Hark rise. He traces that evolution incisively, bringing a refreshingly light touch to his dystopia-adjacent novel—not marred by perfunctory nihilism, not fixated on educating or warning, not limited to cynical apocalyptic pronouncements. This feels like a step forward for the Trump-era satire. But then we’re missing a reason to invest. Lipsyte seems all but divorced from his characters, realizing them with a crippling sameness. Hark’s most insightful passages could be attributed to anyone; even as they describe or refer to specific people in the book, there’s no specificity to them. The emotional connection is lacking. The story scatters between its principals, starting slow before rushing for a plot, an arc, an ending, a purpose ... Lipsyte’s still a compelling stylist, but here, crafty sentences function like unfulfilled promises, winding toward profundity that never arrives.
Like many of Lipsyte’s best characters, Hark is sketched in both broad strokes and absurdist subtleties that, when combined, ring hysterically and heartbreakingly true ... Unfortunately, Lipsyte focuses too much of the novel on Hark’s braintrust at the Institute For Mental Archery... Their names... are often more interesting than their exploits ... They’re vehicles for Lipsyte’s madcap brand of humor, which too often here misses the mark. A yogi would say that these jokes, involving ass worms, sour cherry soup, and the 1980s New York Jets’ defensive line, are not grounded, not connected or in service of the story and its characters. But for all their blandness, this core group of Harkists reveals the blessing and the curse that accompanies our age’s obsession with the secularized meditation practice commonly known as mindfulness.
Although its plot gets a little shaggy — there are betrayals, crimes, geopolitical chaos — Hark is a tartly effective sendup of 21st-century America ... Lipsyte ably skewers our fads and phony gods. His sharpest observations focus on language itself, like the Silicon Valley-birthed babble that melds mindfulness and corporate-speak ... Lipsyte crafts an arresting portrait of a charlatan and his hopeful but misguided public ... awfully funny...
Hark...presents itself as a spoof of the wellness industry but in short order it becomes the kind of mopey family psychodrama you find on daytime TV ... Though the novel offers a few satirical feints...it’s mostly stuck in the morass of Fraz’s depression ... Raymond Chandler famously advised that when you run out of ideas writing a crime story, have a man come through the door holding a gun. For the writer of serious literary fiction, the analogous trick is to inflict a traumatic injury on a child. This is what Mr. Lipsyte does at the book’s midpoint, a plot twist so desperate and manipulative that it puts paid to any further prospect of laughter.
Is there a funnier writer in America than Sam Lipsyte? Not if you find funny, for example, the use of 'whither' and 'dick-smacked' in the same sentence ... Much of what feels so good about writing like this is the feeling that it shouldn’t be working. It is too fancy and, at the same time, the opposite of that ... The idea seems to be less to strip words away than to follow the words to where they’re actually going ... Lipsyte’s new novel, Hark, also centers on a form of language that may not make sense, but still works ... It’s as though Lipsyte read the Dyer review and decided to prove the critic wrong, that stylists could tell stories too. It’s also as though he wearied of the task partway and opted to revert to his usual tricks. The result is a book with a lot of loose ends, abrupt bloodshed, and burlesque gags taken to the brink, and occasionally over the brink ... It’s hard to say if what we’re reading is dystopian fiction or just heightened reportage ... No writer alive today is better at making art out of verbal garbage.
Loaded down with sub-plot conspiracies, comedic monologues, and mock-histories of archery traditions from the Amazon to ancient Korea, with some bullshit about William Tell thrown in for good measure, Hark does not shoot straight. It buzzes and bobs until it crashes into its target, at which point, the reader might stop to think, maybe the story isn’t the point. Maybe... it’s a book about how language can build and dismantle reality ... You would think this POV toggle would balance the absurdity of the novel. Instead, it makes it all the more inescapable. Through normalization... the resulting diffusion feels a lot like dystopia, a lot like today ... Lipsyte’s language maintains a flexibility, a resilience, that feels quite necessary in a time of oversimplification and duplicity ... In Hark’s final pages, as the story takes on messianic velocity, Lipsyte turns somber. The laughter stops, and the novel becomes, if not profound, then at least elegiac—which is perhaps satire’s bullseye.
Lipsyte’s satire runs rich and deep. His sentences roil with a kind of mania. And the novel is very funny — at least until towards the end, when it isn’t. Then, the zaniness and pyrotechnics give way to a sense of something real and serious. In Hark, Lipsyte is on to something big. But he unleashes too many arrows at too many targets, from tech gurus to parenting styles, from food fads to the modern workplace, and in so doing misses the bullseye.
... while [Lipsyte's] target is still the indignity of simply being alive, his new novel is a little crowded ... Lipsyte is at his absolute best, his most crushing and merciless, when his characters are going to pieces. It’s a pure joy to read the diatribe Hark launches at a fictional version of the Web Summit, the largest tech conference in the world ... I’m giving the highest praise imaginable when I say that Lipsyte doesn’t need plot to hold the reader’s attention. In fact, how many writers alive are such good prose stylists that they can discard it altogether and still deliver an entertaining book? Lipsyte’s sentences are so dizzyingly brilliant, so sharp and energetic, that the plot feels like the distraction, the noise you wish you could drown out ... But though I admire his ambition, Hark is slightly unfocused ... A few hours spent offline with Lipsyte is a worthwhile investment.
Although ostensibly set in a future several presidents after Obama, Hark is the best novel I know about Trump time ... [Lipsyte ]is an extremely aggressive stylist, never satisfied with neutral expression, always trying to break through the ordinary with his focus, his descriptive exactitude or emotional rant ... Lipsyte’s... realistic rage in Hark cheers me, but this novel is not for those readers who need books as likable as Hark the person. Hark the novel is, like Coover’s Burning and Melville’s description of Moby-Dick, 'broiled in hell-fire.'
... [a] trenchant satire about the quest for meaning and the extremes to which some people will go to achieve it ... Oddly enough for a novel about the power of focus, Hark sometimes strays from its central story. But Lipsyte lands plenty of jabs at his targets, from internet trolls and conspiracy theorists to the desire for quick fixes to complicated problems. If acidic satire helps you fend off life’s challenges, then put Hark in your quiver.
Lipsyte’s witty dialogue provokes plenty of chuckles, though the Pensig twins do sound more like teenage wiseacres than grammar schoolers ... For all the larky humor, though, one wishes that the plot moved with more dispatch. One senses that Lipsyte wasn’t certain where to take his story ... Lipsyte’s subplots try to sustain our interest... But these are sideshows to the main drama of Hark’s rise to eminence ... We don’t need to like fictional characters to find them fascinating. Nor do characters in comic novels need to attain the rounded features of those in other novels. But I did hope to care as much about Lipsyte’s people as I admired his deft satire.
[A] comic meditation on technology, authenticity, and end-times anxiety ... lots of characters and a jumbly plot make for a clamorous read. But Lipsyte also offers high-velocity moments in which bleakness and humor, the quotidian and the apocalyptic all gloriously converge.
What keeps the reader going for much of the book is the language, which is sharp and at times wickedly sardonic ... A funny but ultimately frustrating book, Hark doesn’t live up to its initial promise.
...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...
Mostly a sour, disaffecting experience that’s reflective of our troubled times ... Unfortunately, Lipsyte assembles his story through the point of view of the supporting characters, most of whom are miserable misanthropes when they’re not around Hark ... As usual, Lipsyte’s command of language is sublime...but the dubious premise and deeply unlikable characters sour the already-tart satire that the author is proposing ... Magical realism works great for some authors, but Lipsyte ends up closer to the ending of the television show Lost than to any substantial prosecution of contemporary society.
Acerbic and surprisingly moving ... a searing exploration of desperate hopes, and Lipsyte’s potent blend of spot-on satire, menacing bit players, and deadpan humor will delight readers.
