No One Left to Come Looking for You — while admittedly addictive and fun...is no one’s idea of a formulaic book, unless the formula is to write one original and unpretentious and funny sentence after another ... As a first-person narrator, Jack is exceptionally winning, combining Lipsyte’s characteristic Falstaffian wit — playful, biting, verbally dexterous — with a sweet-natured and lovably pure, yet un-self-serious and only slightly doofus-y personality ... No One Left to Come Looking for You is narrower in focus, concerned only with unspooling the story at hand. It proceeds smoothly, without any narrative bumps ... It tells one small story and tells it well. But it’s also very smart and very funny, a slangy, brainy, expletive-laden, occasionally touching pleasure to read from the first page to the last.
Lipsyte’s latest novel, the East Village–set No One Left to Come Looking for You, is...remarkably stripped down. Its moments of linguistic flamboyance are outnumbered by an almost screenwriterly tendency toward dialogue, and its characters talk in a clipped, plainspoken style that verges on hard-boiled ... Lipsyte's experiment in hard-boiled hardcore manages to take its self-imposed conventions somewhere more playful and less pointlessly nostalgic than have similar genre exercises by his contemporaries ... Lipsyte has updated the detective novel for the billionaire era by lifting his antagonist straight from life. In doing so, he ends on an insight worthy of his theory-spouting protagonists: the real crime is financialized property ownership; the underworld worth illuminating is a rapacious real-estate industry that really did put an end to the market-rate 1990s.
No One Left is designed as a caper, a kind of 'lost on the Lower East Side' picaresque ... More than anything, it’s a tender valentine to an era when the idea of ditching the Man for a life on the margins could keep you insulated from adulthood for as long as you could possibly hold out ... A fitting tribute.
Less an exercise in nostalgia than a bid to launch the underground East Village music scene into the pantheon of fiction ... This is a great pleasure of the book — to see this long-lost low-rent world, its lousy jobs and scuzzy bedrooms, brought into being in a funny novel ... In a novel that spends so much energy coming up with stand-ins for the real thing, that Trump appears by name is a baffling choice ... He makes more than one appearance in the novel, a recurring Scooby-Doo-like villain. Maybe, to some readers, that will be a witty diminishment of Trump’s power. But to me it was disappointing — and, more importantly, not particularly funny.
Fans of Lipsyte's will appreciate a rollicking, cartoonish side-plot sending up an all-too-familiar real-estate developer. But Lipsyte, famously, was once the 'lead screamer' of noise-punk outfit Dungbeetle, and the novel’s autobiographical touches, especially regarding drug abuse and success-envy, temper its satire with a refreshing new vulnerability ...
Lipsyte's novels are always funny in a dense, almost exhausting way. His characters are fast-talking and smart. Reading his prose, especially his dialogue, feels like listening in on a conversation between some of the smartest, funniest people you know after they've had perhaps a bit too much to drink.
