Sam Lipsyte’s third novel, The Ask, is a dark and jaded beast—the sort of book that, if it were an animal, would be a lumbering, hairy, cryptozoological ape-man with a near-crippling case of elephantiasis. That’s not to say The Ask isn’t well hewn, funny or sophisticated, because in fact it’s all three ... Lipsyte is not only a smooth sentence-maker, he’s also a gifted critic of power ... there’s a rotten joy in Milo’s shenanigans despite his personal joylessness, a kind of delicious pleasure, with only a hint of rancidness, that accretes to us in his miserable wallowing ... What makes The Ask work so well is the way it dovetails its characters’ self-loathing with their self-consciousness. For instead of making its characters blind...it gives them 20-20 vision but endows them with perfect impotence ... And that’s why this book is a success: not only the belly laughs but also the sadness attendant upon the cultural failure it describes. There’s a genuine disappointment visible through the cynic’s jibes—the grief that comes with the end of empire and the collapse of an ideal.
Basically, the more style you have, the less plot you need. So if it takes little time to sketch the plot of Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, that's a backhanded way of saying it's a stylistic tour de force ... what a ride it is. We're pinned back in our seats by the prose's headlong momentum; we're craning forward to see what's coming next ... The Ask is full of amazing swerves in diction, sudden ascents and plunging descents in register (in the space of a page, and often in a single sentence); it affords breathtaking views of the social landscape of 'late capitalism' ...
There are strong traces, here and elsewhere—especially in the dialogue—of Don DeLillo. Lipsyte has absorbed DeLillo's concept of the novel as neon essay, dialogue as deadpan rhythm section, character as discursive figment of the real. That's why the aforementioned roller coaster [of prose] is all the time curling back on itself, offering vertiginous glimpses of its own construction, the stuff from which it is made: the American language ... the comparison that demands to be made is with Martin Amis's Money: there's a similar intensity and voltage to the language, the same vaulting confidence in the ability of the pyrotechnic monologue to fix a historical moment.
... sentences you can bounce a quarter off of; pleasantly shaggy plotting that makes only a dutiful nod toward the notion of narrative urgency; and jokes. Good ones, that land ... You can count on Lipsyte to sculpt sentences of muscular prose loaded with solid, old-fashioned gags, and thank God for that. He's determined that the comic novel must be comical, not simply humorous. Not for him, that now-pandemic species of light, supercilious literary irony that inspires in the reader a knowing smirk. Lipsyte aims instead for the gut laugh of rueful recognition ... Lipsyte's language is beautifully crafted stuff, yes, but he employs it in service to a larger, coherent purpose that makes his many narrative digressions worth the detour ... It's biting stuff, but there's heart here, too, especially in Lipsyte's depiction of the relationship between Milo and his young son Bernie. There's heart, but not schmaltz ... What's singular about the novel—what inspires the laughter of rueful recognition, page after page—is the sharply observed way Lipsyte shows us a man so like our ordinary, unheroic selves: A man who doesn't so much triumph over adversity as find a way to broker a deal with it
...sneakily poignant ... If the action lacks much forward progress, The Ask succeeds as a series of brilliant riffs and satirical set pieces, skewering progressive preschools, reality TV, Brooklyn hipsters, conceptual art, natural childbirth, self-righteous foodies, and politically correct office culture, along with just about everything else ... America 'was a run-down and demented pimp' ... The Ask is a brilliant illustration of both this point and the limits of this kind of point. It’s about what happens when the spinners of knowing, not-knowing riffs look around to find that everyone else has stopped listening and graduated to adulthood, whatever that is.
At first glance, Lipsyte's newest novel, The Ask, doesn't seem to offer much thematic progression [from his previous novel Home Land] ... The Ask's sluggish storyline...has an exotic weapon as part of its finale, [and] is made up for by the author's scathing insult comedy ... While the many pleasures in Home Land came solely from the pyrotechnic pithiness found in its narrator's self-loathing, the writing in The Ask is toned down to create a more grounded portrait of a disappointed person in a less satirically American backdrop—a gentrifying neighborhood in Queens ... Lipsyte's novel, ultimately, gives readers a portrait of a character who realizes, as he approaches middle age, that he was given too much and asked too little.
Lipsyte’s usual dartlike details abound in The Ask. Who among us has not taken a 'hot, khaki-moistening' walk along a busy boulevard? He also has a knack for presenting grander statements in an undercutting way that’s not insufferable ... I...urge you to read his book twice ... Lipsyte is kinder and gentler in this novel, but maybe it’s his most cutting creation yet. He’s telling us, with a friendly punch, that there are winners and losers in life.
The Ask is not quite a story in joke form. But in its gravid, relentless wit, it finds an implausibly effervescent seriousness that suggests Lipsyte, whose fourth and best book this is, could be one of the novelists whose voice will define the next decade ... Thematically familiar, Lipsyte's vision of white-collar pallor is brought to life by his stunningly diverse language. If he is amazed by his culture's knack with the deadening name...his vaults and swoops from the romantic to the Anglo-Saxon, the sacred to profane, furnish him with a descriptive facility that can make accuracy so fresh as to sound obscene ... In a funny way, though, that singleminded pursuit of the punchline—which contains a kind of deathwish—also bestows Milo with greatness, the kind of awesomely cantankerous masculinity also found in Philip Roth's Zuckerman, or Saul Bellow's Herzog.
Lipsyte’s pitch-black comedy takes aim at marriage, work, parenting, abject failure (the author’s signature soapbox) and a host of subjects you haven’t figured out how to feel bad about yet ... his takes its tone of lucid lament to the devastated white-collar sector; in its merciless assault on the duel between privilege and expectation, it arrives at a rare articulation of empire in decline
Another savage, hilarious black comedy from Lipsyte ... Once again, Lipsyte creates a main character whose lacerating, hyper-eloquent wit is directed both outward at the world—sardonic commentary on parenthood, class privilege, sexuality, the working world, education, ideas of Americanness and much more—and inward; Milo spares himself no degradation, no self-loathing, nothing. As it goes on one can’t help noticing, beneath the fevered playfulness, a deeply earnest moral vision akin to that of Joseph Heller or Stanley Elkin. The author’s most ambitious work yet—a brilliant and scabrously entertaining riff on contemporary America.
