Home Land

Sam Lipsyte sees things more clearly than most writers, and he doesn't flinch. What is portrayed by even his admirers as over-the-top satire strikes me as a dead-on adumbration of every value Americans hold dear, every piety we utter, every meaningless counter that marks our status. While the marvelous conceit of this book--letters to a alumni newsletter--has been recognized and applauded, what hasn't really been remarked upon is that in firing off his jeremiads, Lewis Miner's is a voice speaking into a void. There is no wise and simple man in his Connemara clothes waiting for Lewis's epistles. This book is funny, yes: laugh out loud funny. But it is also dark, a blending of the intense and somber tones of VENUS DRIVE with the brighter and more detached comedy of THE SUBJECT STEVE. It is also very wise: Lipsyte posits no solution to the waste he portrays, no utopian ideal to which his book serves as an illustration of its dystopic opposite. Yet Lewis Miner leaves us with hope, he threads his way through the sheer, glittering, noisy, cacophanously glorious surface of Lipsyte's book to find his way to a sort of self-knowledge. Buy the book.

Home Land should be read in private, not because of the secret pleasures enjoyed by Sam Lipsyte's characters (on the Internet or with one another), but because of the boisterous hilarity that explodes from the reader - uncontrolled mirth seems to frighten strangers in public places even when brought on by wonderful writing. Lipsyte's people make the weird ordinary and the ordinary obscene.

The first time I read Sam Lipsyte's Home Land, I read it in one sitting. The second time, I had to stop every few pages, call a friend, and read some unbelievably hilarious (or utterly heartbreaking) passage aloud. (I mean, how else would I know I'd really read it? 'Cause, if I hadn't read Lipsyte's last novel, The Subject Steve, too, I don't think I'd believe that anyone alive could actually write like this). Last week, my local bookstores ran out of copies of this handsomely bound novel before I ran out of well-deserving friends to give it too. But a book this good isn't going anywhere, anytime soon. All the same, do yourself a favor and buy a copy today-it's prozac on the page, truer than life, and the funniest stuff since Ali G came out on DVD. Thanks, Sam, for loving us enough to write this seriously, stupendously wonderful book!

I'm in highschool and am proud to say that this book is the the funniest book about high school that I have ever read. My girlfriend gave me the great book Venus Drive, and after reading it, I thought this is my new favorite writer. I will admit that I did not really understand what the heck was going on in his follow up, the Subject Steve, but Home Land is as funny a book as I've ever read.