The Ask

Hilariously funny, bitterly precise, each word a perfectly sharpened dagger. "The Ask" manages to be all at once resigned, despairing, and hopeful; about grim hatred and bottomless love. It manages to present a "compleat sampler" of 21st-century American types: in no particular order, the disfigured Iraq veteran; the septuagenarian mother seeking lesbian pleasure after her two-timing husband has died; the utopian young college grads implementing new age childcare theories in a dingy basement day-care setting; the privileged barely aging heir, toned wife, and assorted bodyguards throwing money around; the development office of Mediocre University with its ever-capable office manager "Vargina"; the generation Y fundraiser who lives in a cage in Brooklyn in order to afford NYC rents; our narrator a once-aspiring semi-talented artist who loses his fund-raising job because of his endearing but self-destructive tendency to tell the truth; his adorable son "Bernie," whose almost-four-year-old malapropisms are heartbreaking in their precociously accurate sweetness. All of this is just perfectly calibrated and impossible to put down. Great book.

This is an amazing book - full of wit, intelligence, and passion. The voice is totally engaging, and the observations consistently nail the most telling/paradoxical/poignant things about our cultural moment. But perhaps what I found most striking is how Lipsyte is so attuned to self-loathing, failure, social decay, etc., yet turns out some of the most sensitively rendered passages about relationships I've ever read. (See, for instance, his handling of the narrator's relationship with his parents, wife, and son.) Reviewers who harp on how bleak or depressing this book can feel are missing the tenderness and longing at its heart. Maybe they find it too painful to see themselves in Milo Burke - a character who, like any of us, has to recalibrate his youthful aspirations and adjust to the harsh realities of adult life. But Lipsyte's compassion for Milo - and for humanity, despite all its foibles - makes this a brave, even heroic book. And, it's brilliantly funny.

I was in New York and read a review of the book in the Village Voice. At the Atlanta airport I decided to buy the book on my Kindle and started reading it. Within minutes I was sitting in the airport and was laughing so loud that I must've looked nuts. Bottom line: if you are kind of feeling a little bitter about life right now - and who isn't with this economy - you need to read this book. It's as acidic and dirty as they come, but you're guaranteed to laugh!