Venus Drive

Venus Drive might be a street or it might be an admonition to a woman in the getaway car after a bank robbery, but this book is one long riff on how folks get by. Not so much in how they get and spend their money, but in how they spend their lives. Life is currancy, and these people are flush. If you like your books hot and twisted, read Rabid: A Novel by Kenyon, Tree of Smoke: A Novel by Johnson, The Pugilist at Rest: Stories by Jones, and Fight Club: A Novel by Palahniuk. The Bookeater!

I've read numerous (probably too many) short story collections this year which were very good, but Venus Drive gets my vote for the best collection of short stories published in 2000. Why wasn't one of these included in the O'Henry Anthology or The Best American collection? Idiots! I can't wait for Lipsyte's next book. Go, Sam, Go!

Lipsyte uses the short story genre like the masters (Pynchon, Delillo etc) use the epic novel: to create fiction that exists on its own stylistic plane. The reader truly does enter his world while reading these stories. A reviewer suggests the book be read in one sitting. I disagree, and would opt for a slow reading and re-reading to fully appreciate Lipsyte's use of language and development of characters. Know going in these are not minimalist tales about happy people dealing with relationships, bosses or other trivialites of every day life. Lipsyte is going for something a lot deeper here, and he seems to have succeeded well. A great book.

Sam Lipsyte writes very funny stories about very painful things. This is a *forceful* book - Lipsyte's characters are gripped and ripped by forces the writer brings alive with language that describes things words can barely contain: an apartment building full of old women waiting for death; a summer camp that mirrors, in mysterious ways, the cruel workings of concentration camps; a tele-marketer's face-off with loneliness... The subject matter can be shocking, and is often quite dark; the book is full of death, drugs, and abandoned dreams. Here's a passage from "My Life, For Promotional Use Only," in which a failed rocker turned dot-commer describes his new life:"Once in a while, though, in the elevator at work, someone will stop me, a man my age with a cell phone, a portfolio case. He will ask me if I am who I am, recall with wonder something I did on stage with safety razors, mayonnaise. Maybe it's some dim gift I've given him, some phony idea that he's reached into danger long enough for one life. Now he can make some calls, do some deals. But neither of us knows what danger is. Neither of us is sinking fast through lake weeds."But it's worth repeating that these stories, which reveal life with an honesty you'll see in few first-time collections, are often hilarious. Far from the fast (or slow) sink so much of today's fiction has become, this book - free of parlor tricks and cheap sentimentality, and full of small, hard, truths - is the triumphant surfacing of a fresh, and glorious, new voice.

Sharp, taut, seriously funny and tremendously sad. Comparable in many ways to Denis Johnson's Jesus' Son, but with greater range. A beautiful book that I just can't stop reading and re-reading.