funny, tragic, america as we know it... but never told this way ( )

honest-to-god this is the best book i've ever read. hunter thompson meets david foster wallace... or something. creative and hilarious and beautiful and painful and poignant, i think. i'd like to be in lipsyte's head.
blargh, so good. ( )

Really, deeply funny book. I didn't think I'd like it at first, it seemed like it was going to be bleakly hip, but no. Lipsyte is actually surprisingly warm with his characters and he writes some of the best dialogue I've read. It's how people OUGHT to talk. I kept wanting to read passages out loud to passersby. Clever clever. ( )

After having read Never Mind the Pollacks, it was hard not to compare Lipsyte's slightly surreal and completely off-kilter story with Pollack's work. Home Land is the story of a slacker twenty-something trying to explain to his former classmates how his life got so screwed up since they last saw him during high school. He does this through a series of (never-to-be published) updates to his former school's alumni newsletter. Where saner people with more normal lives might announce the birth of their first child, he chooses to mention how he scores pot off his friend's Narcotics Anonymous sponsor.

Lipsyte is at times just as funny as Pollack, but Home Land seems to run out of steam just as his protagonist finally gets to confront his former classmates, at their five-year reunion. For those last few pages his story takes on a completely different (and severely less funny) tone from the one that carried the book up to that point. Still a pretty good read, despite the disappointing ending. ( )

A just-good-enough book with lots of sophomoric humor. It was entertaining over-all though the sex and drugs humor did make me think of high school all over again. This might be the point since the main characters never really grew up past 12th grade. ( )