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Loading... The Ask (2010)by Sam Lipsyte
 librarianarpita | Apr 14, 2013 |  This is a weird book. It's not very original (beta male works at/gets fired from job at mediocre college where he begs rich people for money), but it's funny enough and occasionally succeeded in making me feel slightly uncomfortable. Lipsyte knows how to make words his bitch, which results in some lovely turns of phrase, but he can't quite achieve the emotional connection he's looking for. Or maybe the point of the book is that it's about someone who doesn't count, so we don't care ("Stories were like people. We pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did."). Perfect book for the holiday season. (  )1  kszym | Apr 3, 2013 | Audiobook read by the author. This is an incredible piece of writing. Social commentary, themes, and whatever else aside, the language in this, the use of irony, the absurdity, all the crazy crap comes together as an amazingly entertaining, hilarious, pathetic whole. I loved it. Re-listened in Dec 2012 and also read it some time this year (forgot tot enter). Still amazing as ever. (  ) malrubius | Apr 2, 2013 | Very smart and nonstop about that. I never quite warmed to it but it's not a warm novel, really. But funny, sharp, snarky, and almost oppressively true - I laughed a lot, even if the nonstop variety show of black humor got exhausting after a point. Still, really well done. (  ) lisapeet | Mar 31, 2013 | A very clever novel. I will write more when I am able to. Sam did a great job with this book. Well worth reading. (  ) MSarki | Mar 31, 2013 |
 The gift is Sam Lipsyte's writing: a chewy, corrosive, and syntactically dazzling prose style that doesn't so much run across the page as pick it up and throttle it. There's probably not a living American writer who has so comprehensively mined the comic possibilities of that particular anguished, hapless combination of the overeducated and the underachieving as Sam Lipsyte. Against all odds, his heroes refuse to succeed, and they and we are rewarded with the endlessly entertaining spectacle of their nonstop humiliation.
Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0374298912, Hardcover)Amazon Best Books of the Month, March 2010: How can a life so miserable be so funny? Is it because the stakes are so low (Milo Burke, the antihero of Sam Lipsyte's novel, The Ask, is a failure at many things, but most prominently at his job of pulling in major donors for a deadwater arts program at a middling university neither you nor he care about), or because they are so high (among them death, love, and the general squandering of the glories of creation on trivia)? Lipsyte's brilliant bile earned his previous novel, Home Land, one of the most passionate cult followings in recent years, and in The Ask that verbal invention is often the only thing that can rouse Milo and his peers from their ennui. They bait and badger each other and toss off complex cultural analyses to little effect, all the while haunted by the gap between wit and wisdom. Lipsyte manages to be both sour and tender to his characters, Milo in particular, whose barest shambles toward self-respect come to seem like the first baby steps of an honorable quest. --Tom Nissley(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 15:58:13 -0500) After he loses his job as a development officer at a university, family man Milo Burke is given a chance to regain his position, but only if he can reel in a potential donor, one who has requested his involvement and turns out to be his sinister college classmate.… (more) |
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Favorite lines (of many):
"Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for."
"'Sarcasm,' I said.
"'What I was raised on. It's stupid but you can trust it. It's just there to hurt people. Nothing more.'"
[On the narrator's job search process] "Besides, I was so unaccomplished, I could fit in anywhere. I'd never pose a threat to colleagues. That would be my angle." (