Sam Lipsyte

Milo Burke is a development officer at a third tier university. His job is to set up potential donors for “the ask”, and the bigger the ask the better. Unfortunately Milo isn’t very good at his job. And he isn’t very good at any else either — his marriage, his role as a father, his painting, his friendships, his relationship with his mom. Things aren’t good for Milo and they are about to get much worse.

Fortunately for Milo this is Chucklit. So Milo is bound to have old friends show more with oodles of cash. He has women who find him funny and possibly attractive, though not as attractive as he finds them. His problems, such as they are, are really other people’s problems — his cheating wife, his looney mother, his rapacious employers, his manipulative friends. Milo may be a sad sack, but at least none of it is his fault. And even the bits that are his fault, he can simply own them. Yes he is bitter at others and himself. Yes he is probably an alcoholic. Yes he is a misogynist. But we all still love him, right?

No, we don’t.

At one point Milo’s friend wants to relate something to him in the form of a story. Milo’s asks if he couldn’t just tell it to him in the form of a joke instead. And that pretty much sums up both Milo and this book. For me, it was too much to ask. show less

Rating: 4.5* of five

The Publisher Says: A darkly comic mystery by the author of Hark and The Ask set in the vibrant music scene of early 1990s New York City.

Manhattan’s East Village, 1993. Dive bars, DIY music venues, shady weirdos, and hard drugs are plentiful. Crime is high but rent is low, luring hopeful, creative kids from sleepy suburbs around the country.

One of these is Jack S., a young New Jersey rock musician. Just a few days before his band’s biggest gig, their lead singer goes show more missing with Jack’s prized bass, presumably to hock it to feed his junk habit. Jack’s search for his buddy uncovers a sinister entanglement of crimes tied to local real estate barons looking to remake New York City—and who might also be connected to the recent death of Jack’s punk rock mentor. Along the way, Jack encounters a cast of colorful characters, including a bewitching, quick-witted scenester who favors dressing in a nurse’s outfit, a monstrous hired killer with a devotion to both figure skating and edged weapons, a deranged if prophetic postwar novelist, and a tough-talking cop who fancies himself a retro-cool icon of the homicide squad but is harboring a surprising secret.

No One Left to Come Looking for You is a page-turning suspense novel that also serves as a love letter to a bygone era of New York City where young artists could still afford to chase their dreams.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Coming home to my era of Manhattan living in this story was a pleasure. It has Author Lipsyte's requisite snarky, biting wit. It felt like I was back in the after-hours club post-Save the Robots listening to the coke-fueled motormouthing. Oh my...I've said too much.

But it's true, this is the way it felt, and looked, and even smelled.

What I think makes this a good read, then, is its way of being in harmony with my own memories. It's an evocation of a vanished time and place. So how will it hit someone whose memories aren't like mine?

Right on the funny bone.

Later, we go get a drink at the Jew-Hater's bar.

The merry old pogromist, with his lovely shock of alabaster hair and craggy fascist visage, pours us free shots with our beers. Maybe he means to lubricate his audience.

"The Yids, they cut the penis," he says, casual, as though relaying news of an off-season baseball trade. ... "God makes people perfect. The penis, perfect. Why cut it up? Only the Yid thinks of that."

The bland face of evil, played for a few yuks...if you're going to work as this book's audience, you'll need to see that as humor. Offensive and crass and humorous.

Otherwise this isn't a story I think you'll get into. And you'll need to want to get into it...the blizzard at the end of the book needs to feel like we felt then, a suspended moment of possibility, a confusing intersection of many corners all hidden behind drifts and shockingly cold winds forcing your face away from the way you started out wanting to go. That moment in the narrator's life was one where there were many ways to go. He went too far away from the one he thought he wanted and it took a blizzard to show him where he had to be.

Author Lipsyte won't be going back to the days of wine and roses, as the old saying has it; he's fifty-four now, and this story just couldn't come from anyone not fifty-four. My viewpoint, ten years ahead of him, was different enough to make this fun trip to a time I loved familiar enough. I wouldn't have seen it from this angle but it was still speaking to me.

Over forty-five? Give this a read today. What else is that gift card for if not to try to time travel? show less

Most artists would be sorry to hear that their work looked like a steaming plate of poop, but not Paul McCarthy. Because that's exactly what he's drawn. In a woodbound portfolio scribbled and annotated ("finger," "smeel my assh hul hole") in what looks like the handwriting of a teenage boy, everything that isn't scatological is phallic or violent. Photographs, including documentation of his sculptures, raise the production values and (sometimes) lower the NC-17 rating. And his commentaries show more on the work clarify his intentions: if Disney-esque model dwarves are "emissaries from multinational conglomerates come to colonize our dreams," McCarthy's mission must be, in part, recovering those dreams and restoring the taboo to our minds. Mission accomplished. McCarthy, born in Salt Lake City in 1945 and a longtime resident of Los Angeles, has had recent major solo shows at Stockholm's Moderna Museet, New York's New Museum and the Tate Modern in London. show less

Sam Lipsyte, author of the cult favorite Home Land, is back in fine form with his third novel. In The Ask, Milo Burke is a not-very-lovable loser (think Paul Giamatti playing him in the movie, and you'll get the idea), who's approaching middle age with nothing much to show for it but a bachelor's degree, a failed career as an artist, and a crummy job as a development officer at Mediocre University in New York City. Unfortunately for Milo, he's never quite perfected the art of The Ask -- the show more delicate process of cultivating potential donors for large sums of money. Even more unfortunately, Milo loses his temper with the bitchy daughter of an Ask (the word is also a noun), and his crummy job evaporates. This state of affairs doesn't help his marriage, which has stagnated into one of those where the parties can't seem to remember why they got together in the first place.

Lipsyte spins this scenario into a comic narrative that somehow manages to incorporate internet zillionaires, meth freaks, helicopter parenting, the Iraq War, and Astoria without ever coming close to losing its footing. To make matters even better, Lipsyte is more than capable of coming up with full paragraphs that will make you do a double take just to admire them. For example, about the aftermath of a home invasion robbery:

"But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves."

And if you're looking for a redemptive narrative of dawning acceptance and enlightenment, look elsewhere, because Lipsyte doesn't make it easy on himself, or on the reader, by taking the easy way out at the end of this one. Fortunately for Lipstye's audience, neither he nor and Milo buys into the rose-colored, easy-listening pablum of works like American Beauty. This book hurts at the end, but it's worth it. show less