The Ask
A Novel
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The Ask
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ナレーター：
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Sam Lipsyte
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著者：
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Sam Lipsyte
このコンテンツについて
From the author of Home Land and Venus Drive comes Sam Lipsyte's searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel, The Ask.
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has "not been developing": after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major "ask"—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo's involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo's sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the "give" won't come cheap.
Probing many themes— or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is a burst of genius by an author who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.
批評家のレビュー
“If you've heard anything about Sam Lipsyte, you've probably heard that he's funny. Scabrously, deliriously, piss-yourself funny (his characters would no doubt find a dirtier, and funnier, way of putting it), drawing audible snorts even from the kind of people, such as the people in his novels, who are way too cool to laugh out loud . . . Lipsyte's prose arrows fly with gloriously weird spin, tracing punch-drunk curlicues before hitting their marks--or landing in some weird alternate.” —Jennifer Schuessler, The New York Review of Books
“Lipsyte's brand of absurdity is deeply rooted in the now. The recession, text messaging, reality TV--all are up for grabs. What's particularly effective is Lipsyte's acerbic yet subtle approach . . . But he's never simply bitter; one can always sense a yearning in this book, even at its most acidic moments.” —Kimberly King Parsons, Time Out New York (five stars)
“With this novel, Mr. Lipsyte has proven himself to be one of the most unapologetic voices of contemporary literature. He mines the sexual frustration of Philip Roth, combines it with the paranoia of Don DeLillo and fills the space in between with a cast of characters as absurd and enigmatic as anything in a Thomas Pynchon novel . . . The Ask is a hilarious book about failure; a scathing unhappy comedy obsessed with a culture that's obsessed with obsessions.” —Michael Miller, The New York Observer
Audible制作部より
How is it that Sam Lipsyte has not killed himself? This is a writer whose deeply intelligent sense of black comedy is a direct descendant from the bitter wellsprings of David Foster Wallace and John Kennedy Toole, except firmly anchored in realism. Like an extended outtake from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or A Confederacy of Dunces that substitutes the corporate end of academia for New Orleans, Lipsyte’s third novel is destined to delight in a way his previous two books did not. In fairness to Lipsyte, probably his initially bright career trajectory was cut short by the fact that his first book was released on 9/11, so reviewers had other things to think about. But it is precisely his experience with this type of tragic coincidence that informs the lives of his characters so well.
Lipsyte’s double-duty as narrator for his book leaves us doubly blessed. Told from the perspective of Milo Burke, a finder of funding at a mediocre school in New York, Lipsyte’s uncanny ear for dialogue really shines as Milo tries to remain respectably under the radar of a militaristic dean, sufficiently snooty in the company of an ideas tycoon with whom he went to art school, convincingly authoritative under the scrutiny of his toddler of terror, and attentively supportive to his cheating wife. Once upon a time, Milo was going to be a successful painter. But Milo is now basically an over-educated drone just trying to eke out a mildly respectable and not-too-schmucky sustainable life for himself and his crumbling family. His comparatively big break comes when an old acquaintance is interested in making a hefty donation to Milo’s school. If Milo can make it happen, he’ll be a hero. But Milo is not good at making things happen, or at being a hero. He is, at best, a wonderful loser.
The cadences of the assorted conversations going on in this book are so absolutely real that you’ll wonder if Lipsyte has been spying on you. He perfectly captures the despairing dialogue between a parent about to crack and a child who oscillates between naive violence, ceaseless rhetorical questioning, and practical selfishness. These traits are interestingly mirrored in the witty back and forths between Milo and Don. Don is the secret love child of Milo’s old acquaintance, and keeping Don happily under wraps is what Milo will have to do in exchange for securing his big donation. But Don is an unhappy smack junkie who lost both legs in Iraq, and he is not too interested in daddy’s hush money.
Lipsyte does not deliver a happy ending for anyone, because happy endings do not reflect reality, but he does deliver a satisfyingly solid treatise on the joyous, mysterious failure that is our maddeningly complex pursuit of staying alive. Lipsyte as author is no holds barred, but Lipsyte as narrator voices not one depressing note. You will want to cry, but you will laugh instead and hope that Sam Lipsyte lives long enough to deliver many more works of such profoundly true meditations on our frail modern life. Megan Volpert