The Ask

The Ask, by Sam Lipsyte, is a familiar kind of novel--it details the unraveling of a man, as his professional and personal lives crash around him. All the while, though, he dazzles us with his reflections on the culture of his time, and though his faults are numerous and apparent, we can't help but like him.

Lipsyte's protagonist is Milo Burke, who works for a New York college in the development office, which basically means he solicits donors. These potential donors are referred to as "asks," and their donations as "gives." But, as the book begins, he tells off the spoiled daughter of one of the donors and is fired. An old college friend, Purdy Stuart, now wealthy, offers him a chance of redemption, but to do it he has to do something a little shady--act as the go-between Purdy and his grown son from a long-ago relationship, a son he would like to keep hidden from his wife. This son turns out to be an Iraqi war vet with two artificial legs and a serious chip on his shoulder.

I loved The Ask on one level, and that is the virtuosic use of language. Where the book was wanting was its story. I wasn't really propelled forward by the plot, and at times Milo was so pathetic it was hard to really care about him. There was a section when he was walking his young son toward an impromptu lunch meeting with his wife, where he was describing how happy he was, that you knew the boom was about to fall. Sure enough, boom! he sees his wife with another man.

But there are paragraphs that absolutely sing, especially those that perfectly capture a certain way of life. I liked this one, about New York salad bars: "The schizophrenic glee with which you could load your plastic shell with spinach salad, pork fried rice, turkey with cranberry, chicken with pesto, curried yams, clams casino, bread sticks, and yogurt, pay for it by the pound, this farm feed for human animals in black pantsuits and pleated chinos, aminals whose enclosure included the entire island of Manhattan, this sensation I treasured deeply, greasily."

And I don't know if I've read anything so short that summed up the current state of television viewing: "We jumped from pundit to pundit, then on to basketball, Albanian cooking, endangered voles, America's Top Topiary Designers, America's Toughest Back-up Generators, The Amazing Class Struggle, the catfish channel, a show called, simply, Airstrikes!"

There's a long passage in which Milo pitches an idea for a reality show where accomplished chefs prepare last meals for death-row inmates. The woman, an old acquaintance from college, listens to his idea and then off the top of her head crafts what the show would be like. The writing is breathtaking, the satire scathing. I wouldn't be surprised to see this show on the air within the year.