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FILM REVIEW: Please Give
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4.17.10
CONCERT REVIEW: Jakob Dylan at the Egg, Albany, N.Y.
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4.16.10
BOOK REVIEW: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Review by Seth Rogovoy of Berkshire Living Magazine
4.16.10
MUSIC REVIEW: Shawn Colvin at the Mahaiwe
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12.29.08
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BOOK REVIEW: The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
4.16.10
The Ask
by Sam Lipsyte
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review by Seth Rogovoy
When was the last time you read an American novel narrated by a perfectly calibrated, put-upon American everyman who was wholly unlikable but hysterically and mischievously funny, the tool of an author who found the perfect narrative setting -- in this case, a college development office -- from which to skewer and satirize the entirety of American culture?
Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask put me in mind of nothing less than Joseph Heller’s two great works of literary and cultural satire, Catch-22 and Something Happened. In The Ask, everything and everyone is evil and stupid in the most banal of ways -- simply because the culture calls upon everyone to act contrary to the way they know things should be. It’s not only that politically correctness has run amok; it’s that social relationships, even down to the nuclear family, have been shattered and atomized and digitized and because everything has been blown up into hyper-reality when there’s no core reality.
The Ask tells an utterly ridiculous story featuring ridiculous people who are all the object of ridicule at their own hands and at the hands of their creator, Lipsyte. That the story is so real, and that you can’t put it down, makes it all the more urgent and of our time. I can’t think of another novel that so captures this cultural, economic, social, and political moment in America than Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask.
Isn’t this what we want from our art, our literature?
Seth Rogovoy is Berkshire Living's award-winning editor-in-chief and cultural critic.
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