Houston Southard
a name that looks so fake you'll care just as little to learn it's not
Sam Lipsyte - no one left to come looking for you
It's surprising to see one of the genre's knobbiest literary authors put out a pulpy plot. You might think it's chasing a mass audience, but this is no formulaic book, unless the formula is to write one original and unpretentiously funny sentence after another.
The book is set in 1993. Jack is the bassist in a band that’s ensconced in a boisterous if not quite thriving downtown scene, and he describes his musical entourage as a “scabrous, intermittently witty, post-skronk propulsion not unlike early Anal Gnosis.”
With 1st-person POV, Jack is exceptionally winning, combining Lipsyte’s characteristic debaucherous wit — playful, biting, verbally dexterous — with a sweet-natured, lovably pure, un-self-serious and only slightly doofus-y personality. It's a ragtag gang of unstrung detectives thrown into contact with some of the crooked political pimps and real estate barons the band lambasts in prior songs as they attempt to bring the bad guys to justice.
His breakout hit was powered by its bleak portrayal of middle-class suburban life. From today’s vantage, the book seems like one of the last relics of the long postwar era when literary novels’ most ubiquitous boogeymen were consumerism and suburban malaise.
His next book mined these concerns to great effect, perhaps to better effect than any other at the time, competing for space and primacy with the thickets of social analysis. Its characters launched into hyper-articulate riffs about society as un-self-consciously as musicals burst into song.
And the last installment before this one seemed less concerned about getting readers invested in the particular fates of its characters than to make broad points about tech barons, left-wing terrorism, the ultra-wealthy, the lure of selling out.
This is a smooth story without narrative bumps. The character who breaks into a spontaneous lecture at a dinner party is exactly the kind of person who would break out into a dinner party lecture. It doesn’t set out to diagnose all our political and social ills or make sense of our moment. But it’s also very smart and very funny. A slangy, brainy, crass, and occasionally touching wonder to read from start to finish.