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3.13 AVERAGE
3.13 AVERAGE
I absolutely did not like this book. It was crass, rude, and the satire was not even funny. I would not recommend it.
Any novel that opens with references to demented pimps, whoremasters, and dick-smacking the Soviets is fine by me.
Well written but the dark humor gets a little depressing toward the end.
One of those novels where the narrator starts in a bad place and just slides downhill throughout the entire book - ending up in a worse place. Milo is a well-educated former painter who now works as a fundraiser for a second-rate, expensive, private college in New York City. He gets fired, but might have a chance to get his job back if he can land a big donation to the college from a man who happens to be one of his old college friends (who has gone on to much greater dot-com success). Oh, and Milo's wife is having an affair and his four-year-old son is somewhat incomprehensible and slightly unlovable. The writing in this is great but the story just slides along until the end.
I read something not too long ago talking about how most authors are terrified and/or unable to write about modern life. One example cited was Cormac McCarthy, who while widely celebrated, sets his books in the distant past (or future). Not to pick on McCarthy because virtually all authors do it. Even when they set it in the present, they seem to find ways to escape, ignore, or elide the type of modernity that is reality for so many people. Here I'm thinking of, for instance, Philip Roth and his small-town professors.
Where are all the books about people working office jobs? Maybe they're out there but I just never hear about them. It is amazing how much of a role work plays in our lives and how little in plays in the lives of fictional characters. I suppose even the most literary of fiction can't escape it escapist roots.
All of which is a long rambling way to say that I really like what Lipsyte tries to do in The Ask. I give him an A+ for effort, for vision, for chutzpah.
However, the execution has enough flaws to bring my final rating down considerably. Lipsyte just goes over the top one time too many for me to get wholly behind this book. Milo is a loser, I get it, but the sheer number of bizarre loser episodes seem to push this from tragedy to farce. (There's also an underlying tension about the tone of the book; in the early parts you think it is a kind of dark comedy but other parts veer wildly.) The finger thing while crashing at Horace's, the cafe pick-up, things like that feel out of place to me.
There's a passage late in the book that feels like some meta-dismissal to this argument. Milo says, "No, I mean if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?"
Horace replies, "I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it."
It's almost like Lipsyte is trying to convince me that I am wasting my time reading this book. Or using reverse-psychology to convince you to finish reading it.
Where are all the books about people working office jobs? Maybe they're out there but I just never hear about them. It is amazing how much of a role work plays in our lives and how little in plays in the lives of fictional characters. I suppose even the most literary of fiction can't escape it escapist roots.
All of which is a long rambling way to say that I really like what Lipsyte tries to do in The Ask. I give him an A+ for effort, for vision, for chutzpah.
However, the execution has enough flaws to bring my final rating down considerably. Lipsyte just goes over the top one time too many for me to get wholly behind this book. Milo is a loser, I get it, but the sheer number of bizarre loser episodes seem to push this from tragedy to farce. (There's also an underlying tension about the tone of the book; in the early parts you think it is a kind of dark comedy but other parts veer wildly.) The finger thing while crashing at Horace's, the cafe pick-up, things like that feel out of place to me.
There's a passage late in the book that feels like some meta-dismissal to this argument. Milo says, "No, I mean if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?"
Horace replies, "I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it."
It's almost like Lipsyte is trying to convince me that I am wasting my time reading this book. Or using reverse-psychology to convince you to finish reading it.
funny
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
No
Loveable characters:
No
Diverse cast of characters:
No
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
bleh...Lipsyte is obviously an excellent writing but it was actually a bit of a slog for me to get through this. I think my biggest issue is that I was just very annoyed by the main character. It was a struggle for me to care about what he was experiencing. It's one thing to not like a protagonist in a novel, I can live with that. But to be completely ambivalent about them? That's a difficult thing to overcome. Maybe that was the whole point? If so, it was more than I could overcome.
It is what the reviews say it is: a darkly funny albeit profane, vulgar and very, very bitter tour de force satire. There are lines that are hilarious. There are lines (often the same ones) that provoke sheer envy.
I will also say that I didn't find the plot as shaggy as some have -- there's enough there. The arcs arc and the threads all come together. It suffers, perhaps, because the portrayals of women are on the thin side. And one wishes for just a bit more out of Milo, the un-hero. But then again the funny comes from the depths and the dregs he sinks too and swallows.
I will also say that I didn't find the plot as shaggy as some have -- there's enough there. The arcs arc and the threads all come together. It suffers, perhaps, because the portrayals of women are on the thin side. And one wishes for just a bit more out of Milo, the un-hero. But then again the funny comes from the depths and the dregs he sinks too and swallows.
The Ask is a somewhat discombobulated tale of a confused individual who is mistakenly entitled and still manages to waste that entitlement, nevertheless!
It starts off meandering and a little all over, but soon settles down into a steady pace. Our protagonist, Milo Burke, works for the fine arts endowment program of a nonprofit university and he’s not good at it. At all. In fact, he pretty much sucks at it. He has held multiple jobs before finding his latest vocation, but all those too are littered with failures and disappointments of varying degrees. He is figuratively and literally wandering pretty much aimlessly along when an old acquaintance reaches out to him.
It’s a little like seeing a wobbly spinning top stabilize into a rock solid upright position. You realize that all those initial funny quibbles and one-liners are just a lead-in to the actual situation which begins to unfold when Milo meets Purdy. Suddenly a lot of new characters find their way into the story, the entire landscape expands, backstories begin to emerge, characters begin to form and the plot begins to appear - and thicken.
The way the author handles the story makes it seem less serious than most other such stories would have been, and IMHO that makes for easier reading and more empathizing. The life of Milo and his family are shown in colorful, short but delicious interactions, each bringing up another aspect of Milo’s stunted personality. The best thing about his story is his own belief that he is too good for all this, and can actually choose to be much better and better off- he’s just not interested, he keeps telling himself.
And that makes for some ironic hilarity.
Purdy and Don add some real complexity to Milo’s storyline, but Milo still doesn’t get any wiser. He continues to complain about how he is being given the short stick all the time, and how he should (or could, should he choose to!!) get a better deal out of all of this. He is proud of his efforts, though he is hardly aware what exactly those efforts are for, and so he keeps repeating to himself he doesn’t care.
All said and done, this is a tale of misplaced entitlement, of the self-proclaimed 0.5%, who aren’t really even the 5%. He doesn’t seem to know the difference between entitlement and deserving, between privilege and expectation.
This is a bleak, somewhat dark comedy that drives home the message that no matter how bad things are, always remember they could have been much worse, that there are always others out there who’ve had it much worse. So stop complaining. I guess somewhere there’s an implicit follow-up message that for every moment you spend complaining, you are missing out on being happy about what you’re blessed with. Not sure if Milo gets it even at the end.
It starts off meandering and a little all over, but soon settles down into a steady pace. Our protagonist, Milo Burke, works for the fine arts endowment program of a nonprofit university and he’s not good at it. At all. In fact, he pretty much sucks at it. He has held multiple jobs before finding his latest vocation, but all those too are littered with failures and disappointments of varying degrees. He is figuratively and literally wandering pretty much aimlessly along when an old acquaintance reaches out to him.
It’s a little like seeing a wobbly spinning top stabilize into a rock solid upright position. You realize that all those initial funny quibbles and one-liners are just a lead-in to the actual situation which begins to unfold when Milo meets Purdy. Suddenly a lot of new characters find their way into the story, the entire landscape expands, backstories begin to emerge, characters begin to form and the plot begins to appear - and thicken.
The way the author handles the story makes it seem less serious than most other such stories would have been, and IMHO that makes for easier reading and more empathizing. The life of Milo and his family are shown in colorful, short but delicious interactions, each bringing up another aspect of Milo’s stunted personality. The best thing about his story is his own belief that he is too good for all this, and can actually choose to be much better and better off- he’s just not interested, he keeps telling himself.
And that makes for some ironic hilarity.
Purdy and Don add some real complexity to Milo’s storyline, but Milo still doesn’t get any wiser. He continues to complain about how he is being given the short stick all the time, and how he should (or could, should he choose to!!) get a better deal out of all of this. He is proud of his efforts, though he is hardly aware what exactly those efforts are for, and so he keeps repeating to himself he doesn’t care.
All said and done, this is a tale of misplaced entitlement, of the self-proclaimed 0.5%, who aren’t really even the 5%. He doesn’t seem to know the difference between entitlement and deserving, between privilege and expectation.
This is a bleak, somewhat dark comedy that drives home the message that no matter how bad things are, always remember they could have been much worse, that there are always others out there who’ve had it much worse. So stop complaining. I guess somewhere there’s an implicit follow-up message that for every moment you spend complaining, you are missing out on being happy about what you’re blessed with. Not sure if Milo gets it even at the end.