Question Marked
There’s probably not a living American writer who has so comprehensively mined the comic possibilities of that particular anguished, hapless combination of the overeducated and the underachieving as Sam Lipsyte. Against all odds, his heroes refuse to succeed, and they and we are rewarded with the endlessly entertaining spectacle of their nonstop humiliation.
The Ask features Milo Burke—leave it to Lipsyte to hybridize Joseph Heller’s monster of systematized selfishness with the eighteenth-century humanist—of “the House of Wanker,” whose life hasn’t panned out, by which I mean he’s both spectator