A Life In Gags
Sam Lipsyte, The Fun Parts
Granta, 240pp, £12.99, ISBN 9781847088031
reviewed by Gee Williams
For a start, the title of Sam Lipsyte’s new short fiction collection, The Fun Parts, niggled me throughout a first reading. All fun? Surely not?
Like most of the male protagonists in these thirteen stories – and even when given ladybits and called Tovah, as in ‘The Climber Room’, they are men – Mr Lipsyte seems to have had a troubled history, especially publishing wise. One of his novels, he claims, was rejected 30 times. Now, though, he’s been lionised as the new Joseph Heller, and the press release claims his voice ‘will define the next decade.’ And as he teaches other people how to do the same at Columbia University, you would expect plenty of evidence of his trade left for the Critical Science Investigation team. A flint strike on bare bone, an O. Henry trace to get excited over: but his work is none the worse for that.
The best and my favourite piece, ‘This Appointment Occurs in the Past’ has ransacked an entire Gerstner tool chest. It’s a pun-ridden few minutes, an old theme park ride of exposition, climax and resolution. But so-o naughty. You’re recruited and your Arts and Humanities politesse is trampled. ‘My G-God,’ your stomach stutters and finally, when you stumble off, you’re either crying ‘Literary date rape!’ or ‘What a mildly amusing homoerotic riposte to Conrad’s The Duellists!’ Some people claim to find Lipsyte hilarious to the point of blackout, but then everyone has their own burden.
It won’t be long before commentators name and begin mapping Lipsyteworld. The stories are alley-metropolitan in outlook and as limited in aspiration as Austen’s little bit (two inches wide) of ivory. That derided freaky teenager we know and don’t love from his lead in School Massacre III narrates ‘The Dungeon Master’. In ‘Nate’s Pain Is Now’ the author of Bang the Dope Slowly, a purgatory memoir, is another workman-like character who brings to my mind an Audenesque freeze-frame: the raddled roué searching front row at his own reading for that young Adonis to sleep with. (Also the poet in close-up staring at the sink he’s peed in till it reeks.) In the same story Lipsyte finesses Poverty Porn into Talent Poverty Porn before descending into farce and a quipfest: Nate tries to take down his rival by saying ‘I have no idea why he qualifies as a punk.’ It’s one of those moments you want to ask the writer:
Do you know what you’re doing?
Do ya Sam, Do ya? Aw, Jeez, Sam… Well OK…
You pick up fallen icons – ball players, lushwriters, boxers – so try this one on for size: Bob Monkhouse, English comic, died ten years back. Cancer had made an old man of him but Teenage Bob got expelled from public school – he didn’t mind because he was already writing and cartooning for The Beano among others. One liners for Bob Hope came after and, running parallel, his own in-house porno ‘novelettes’ – Harlem Hotspots – he brought out a crusty one hundred of them, to be found in a lockbox someday at an unexpected location – that’s my guess. What else could he do?
He acted in The Boys from Syracuse, was sacked from TV’s most popular gameshow, reinstated, was funny for money like forever. In fact what could he not do? And now he finds himself turned into Radiohead’s album cover of The Bends: a death mask. Still the story’s not with Bob, the story’s with The Man Who Stole Bob Monkhouses’s Joke Book the year The Bends came out. Same year. A muscleflex of the moral continuum got the thief coppered for ransoming it. But through all his three-quarter century while Bob wrote and drew and sang and published and did stand-up and acted and got sacked and got reinstated – his two replacements were fuckwits in comparison to Bob and the advertisers said who cares about taking bribes get Bob back you TV dicks – all those years Bob just wanted to work on his joke book. Then it went AWOL. Then it came back and was the last big Bob story. It was a fucking book of gags, Sam, sorry, I mean Bob. He called them, ‘my babies.’ The Gags. That shit’ll kill ya, Bob- oh, it has.
But Bob, I mean, Sam, The Fun Parts … it niggled me and I know why now. A life in gags will alienate even your broodiest, horniest, most-prolix Muse. Try calling John’s Cousin from your own ‘The Worm In Philly’. It’s the modernist meta-fictional must-do anyhow – and if you remember, he does say ‘I can help.’
Like most of the male protagonists in these thirteen stories – and even when given ladybits and called Tovah, as in ‘The Climber Room’, they are men – Mr Lipsyte seems to have had a troubled history, especially publishing wise. One of his novels, he claims, was rejected 30 times. Now, though, he’s been lionised as the new Joseph Heller, and the press release claims his voice ‘will define the next decade.’ And as he teaches other people how to do the same at Columbia University, you would expect plenty of evidence of his trade left for the Critical Science Investigation team. A flint strike on bare bone, an O. Henry trace to get excited over: but his work is none the worse for that.
The best and my favourite piece, ‘This Appointment Occurs in the Past’ has ransacked an entire Gerstner tool chest. It’s a pun-ridden few minutes, an old theme park ride of exposition, climax and resolution. But so-o naughty. You’re recruited and your Arts and Humanities politesse is trampled. ‘My G-God,’ your stomach stutters and finally, when you stumble off, you’re either crying ‘Literary date rape!’ or ‘What a mildly amusing homoerotic riposte to Conrad’s The Duellists!’ Some people claim to find Lipsyte hilarious to the point of blackout, but then everyone has their own burden.
It won’t be long before commentators name and begin mapping Lipsyteworld. The stories are alley-metropolitan in outlook and as limited in aspiration as Austen’s little bit (two inches wide) of ivory. That derided freaky teenager we know and don’t love from his lead in School Massacre III narrates ‘The Dungeon Master’. In ‘Nate’s Pain Is Now’ the author of Bang the Dope Slowly, a purgatory memoir, is another workman-like character who brings to my mind an Audenesque freeze-frame: the raddled roué searching front row at his own reading for that young Adonis to sleep with. (Also the poet in close-up staring at the sink he’s peed in till it reeks.) In the same story Lipsyte finesses Poverty Porn into Talent Poverty Porn before descending into farce and a quipfest: Nate tries to take down his rival by saying ‘I have no idea why he qualifies as a punk.’ It’s one of those moments you want to ask the writer:
Do you know what you’re doing?
Do ya Sam, Do ya? Aw, Jeez, Sam… Well OK…
You pick up fallen icons – ball players, lushwriters, boxers – so try this one on for size: Bob Monkhouse, English comic, died ten years back. Cancer had made an old man of him but Teenage Bob got expelled from public school – he didn’t mind because he was already writing and cartooning for The Beano among others. One liners for Bob Hope came after and, running parallel, his own in-house porno ‘novelettes’ – Harlem Hotspots – he brought out a crusty one hundred of them, to be found in a lockbox someday at an unexpected location – that’s my guess. What else could he do?
He acted in The Boys from Syracuse, was sacked from TV’s most popular gameshow, reinstated, was funny for money like forever. In fact what could he not do? And now he finds himself turned into Radiohead’s album cover of The Bends: a death mask. Still the story’s not with Bob, the story’s with The Man Who Stole Bob Monkhouses’s Joke Book the year The Bends came out. Same year. A muscleflex of the moral continuum got the thief coppered for ransoming it. But through all his three-quarter century while Bob wrote and drew and sang and published and did stand-up and acted and got sacked and got reinstated – his two replacements were fuckwits in comparison to Bob and the advertisers said who cares about taking bribes get Bob back you TV dicks – all those years Bob just wanted to work on his joke book. Then it went AWOL. Then it came back and was the last big Bob story. It was a fucking book of gags, Sam, sorry, I mean Bob. He called them, ‘my babies.’ The Gags. That shit’ll kill ya, Bob- oh, it has.
But Bob, I mean, Sam, The Fun Parts … it niggled me and I know why now. A life in gags will alienate even your broodiest, horniest, most-prolix Muse. Try calling John’s Cousin from your own ‘The Worm In Philly’. It’s the modernist meta-fictional must-do anyhow – and if you remember, he does say ‘I can help.’