America Agonistes - Sam Lipsyte’s ‘The Ask’
- Nick Terrell
The Ask by Sam Lipsyte
Picador. 296 pages. $Au 29.99
“Throughout my whole life I was constantly finding my place taken, perhaps because I did not look for my place where I should have done.” Turgenev - ‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’
Who, in this age of late, post or undead capitalism is more superfluous than the aspiring artist? Who promises the least likely return, the lowest work-to-profit ratio and the highest likelihood of redundancy? With their seedling talents having barely pushed through the heavy sod, yet to produce any mature, robust or arresting foliage, the aspiring artist is always on the brink of nonentity. Ignored, ambitious, over-astute of every hierarchy of success, these are figures who cherish their marginalisation as the antecedent to rich rewards, while also deeply loathing it as the material evidence of their unrequited pretension.
Superfluous Milo Burke, unwanted as the saviour of painting, has shouldered the burden of his lost illusions. Every day he carries that burden with him to his workplace, where he stalks potential donors (‘asks’) on behalf of Mediocre University.
Milo is uninspired, disliked by his colleagues and losing ground to the office temp. One morning, a painting student infiltrates the philanthropy sector to preen and complain. As the daughter of a man who donated the university’s observatory, she is claiming her right to special treatment. In the process she manages too pointedly to “reify [Milo’s] servility” and he snaps. “I should have just surrendered, cinched the entitled scion her little pouch of entitlement … done my duty.” Instead, like many of his superfluous predecessors, Milo makes a futile stand. It plays out to no one’s detriment but his own. Milo kicks against the forces conspiring to belittle his great soul, but his self-assertion merely brings him face to face with his inconsequence and, worse than that, his expendability. “My words contained nothing an arrogant, talentless, daddy-damaged waif wants to hear about herself.” The arrogant, daddy-damaged waif sics her daddy on Milo and before the day is done, he has been jettisoned by Mediocre U.
Milo’s psychic limp becomes more pronounced as he begins to admit the emotional gulf that has developed between him and his wife Maura, along with the gulf that now yawns between who he is and who he’d wanted to be. Even Milo’s mother is reluctant to risk too much exposure to his deflated affect. She can spare little time, besides, from her age-defying routines of yogic oxygenation. For Milo’s mother, the word ‘grandchild’ is a cudgel. “This is my decade,” the septuagenarian confidently insists. At this point, the only thing keeping Milo from total capitulation is that he can’t find anyone willing to look after him.
After a brief period of drifting around his neighbourhood – a gentrifying borough in the process of ruination by people who wear the same category of sneakers and spectacles as Milo – and contending with the factional upheavals at his son’s childcare centre, Milo receives what looks to be a lifeline. A friend from his student days – days full of promise, when he was still a painter, “at least at parties” – is in a position to make a donation to Mediocre and he has requested that Milo handle the ask. Enter Purdy, the golden haired boy. Purdy is well liked, confident, benevolent and egalitarian; an inheritance-brat who had spent a passage of his extended adolescence mingling with the florid dramatis personae of Milo’s art school crowd.
Purdy wants to make a give, but he also has an ask which, for some reason, he feels Milo is well suited to fulfil. Purdy has come into his fortune, he is now grossly well-off and a successful man of business. His glamorous wife is undergoing IVF treatment and he will soon have his own heir to wreath in privilege. There is a problem though – he has a bastard son from a brief (she was poor), youthful romance. The bastard lovechild, Don, is an angry, disillusioned veteran of the Iraq war – a double amputee whose physical limp makes Milo’s psychic limp look something of a privilege. Milo is to play go-between and to protect Purdy’s interests while tending to Don’s financial demands. Milo is to work on Purdy while he works for Purdy. He is two times a flunkey now. But even as a paid troubleshooter, handling the moral waste of Purdy’s privileged negligence, Milo continues to float in a haze of docile acquiescence to the forces that have unmanned him.
In Milo’s neurotic self-doubt, his angst-ridden passivity, and his anti-hero schtick, Lipsyte is reincarnating a character type with a long tradition in the satire of identity and idealism. Gogol drew the first outlines, Turgenev formalised the conventions of reflexivity (‘The Diary of a Superfluous Man’) and Dostoevsky refined the psychological realities of the type in his Underground Man. These are fantastic, malformed creatures, floundering around the margins of polite society in a fug of self-infatuated abstraction. They inhabit the same kind of “pathetic hallucination of a life” as Milo; reality for them is a neglected, inhospitable realm, pale and uninspiring. Like Dostoevsky’s vain nonentities, Milo lives in “a fabulous and secret universe of the mind” (at least he would like to) and like his spiteful forebears he solaces himself with fantasies of future glory. In the particular slant of Milo’s aspirations and glory-hunger, Lipsyte invokes a vast tribe, ubiquitous to the modern urban landscape and economy, of under-utilised, tertiary-trained creatives.
Milo’s arrested adolescence, his unsatisfied mind, his vague, impotent dissent and his desire for a career as a successful artist are broadly representative traits. In capital cities all over the world, there are hordes of Milos, and for all of them, time marches on. After whiling away their youth nurturing romantic fancies of creative success and widespread renown, the evidence of their failure and their superfluity becomes too prolific to ignore. The dreamy aspirations which had insulated them against the hated idea of nonentity turn in an instant to a kind of hair shirt, and at every jarring encounter with their souring reality another layer of skin is rubbed away. Then there comes a point where the talismanic powers of that cherished idea of potential transforms into a cult of virtuous failure, of cherished integrity, of being better than the world, disdainful of success.
Still, what starts out as a sterile cynicism, with its roots in thwarted longing and untempered idealism, can form the platform for an overdue maturation. Once you realise you have become superfluous, you can make peace with your flaws. The Ask builds towards this point, Lipsyte even signposts the moment of crisis with an economical commentary from Milo’s colleague Horace: ”He figured out the world wasn’t all about him and he fainted.”
In the meantime, though, Milo has his wit, and a fair idea of the disdain he inspires in all the normal, pragmatic adults around him. And thanks to Lipsyte’s sardonic penetration and his well-honed comic rhythms, the wit he bestows on Milo does go a long way towards balancing the ledger against his many character flaws. It’s not just the deflective comedy and pre-emptive self-deprecation that keep Milo’s trespasses from telling against him. His adolescent idealism and the romantic ambitions he’s nurtured since youth do encode a lust for glory, but they also contain genuine and generalised benevolence. It wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world if Milo, with his vague, left-wing humanitarianism and his reverence for culture, were to gain a bit of clout. It’s not what Milo is that renders him comparatively endearing, it’s what he’s not. What he’s not, and not willing to become, is American. A certain type of American at any rate – the global caricature, the self-deifying wheeler-dealer. There’s something monastic or self-abnegating in the form Milo’s passive resistance to the conventional dynamics of whoremaster America, something both radical and benign.
II.
Addressing his current crises and confusion, as well as some pivotal episodes from the formation of his now crumbling self-image, Milo gives engaging and self-deprecating commentary and analysis. It is an active conversational style which could be read either as the deflective persiflage of an intractable narcissist or as the natural complement to an intellectually curious and ethically fertile attitude towards confusion, identity and responsibility. This style is also precarious – Milo’s narrative is a carefully orchestrated, tenuous composition that must read like spontaneous confession. Mostly, Lipsyte pulls it off – the syntax and punctuation of comic writing is performing best when it goes unnoticed. In a way, that’s a shame, because there’s a lot to appreciate when it’s done well. Lipsyte’s phrasing and rhythm ensure that momentum flows smoothly for the most part, but also carefully frames points of emphasis, pauses and punchlines.
Lipsyte’s writing conveys the mental gait of a sardonically critical mindset, always primed to lacerate or puncture any threats to a fragile self-esteem. Milo once had a reputation as a stylist of the rant, able to riff his way out of social invisibility. But his “eighties pomo raps” are now a thing of the past. His idiom has dated, his youthful assurance has faded, and he has been superceded as the source of astringent social commentary. His commentary has gone underground, The Ask’s first person narrative carries the rhythms of a sub-vocal comic patter.
Maybe the hangover would never leave, just hide from immediate detection, hide like a deep-cover hitman, some human killbot who works the graveyard shift at American Smelter, takes his family to mass every Sunday, until the moment the baddies flip his switch. Then my hangover, “activated” by further alcohol consumption, would return, step out of the shadows in surgical galoshses, press the muzzle of its silencer-engorged Ruger to my skull.
The Milo Sanction would be complete.
As far as public performances go, it’s Milo’s younger colleague, Horace – the office temp, the next-generation Milo, the replacement – who fires off The Ask’s opening sally. Milo’s first person narrative begins, tellingly, with some appropriated fireworks:
America, said Horace, the office temp, was a run-down and demented pimp. Our republic’s whoremaster days were through. Whither that frost-nerved, diamond-fanged hustler who’d stormed Normandy, dick-smacked the Soviets, turned out such firm emerging market flesh? Now our nation slumped in the corner of the pool hall, some gummy coot with a pint of Mad Dog and soggy yellow eyes, just another mark for the juvenile wolves.
The Ask begins, then, by casting a no-confidence vote towards the idea of America, and there are many more to follow. While hanging out in the local doughnut shop during his unemployed phase, Milo encounters a homeless regular, a man he has christened the kiddie-diddler. After the man leaves, Milo betrays his suspicions to the doughnut seller and receives a stern though conflicted reprimand: “He’s a good man. I just hate him.” Then he explains why:
“… He gets in the way of my lie. My lie for myself.
“Your lie?”
“That in America, things can be okay.”
“Why do you let him back?” I asked.
“It’s his store.”
“His store?”
“Well, was. Till he went nuts. Now his brother Tommy runs it. Not a very nice guy, Tommy. Lets his brother roam the streets. That’s not America.”
“Actually, that is America.” I said.
“True,” said Predrag, “but I don’t want to hear it.”
In Lipsyte’s America, then, the price of optimism is eternal vigilance – the mere idea of a just society is valued more highly than the truth. It’s hard to give much credence to the idea that America, or the idea of America, is any more rotten or compromised now than it always has been. And in a way, this is what Milo is saying here. At the same time, Lipsyte’s America is well stocked with the symptoms of decadence and the signs of a civilisation in decline. There are candy boutiques selling designer licorice, schism-ridden childcare collectives issuing pedagogical manifestoes, hordes of emerging artists living in apartment building car cages, and premium branded IVF clinics.
The Best Place was one of those establishments that signals the end of empire, or perhaps the advent of something much better than empire, at least to those who could afford it: spa facility, birthing center, archery gallery, breast milk bank, coffee shop. Who wouldn’t want to quaff a latte, or shoot a few quivers, during prodromal labor? If the mother to be wasn’t up to it, she could email JPEGs of her dilated cervix to her birthing community while her partner got a peel…
Milo’s cynicism about the land of the free is more than usually severe, perhaps, because he’s looking at his country through the lens of his personal disillusionment. If America is a basket case, then it’s not just him.
The parallel between another tradition in jeopardy – liberal humanities – is more directly stated.
…The whole game is poised for a gargantuan fall.”
“What game?” I said.
“Higher education. Of the liberal arts variety. The fine arts in particular. Times get tough, people want the practical. Even the rich start finding us superfluous. Well, they always think we’re superfluous, but when they’re feeling flush it doesn’t matter. You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man. But it’s a pleasure many don’t feel like splurging on these days.
There is a sting in the tail for Milo, “The whole deal’s in danger” his colleague concludes, “And maybe it should be. Look at you.” A society that brings forth and nurtures such superfluous creatures must surely be on the skids.
III.
The fact that Milo is not a man of action - not the one to seize the moment, rise above – is ultimately what allows him to disentangle himself from the aggressive, competitive and morally bankrupt America he comes to associate with his old friend and temporary benefactor. Here again, Milo is not as hopeless as Lipsyte initially encourages the reader to believe. Tallying up a comparative table of the various personified options for life in NYC 2010, Milo’s ultimate condition would rank fairly high on the axis of ethical proportion. To begin with, it may simply have been that Milo was too self-absorbed to actively exploit anyone, but as the novel progresses he shows a distinct and conscious lack of appetite for this path to self-realisation.
On the eve of his departure for college, Milo’s father presents him with a large knife with a carved, ornamental hilt. Milo is pleased, touched, but puzzled as well. What am I going to do with it at college, he asks. “Get drunk and wave it at some stuck up ass-holes. Brandish it. Show it to a girl”. The urban college equivalent, I suppose, to taking it hunting. Milo’s dad is a surly, impatient, philandering man, emotionally detached from his family. Worried by his son’s predilection for reading and daubing, he is reluctantly, awkwardly, passing on some phallic steel. Milo is ambivalent about this inheritance, he can’t quite gauge whether owning such a knife is edgy-bohemian-hip or cro-magnon-hick. Even after his father dies, a year or so later, and the knife becomes a grief trigger, he manages to partially disown it in a communal cutlery drawer, ultimately leaving it behind when he moves house.
It’s a clumsy inheritance, smuggling through a kind of lackadaisical symbolism (take it if you want it) around the idea of a cutting edge. Milo of course, lacks just that, and the knife reappears in his life to prove it to him. Returning to his former share-house for a party, he discovers his father’s knife still sitting at the bottom of that same cutlery drawer. The new residents explain it was there when they moved in, and when Milo tries to claim it back the household and the assembled party-goers refuse to acknowledge his claim. Milo has to surrender to the disapproving crowd of hipsters and while backing down he is already castigating himself as unworthy of the blade. The fact that he did not take the knife, he tells himself, shows that he had no right to it. It’s plainly more than just a knife then.
Throughout The Ask, Milo experiences a series of similar emasculations. Rejection confirms his sense of broader impotence, and his broader sense of impotence all but ensures rejection.
Milo is most comfortable in “the creeks and dales and low rolling slopes of universal disappointment.” He is seldom more secure than when he’s good-humouredly flagellating himself with the memories of some past shame (their implications are reassuringly unequivocal). He recalls, for example, a night when his student group-house was broken into by three hooded men armed with bats and a handgun. The housemates are rounded up in the lounge room where the gun wielding housebreaker guards them as the others ransack the house. Things look bad, the gunman is aggressive and erratic. As the housemates sit and wait Milo retreats into abstraction. Observing his own paralysis, savouring it as a sensation and a moral revelation (though one he won’t entirely own), it strikes him that he may finally have drifted “beyond any possibility of action.” Milo turns the break-in into another test of his capacity to assert himself as something more than a passive being of pure consciousness. The episode becomes the acid test for certain illusions he cherishes about himself. It’s his Lord Jim moment: the ship is going down, there’s a right way and a wrong way to meet the crisis, which will it be?
… a final tally, a statistical breakdown of this moment, did exist.
Future Apocalypse Guru: Smidgen of composure, ineffective diplomacy, intractable whininess.
Artistic Provocateur: Ineffectual response to threat, admirable behaviour under physical duress, unseemly and gratuitous assault on downed invader.
Larkish Frankfurtian: Frightened retreat into walls of self.
Marxist Feminist Who Fucked: Initial paralysis, subsequent display of courage.
Semi-Brain-Damage Crystal Tweaker: Valiant and focused response to threat.
Ruling-class Brat: Remarkable bravery and tactical leadership in face of threat.
Home Invaders: Bold initiative, bad intel, poor battle management.
Painting’s New Saviour: Utter cowardice, experienced as bodily paralysis in conjunction with what he would later describe , in an effort to steer the conversation away from actual events, a “bizarre floating sensation.”
Milo has internalised this episode as the confirmation of his inconsequence. He will later have to revisit some of these assessments, though not the assessment of himself.
…the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.
Lord Jim takes the leap. So, Milo carries a lot of ballast, he is trying to live down an array of personal failures but is hampered by his unshakeable interest in the gradual corrosion of his fondest aspirations and his idea of himself. His deprecation and self-pity console him, but this is because he is more interested in his inadequacies than he should be. His wounds are fascinating to him, so he keeps them fresh.
What’s going to break that circuit then? Dismayingly, but logically too I suppose, it is an act of violent rebellion against the relationships, values and the version of America that defined him as a superfluous man. Milo has to do what he can to get his metaphorical balls back.
IV.
In challenging the bona fides and the confidence of Imperial America, The Ask shadows some familiar territory. Milo Burke, shaken loose from financial and emotional security, slips into a kind of limbo – he is thrown off kilter from the regulating rhythms of the city and in a state of stunned impotence (a kind of strategic psychic equivalent to going limp to absorb a blow) he begins to re-evaluate his cherished ideas about himself, his ideas about success and his ideas about America. And each of these is shot-through with his confusion about the qualities and obligations (both genuine and bogus) that define masculinity. It could just be the common partnership with New York City (perhaps the pre-eminent world-historical figure of the last decade), but The Ask treads common ground with Joseph O’Neill’s highly praised ‘post-9/11 novel’, Netherland.
Like Milo Burke, Netherland’s Hans Van Den Broek has allowed himself to drift away from his wife and young son. Post 9/11 angst has shaken all his certainties, and in his confusion he has holed up in a psychic bunker of self-scrutiny, nostalgia and sentimentality. His wife turns her back on the souring promises of the US, but Hank chooses to stay in NYC. “Life itself had become disembodied. My family, the spine of my days, had crumbled. I was lost in invertebrate time.” A free agent, untethered, he allows himself to seep into layers of the city that had hitherto been conceptually cordoned off by his affluence and by the habits and conventions of upward mobility.
Without giving the outcome of either novel away, both authors conclude on a similar note. Having plumbed the depths of disembodiment - the loss of standing, conviction and self-esteem - and having drawn back the curtain on the murky dimensions of American opportunism, both O’Neill and Lipsyte leave the reader to ponder a remodelled ideal of masculine custodianship. It’s still a fact that these middle-class white men can choose to tread more softly because they don’t have to fight to survive, nevertheless, that they do make this choice does count for something. In this sense, these are novels of disillusioned enlightenment. Romances which, in the great tradition of nineteenth century realism, show ideals withering when forced into proximity with a reality that is simply and always ambivalent to our individual aspirations.
Lipsyte’s commentary on the frail delusions that sustain the idea of America tends to be cursory, a pat exchange or a neat cameo with broad national overtones, but this avoids both sentimentality and pomposity (two of O’Neill’s serious and serial offenses against good writing). Lipsyte made his name with brief comic novels, but he aimed, in The Ask, to trade off brevity for gravity. Framed by Lipsyte’s (and Milo’s) wry and satirical attitude to society’s ills, even the gravest of the many themes Milo encounters while falling out of love with himself are inflected with a cartoonish black comedy. Lipsyte’s comic instinct to skim across the surface (and let the depths register like a slow-detonating punchline) sees him well clear of the pitfalls of forced profundity.
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