Home Land

Rating:
Summary: A Cautionary Note
Review: Home Land should be read in private, not because of the secret pleasures enjoyed by Sam Lipsyte's characters (on the Internet or with one another), but because of the boisterous hilarity that explodes from the reader - uncontrolled mirth seems to frighten strangers in public places even when brought on by wonderful writing. Lipsyte's people make the weird ordinary and the ordinary obscene.

Rating:
Summary: SWEET LIPSYTES' BAADASSSSS SONG: MASTERPIECE
Review: If you like your books dark, and your meat rare, this one is for you. If you like watching Dr. Phil, while perusing Chicken Soup for your simpleton soul, this is not the one for you.

HOMELAND is infectious. Lipsyte is a master of style, and he brings everyone's worst nightmare--the loser, the left-behind--to vivid life in the form of Lewis Miner. O the horrors of his downward spiral. Narrating our tale, Miner is the most troublingly likeable maniac since Humbert Humbert.

Read the book. Have the pleasure. Treat yourself.

Rating:
Summary: Lipsyte Has Arrived
Review: Sam Lipsyte sees things more clearly than most writers, and he doesn't flinch. What is portrayed by even his admirers as over-the-top satire strikes me as a dead-on adumbration of every value Americans hold dear, every piety we utter, every meaningless counter that marks our status. While the marvelous conceit of this book--letters to a alumni newsletter--has been recognized and applauded, what hasn't really been remarked upon is that in firing off his jeremiads, Lewis Miner's is a voice speaking into a void. There is no wise and simple man in his Connemara clothes waiting for Lewis's epistles. This book is funny, yes: laugh out loud funny. But it is also dark, a blending of the intense and somber tones of VENUS DRIVE with the brighter and more detached comedy of THE SUBJECT STEVE. It is also very wise: Lipsyte posits no solution to the waste he portrays, no utopian ideal to which his book serves as an illustration of its dystopic opposite. Yet Lewis Miner leaves us with hope, he threads his way through the sheer, glittering, noisy, cacophanously glorious surface of Lipsyte's book to find his way to a sort of self-knowledge. Buy the book.

Rating:
Summary: Top Ten for the 21st Century
Review: The first time I read Sam Lipsyte's Home Land, I read it in one sitting. The second time, I had to stop every few pages, call a friend, and read some unbelievably hilarious (or utterly heartbreaking) passage aloud. (I mean, how else would I know I'd really read it? 'Cause, if I hadn't read Lipsyte's last novel, The Subject Steve, too, I don't think I'd believe that anyone alive could actually write like this). Last week, my local bookstores ran out of copies of this handsomely bound novel before I ran out of well-deserving friends to give it too. But a book this good isn't going anywhere, anytime soon.

All the same, do yourself a favor and buy a copy today-it's prozac on the page, truer than life, and the funniest stuff since Ali G came out on DVD. Thanks, Sam, for loving us enough to write this seriously, stupendously wonderful book!

Rating:
Summary: No Security
Review: There may be a novelist out there as funny as Sam Lipsyte, and maybe a few who can produce characters who will break your heart as tenderly, but probably not. There is absolutely no one else who can do both together so beautifully. Lewis Miner's absurdly honest, appalling, wonderful updates to his New Jersey high school alumni bulletin come in the sort of voice writers dream of creating, if they're smart enough to dream dreams like that--a voice unlike any other. The updates, concerning Lewis's thumbless best friend, his lost love who preferred her own brother, and the constant disgrace of being an American who did not, as he says, pan out, are hilarious, but what makes them so extraordinary is Lipsyte's construction of a new sort of language: his sentences rip English apart and put it back together in strange, playful configurations that make it mean more, not less. He's a master of a sort of comedy that keeps you laughing so hard you can't quite figure out when you began crying, but it doesn't matter, because by now you're laughing again.



Rating:
Summary: best book of 2005.
Review: you know that feeling when you've just read a book so great and you wake up the next day and wish you'd never read it so you could experience it for the first time again? I do. Damn you, Sam Lipsyte, who ever you are, man out there writing great books and now what am I suppose to do? wait for the next one? Read it again? that's exactly what I"m going to do.