Sam Lipsyte

The Ask

The Ask

The Subject Steve

Home Land

The Ask

The Subject Steve

Home Land

Home Land

Venus Drive

The Ask

Vice: The last nine months were probably overwhelming for you. You must have known The Ask was something special, but the response has been huge. Now that things have died down a bit, how are you feeling?

Sam Lipsyte:

Home Land

The Ask

Has all of the attention made you anxious? Are you worried it will affect your writing?

You’ve also experienced the other end of the spectrum. Your first novel was released on September 11, 2001, and numerous publishers rejected Home Land. I have no idea how this stuff works, but a lot of it seems arbitrary. How did things align differently with The Ask?

Home Land

Home Land

Home Land

The Ask

The Ask

Do you think that FSG will be your home in the States for the foreseeable future?

How do you feel about digital books and iPads and all the ways publishers are trying to reinvent their products? Is there hope that e-books will put a little more cash into authors’ pockets?

One thing we can count on is that marketing departments will have even more of an influence over what’s published once there’s a bigger digital marketplace. And that brings us back to Home Land. It arrived when this new way to sell books was on the rise. I get the feeling marketing departments didn’t know how to sum you up in a blurb, and that scared them.

Home Land

They were that stumped?

laughs

Does your age have anything to do with it? I feel like a few years ago, when you were shopping around Home Land, there was some sort of publishing purgatory authors had to deal with if they weren’t a twee 24-year-old who had hang-ups about their ethnicity. Is that still a thing?

Home Land

The Subject Steve

Do you have any regrets from your youth?

Much of your work touches on childhood and parenting in a very uncomfortable way. You don’t discount the joys of having children, but you also explore the agony that comes with it. My mother read The Ask because she’d seen some positive reviews. She told me that although she liked it and thought the writing was excellent, it wasn’t the “type of book” she normally reads. I took that to mean that it made her feel uncomfortable, and that feeling is not what she’s looking for in literature. And I think that what bothered her most was how you write about parenting and marriage.

I’ve always said that I don’t want kids. Everyone tells me that I’ll grow out of it. Would it offend or disturb you to know that your books reaffirm my revulsion at parenthood?

Twenty-eight.

Fair enough, but I can guarantee it’s not going to happen for a long while. I’ll only do it if I can afford to hire people to take care of all the shitty parts, leaving me with nothing but the joy. I might have to freeze some sperm to buy enough time, but that’s my plan.

Are you religious?

The honesty is what I like best about your work. It’s a particular type of honesty that many people are afraid to explore because your characters’ faults may mirror their own and make them feel like scumbags in the process. But everyone should feel like an asshole sometimes, or else you’ll become an asshole all the time without knowing it.

The Ask

Does your wife get pissed about some of the things you write?

laughs

I read somewhere that she trashed the first draft of The Ask.

laughs

How about other family members and friends? I’m guessing they aren’t so forgiving.

Venus Drive

you

your

laughs

You just dance on the ruins.

In my perception, Venus Drive, Home Land, and The Ask follow a loose pattern. Exempting The Subject Steve, your books have flowed chronologically from one that’s mostly about childhood to a second about the byproducts of sustained and stubborn adolescence to a story about a man coming to terms with his failure at adulthood.

Venus Drive

The Subject Steve

Venus Drive

Home Land

The Ask

The other common thread is the dangers of institutions, these intangible oppressors that influence our lives in so many ways we cannot control.

The Subject Steve

Most of your protagonists are truthful in a way that’s detrimental to them, but they still can’t help themselves even when they come to this realization. Lying and passive-aggressiveness have always seemed like wastes of time and energy to me. Yet I feel like you have to be a good liar to write successful fiction.

What’s your daily level of honesty outside of your writing?

I wonder if compulsive liars feel exhausted all the time.

Lying to authority figures is the only instance when it’s acceptable. That’s my rule.

Another thing I’ve noticed is the way you use dreams in your stories. They seem to have their own parameters within the scope of the larger narrative.

The Persistence of Memory

Home Land

Twilight Zone

Every critic mentions the sharp wit and humor of your writing. Making someone laugh out loud using words and ink on a page is a very difficult think to do, and you do it very uniquely and well. But the thing that really amazes me is your timing. You don’t have nearly as many tools at your disposal as an actor or stand-up comic, but you consistently pull it off. Is this sense of timing something that can be taught and developed or is it innate?

Who do you think is funny?

Brass Eye

I want to talk about “The Dungeon Master,” a new short story of yours that ran in the New Yorker in October. For those who haven’t read it yet, it’s about a group of high school students so uncool they’ve been shunned by the Dungeons & Dragons club and forced to play at the house of an aggressive and mentally deranged senior. My younger brother was addicted to World of Warcraft for three years, and I’m not using the A-word lightly. I know video games are a bit different, especially because they usurp any type of imaginative aspect traditional RPGs require, but it amazed me how spot-on you were with the kids’ behaviors. I thought you might have slipped a camera into my brother’s bedroom at some point. The Dungeon Master’s tantrums and the way he talks to his father were so on point they spooked me. What was the inspiration? Do you know people who are into this type of stuff?

laughs

I had a creative-writing professor in college who I really liked, but he went on and on about how the art of the short story died a long time ago and no one cares anymore except other authors. While that may have been the case 20 years ago, I think we’re headed the other way now. Short stories are becoming more fashionable as people’s attention spans get shorter and screens replace paper as the preferred reading medium. What do you think?

During the photo shoot before this interview you mentioned that you’re working on your next book, another story collection. I always wondered how these work. Your stories have appeared in the New Yorker, McSweeney’s, Harper’s, and lots of other places. What’s the editing process like when it’s time to compile them into a book? Do you just slap them in there the same as they ran in the magazines, or are there serious revisions made?

Harper’s

What sorts of short stories do you recommend to your students?

I get the impression that you thoroughly enjoy teaching. Was that surprising for you? I know you didn’t do the typical MFA thing after graduating.

FEED

How do you beat tics out of a writer?

What kind of tics do you watch out for in your own stuff?

laughs

Good answer. I’d like to close out the interview by asking a few very specific questions about your books. The first one is about a scene in The Ask. At one of his lowest points Milo is fighting with his wife and ends up spending the night at a young colleague’s place in Bushwick, which is basically a flophouse with stalls separated by chicken wire. Milo is awoken by his coworker, who is fucking a girl from behind in the next stall. After watching them for a second, Milo sticks his finger through the chicken wire, up to the girl’s face. When I first read this it made me laugh harder than I had in a long time, but it also majorly creeped me out. Where does this kind of stuff come from?

It felt right?

The most disturbing part is that Milo’s intentions—and now I can safely say your intentions as well—were left mostly unexplained. What was he after? A delicate suckle?

OK. I think I might be even more conflicted about the whole thing now, but we’ll move on. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is from Home Land. Lewis and Gary, two of the main characters, use the word normie a lot. What does that word mean to them?

The last question was just a setup for this one: If you had to guess, what kind of books do you think normies read?

The paperback edition of

will be available in March 2011 along with a new edition of the currently out-of-print

. Buy them both and enjoy, normies.