Book Review IX: No One Left to Come Looking for You, by Sam Lipsyte

There’s a scene in this book near the beginning where the main character goes to a punk show in a loft in the village. He spends his time rolling his eyes at the crowd, the band, the music, the space, everything. Halfway through the chapter I realize that the author wants us, the reader, to be rolling our eyes at the main character as he rolls his eyes at the scene.

For this entire novel, I rolled my eyes at the author himself instead.

To be fair, there was a lot to like about this novel. I didn’t live in New York City in the early 90s — in fact, I never lived there — but the depictions of the city felt real and authentic and atmospheric and in like all good novels about great cities, felt like another character in the book. It was winter in New York and it was before Rudy ruined everything and before 9/11 and we were there too.

(I was, however, a teenager in the early 90s, and the book’s depiction of a character saving the box top from his pack of Marlboro’s was so spot on I have a hard time doubting the rest of book’s authenticity.)

And, again, to be fair, the whodunit that forms the crux of the plot is a fun romp. We chase ghosts alongside the main character. We meet shadows and cops and run from thugs. It felt like, in some respects, a black comic version of a Tana French novel set in New York City. Yes, the whodunit was that good.

(I daresay it even had the “coziness” of the TV show Only Murders in the Building — super high praise.)

But my complaints just simply outweigh the praise.

First: we get to hear all about one of the main character’s dreams. For page after page after page, we are treated with the worst of the worst: someone relating a dream. Please, please, please stop doing this. It works, sometimes, in magical realism or, occasionally, in very short bursts to try to give the impression of anxiety, but this dream sequence did neither. It was stupid. Meaningless. I can only assume the author has bored to tears many a dinner party by imparting one of his dreams where he was in a place but it wasn’t the place and he was talking to his father but it wasn’t his father. Oh my god shoot me.

Second: he made Donald Trump the novel’s villain. Like, for real. Now, I fucking hate Trump. And I know that New Yorkers have had a much longer hate-affair with the Donald than I have. But this is just silly. Yes, Trump is an oafish thug. We get it. But hey oh so cool and hip to make him the bad guy in your novel. What an iconoclast you must be.

There is a character in the book who plays in a band called the Annihilation of the Soft Left. And, sorry, Mr. Lipsyte, but you are the soft left. The whole “ORANGE MAN BAD” is the calling card of the soft left. The real left is fighting against poverty and racial disparity and the opioid crisis and the disappearing social safety net — you know, all of the things your characters encounter throughout your novel that you fail to comment on — the soft left meanwhile just shouts “ORANGE MAN BAD.” Let’s get over it and get back to work on the real problems facing this country. “Oh but he doesn’t pay his contractors and he talks funny and he wants to be in New York Society but they all hate him har har har” gag me with a spoon. Do better.

Anyway.

Like most new, American novels, there was a lot to like, but far too much to dislike, for me to recommend this book to anyone.

**

The novel, however, did include two things that I truly loved. Like, really, really loved.

The first is a single snippet of dialog, which might be hard to represent without spoilers, but I will do my best:

“My sister went to Amherst,” Hera says. “Calliope Bernberger? What year were you?”
”It doesn’t matter what year,” Fielden says. “What matters is — Calliope? Yeah, I knew her. We … I mean, we all — it doesn’t fucking matter, okay?”

Dialog is super fucking hard to write. We all know that. At least dialog that rings true. And that exchange above just rings so true. Almost perfectly true. Something about it just works. This makes me think that the author has real chops and that maybe — just maybe — I should check out some of his other books. He had an earlier novel — Home Land — that was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Maybe? We’ll see.

The book also included the most hilariously perfect take on people ironically yelling “Freebird” at concerts. Again. This is so perfect that I wish more than anything that the author had left the dream sequence and Donald Trump on the cutting room floor so I could like this book.

“‘Freebird’!” some dolt shouts. There is always one. I’m not exactly the world’s hugest Skynyrd aficionado, but here’s a possibly bitter-tasting verity: “Freebird” is an infinitely better song than anything some postcollegiate wag in a Mello Yello ringer tee could ever hope to conjure.”

I mean. Right?

***

Next up: Elena Knows, by Claudia Piñeiro.