The Ask Book

Lipsyte's comedy is of the frenetic sledgehammer variety (nothing wrong with that) and his narrator poisonously witty. The comedy is sadly all-too-sitcommy in its overexuberance, despite attempts to establish its own Elkinesque style, and relies overly on hyper-zingy dialogue where every character is a fast-talking asshole, a technique that overwhelms and removes the reader from the simulated reality of this world. In comparison to a similar novel, the superhumanly brilliant Laura Warholic (published three years earlier, not a NYT bestseller) spins relentlessly effective invective alongside more thoughtful, satirically substantial intellectual content, while The Ask leans on the laughs and skimps on the brains. Lipsyte is a talented word-spinner and his prose style is impressively euphonious: clearly he is attentive at the sentence level, weighing his words and sounding his sentences so the phrases tang on the tongue, but the zippy comedy softens some of his skill. Entertaining but by no means an "important" novel of "our times."