Reviews for The Ask

The average rating for The Ask based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-03-08 00:00:00 Steve Antley This is not a bad book, Sam Lipsyte has a cute turn of phrase, but it's just not funny at all and makes you feel bad when you're actually reading it so that you feel good when you stop. Ugh. I checked up my list of all time favourite novels to answer the question - well, maybe you just don't like comic novels. Here are the ones on my list with some comic elements: the fountain overflows the mezzanine catch 22 eighty-sixed trainspotting the curious incident of the dog in the night-time lolita You might possibly say that The Mezzanine, Catch-22 and Eighty-Sixed are comic novels rather than novels which have a lot of comedy in them, but you will note that two of these three are about Aids and War & so have that tragic undertow. Only The Mezzanine proudly declares itself to be Light as in light music. The narrator never impales himself on a stapler. He suffers mortal embarrassment in a men's urinal, but he figures out how to overcome his urethric strangulation problem and everything's plain sailing apart from the shoelaces. Novels which notice everything about Modern Life in America and then jeer loudly at it like The Ask have three terrible giants breathing down their neck; there's Tom Wolfe, who invented this micro-trend the-future-is-already-happening Americans-are-really-absurd stuff way way back in great books like The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby which was in like 1965 which was, well, before before; there's Jonathan Franzen who is doing this sort of stuff in giant novels once every 8 years (and how glad I am he's so slow); and of course there's David Foster Wallace about whom I would not wish to comment because I haven't read enough but he is the Galactic Warpdrive model of all Noticing Machines. It's a brave author who sails his skiff into those waters hoping to catch an overlooked eel. And Mr Lipsyte then goes and sets his novel in a not-very-good University, just like about ten thousand novelists have been doing since the 50s - Snow, Bradbury, Barth, Amis, Sharpe, Lodge, Delillo, Jacobsen, Byatt, Tartt, Powers, Smiley, Chabon, Roth, Coetzee, Roth, Roth, Roth… and so you see that even though Mr Lipsyte has a cute turn of phrase, sometimes very cute, nonetheless, I have to report that this stuff has been DONE TO DEATH

Review # 2 was written on 2013-07-18 00:00:00 Fred Pride 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."