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Title details for The Ask by Sam Lipsyte - Available

The Ask

A Novel

by Sam Lipsyte
Sam Lipsyte
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available

From the author of Home Land and Venus Drive comes Sam Lipsyte's searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel, The Ask.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has "not been developing": after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major "ask"—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo's involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo's sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the "give" won't come cheap.
Probing many themes— or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is a burst of genius by an author who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Awards

  • Release date

    March 23, 2010

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781427210050
      • File size: 232426 KB
      • Duration: 08:04:13

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • AudioFile Magazine
      One must have both a love of black comedy and patience for a mediocre reading to enjoy Sam Lipsyte's third book. In some respects it's truly hilarious, but one has to pay attention every moment. Milo, a fund-raiser at a minor university, is fired for underachievement. He's given a last chance to find a major contributor, but that leads him to a tangle of intrigue. The story touches on war, sex, class distinction, family relationships, humiliation, and numerous other topics. Milo is repulsive and hilarious at the same time. The book is almost brilliant, but the writer should have left the narration to someone else. His voice is humdrum, weak, and monotonous to the extent that one begins to lose track of the plot and then has to go back to re-listen. This is a great book for cynics, but Lypsyte the reader doesn't do justice to Lypsyte the writer. A.L.H. (c) AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine
    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from October 5, 2009
      Lipsyte’s pitch-black comedy takes aim at marriage, work, parenting, abject failure (the author’s signature soapbox) and a host of subjects you haven’t figured out how to feel bad about yet. This latest slice of mucked-up life follows Milo Burke, a washed-up painter living in Astoria, Queens, with his wife and three-year-old son, as he’s jerked in and out of employment at a mediocre university where Milo and his equally jaded cohorts solicit funding from the “Asks,” or those who financially support the art program. Milo’s latest target is Purdy Stuart, a former classmate turned nouveau aristocrat to whom Milo quickly becomes indentured. Purdy, it turns out, needs Milo to deliver payments to Purdy’s illegitimate son, a veteran of the Iraq War whose titanium legs are fodder for a disgruntlement that makes the chip on Milo’s shoulder a mere speck of dust by comparison. Submission is the order of the day, but where Home Land
      had a working-class trajectory, this takes its tone of lucid lament to the devastated white-collar sector; in its merciless assault on the duel between privilege and expectation, it arrives at a rare articulation of empire in decline.

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from March 29, 2010
      Milo Burke is a trademark Lipsyte creation—a sad sack, sure, but a sweet guy, observant, acerbic, and very winning. A failed painter now working a dead-end job in the fund-raising department of a New York university, Milo is assigned to approach his charismatic and very wealthy college buddy, Purdy Stuart, for a big donation. Things aren't too serene on the domestic front either, and listeners can expect mordant musings on family and fatherhood, lust and the vapidity of office life, and a brutal sendup of academia. And the narration is a revelation: Lipsyte is cool and relaxed and transitions smoothly between monologue and dialogue. There are no strained characterizations—just subtle shifts that indicate a change in speaker—and as Milo, Lipsyte sounds just right—sullen, searching, and prone to sentimentality and sarcasm. Smart, compulsive listening. A Farrar, Straus & Giroux hardcover (Reviews, Oct. 5).

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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