"The Ask"

I was only vaguely familiar with the name of the author Sam Lipsyte, until I recently read a review of his new novel, “The Ask” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010) and decided to check it out. I think what drew me in was the main character’s having a job in the development office of a university (which the character, Milo, calls Mediocre U.); I am, as I have written before, drawn to academic novels. The academic aspect turned out to be a minor part of the story, and at first I wasn’t sure how I felt about the character or the narrative, both of which could be off-putting, but I kept reading and became absorbed in the story. Milo is a classic sad sack/loser type. He is smart and somewhat talented, and is not a bad guy, but he has a gift for undermining his own success. True, he has been dealt some bad (but nothing close to catastrophic) hands, but he isn’t very good at coping with them. He is funny and very self-aware, and despite his ongoing propensity for getting into sticky and awkward situations, he is good company. Somehow he disarms the reader. And by the rather anti-climactic but quietly satisfying ending of the story, he has more or less accepted the negatives and made the most of the positives in his life, which include his very young son, his return to painting, and an unexpected financial windfall. For some reason, this character and this novel remind me of a sort of gender role meld: the character and the novel itself are brash and trying to be tough, but are actually very vulnerable and aware of human foibles and fallibilities, and at times could even be considered “sensitive.” Yin and yang? Or simply a sign of the times: less stereotypically gendered literature? (I am fully aware that I too am stereotyping gender roles for literature as well, but those -- as I have written about here before -- are often, although far from always, very easily discernible in fiction, for better or for worse.)