Pan MacMillan

2010

A couple of years ago I was waiting for a Flight Centre group interview to begin. Among the interviewees was a young engineer named Ben who had recently been made redundant. He jokingly lamented that, as a young straight white male, “we don’t get a parade.” And aside from his recent redundancy, I found it difficult to sympathise with him. It wasn’t until I read Fight Club by Chuck Palahnuik that I realised minority groups aren’t the only ones who face soul-crushing trials of everyday life.

In Sam Lipsyte’s The Ask, middle-aged Milo Burke is, in a sentence, a failed artist who now works a dreary white-collar job, obtaining money (in noun form, a “Give”) from wealthy members of society (or “Asks”) whose generous donations fund the university arts program. He is a middle-aged, middle-class, white collar married father whose life has become a passive, flaccid thing. So Milo decides to lose it one day. Unfortunately, the “arrogant, talentless, daddy-damaged waif” he mouths off to happens to be the daughter of one of the university’s donors. Milo is fired for ‘hate-speech’.

But then old college buddy Purdy Stuart enters the picture. He’s loaded. He’s a prick. He wants to deal exclusively with Milo. So Milo is rehired. A second chance. And before Purdy relinquishes his “Give”, Milo is going to need to do a few things for him. Namely, keeping tabs on Purdy’s secret illegitimate son Don, a damaged Iraq war veteran with no legs and serious daddy issues.

As all this is going on, Milo grapples with the complexities of fatherhood and parenting in the modern world, his paranoia about his wife’s infidelity and his general apathy. Well, he doesn’t so much grapple with his apathy but rather lets it wash over him on a daily basis, muting his concerns about his family and failed career as an artist.

The Ask is yet another modern example of literature championing the depressive state of white middle-class males, and is a little less Fight Club, but a little more Jonathan Franzen (whose protagonist in Strong Motions operated in a similar realm of deadpan humour to Milo Burke).  But Lipsyte’s novel seems to find that right balance of humour and self-deprecation. Staff lunchroom conversations reveal Milo’s bitterness: “Blood sausage, anyone?” (he says, on a potential Ask who works in military catering). Milo retaliates to being called a martyr: “A martyr has to give a shit.”

Milo’s colleague Llewellyn responds, “Get over yourself, Milo. You’re a sad man. A born wanker. You were born into the House of Wanker. You’re a berk, and you probably think I’m just saying your last name.” Milo’s inner monologue then speculates Llewellyn had “lifted most of his lingo from the British editions of American men’s magazines.”

Milo’s cynicism and disdain for his workplace, and contemporary America in general, makes him all the more likeable. He also employs the use of creative cursing, at one point calling his mother, to her face, a “spiderc***”.

But a strong character in the loveable loser is not the only reason The Ask works. Lipsyte is full of quips and snappy dialogue. Colleague Horace lectures Milo (Yes this is a common occurrence in Milo’s life),

I don’t sit around dreaming of a parallel universe where everybody’s speaking about my artistic vision in hushed voices on public radio and I’m home in my Brooklyn brownstone half listening while my young assistant with the bee-stung lips and gesso-smeared wifebeater gives me a world-class perineum-polishing with her chrome-studded tongue. No, I concentrate on the mission of this office and the mission of the arts at this university. (p131)

And Milo’s reminiscence of his college days evokes a similarly twisted humour:

Women in tight slacks charged past to the subway, supple organic forms supplemented with technological grafts– earphones, telephones, wraparound shades. I watched them and recalled those cyborg liberation essays from the postmodern feminism class I took in college. I’d run home after every lecture, jerk off on my futon in a fever dream of blinking vaginas. (p79)

The pathetic protagonist who is failing at life is not a new character in modern literature, but Lipsyte manages to inject into him a resigned yet light-hearted humour. Milo is not unredeemable, and his story finds epiphany, resolution, and a moving forward, of sorts. There is a touch of the sweet, with his relationship with kindergarten-aged son Bernie, but these are released in small doses, so the reader never feels like Milo’s life is completely on track.