Satire is the word of the day when it comes to Sam Lipsyte. Satire, sure. Fine. But a love of language is what I come away with when I read Lipsyte.
I'm always reluctant to take up review space with summarizing the plot but anyway, the main character, whose name may or may not be Steve, is diagnosed with a "fantastically new" disease, which the reader comes to assume, or I came to assume, is just Death, like how we're all dying, in some sense of the word. I'm not going to claim that I "got" or "understood" everything that was going on in The Subject Steve. Both plotwise and idea-wise. But I like I said, Lipsyte is a language man, American, corporate language. And yes, the book is frequently funny. And oddly violent. But satire is often violent, right? Exaggerating the violence that is already present in the "real" world?
Let me just freestyle a little here, get some things out there: Meditations on ones mortality, understanding Death in an absurd world, accepting the passage of Time, capital T. What matters? Language matters. The Word matters. The rhythm of modern language, the playfulness, the abstractness. A common language. A common knowledge, a common understanding. Human connection through a common language, through common abstractions.
There is a common voice, as others have remarked, running through these pages. Each person seems to share the same mind. The same language. And though everyone seems to understand one another, real clarity feels like it's just off stage. Especially for "Steve". He both understands completely and understands nothing. Exaggerated satire? Well, of course, one of the main goals of satire is for us to recognize ourselves in the exaggeration. What is it? One who knows that he does not know, is a truly wise man? The more you learn, the less you know? And if you don't know, now you know? Et al.
Now, I'm trying to write concretely about a book that speaks in corporate, slogan-ed tongues (see Lipsyte quote below for more clarity). So you can imagine the difficulty. But it feels like Lipsyte is asking us to pay attention. Not just to life but to language. Well, he's asking us to do a lot of things. Or more like, "Hey, look at this. Think about it this way instead of this way."
And this: when his characters actually spoke in length, I found it compelling. Heinrich's zookeeper fable? I almost missed my bus stop. And Steve's childhood recollection of his father and his best friend's father getting into an erotic "fight" in the tool shed? Easily the high point (for me) in the novel and some of best writing I've read in a while.
"You see too much and you can't see anything at all." pg. 122
"I guess the problem is insincere speech. Life-crushing speech. At least from the language end. I’ve always liked writers who have an ear for all of the subtleties, the particulars of the given cant, the officialese, the business-casual lingo, the business intimate, the intimate casual, all the modes of modern (and unmodern) utterance. I love to read writers who can bend these particulars, spit them back, or knead the feeling back into them. That’s the response, from the perspective of fiction writing. What else? Corporations are part of our current predicament, but every age has a predicament. I’m sorry, I’m not feeling properly apocalyptic today. It’s all going to work out. McJihad is around the corner."
-excerpt from an interview with Sam Lipsyte
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