God damned brilliant.I wish there were more books like this--literary comedies that are at once laugh-out-loud funny, phraseologically intricate, and resonant on the level of the emotions and the psychology and the whatnot. Let's face it, Catamounts: most good writers aren't funny, and most funny people couldn't write a novel any more than some non-funny schmo like me could.But this guy Sam Lipsyte, damn. He is the total package. And in Home Land, he's written a book that kinda needed to exist.This novel covers a lot of thematic ground. Some would say its central concern is disappointment. I actually think the book is mainly about high school. It's just that it's set 15 years after high school ended. And therein lies the "needed to exist" part. High school is a topic that has been exhausted as a narrative resource. Our culture is forever fascinated by high school, from I Was a Teenage Werewolf to John Hughes to that dumb-ass show about the school chorus that is popular right now. But all that shit takes place during the actual four years of high school. Boring! Sam Lipsyte understands that those of us consuming and producing all these high-school narratives are, necessarily, most of us no longer in high school. We are obsessed with it because it's something in our past that has never really left us. I think that's true regardless of whether your high school experience was "the best years of your life" (cliché), or the polar opposite (countercliché, thanks for that one Rick Linklater). Those years are so formative, and the experiences we have during that time have this almost surreal quality of being at once part of an alien, separate life (the no-man's-land between childhood and adulthood) and also kind of still feeling like the default setting of life in a weird way that's hard to explain, like everything else has been an extended postscript, or a head-desk daydream during trigonometry.Anyway, Sam Lipsyte gets this stuff, even if I don't. Home Land is about a 30-something slacker (known as "Teabag," for reasons that have to do with a high school locker room incident) still hanging around his old hometown, and everything that happens in the book is basically either a recollection of high school or a present encounter with people he knew in high school. Among the latter, my favorites were Teabag's run-ins with his old HS principal, who is like Mr. Belding from "Saved by the Bell" reimagined as a tragic boozehound--in that he is hilariously unrealistically over-involved in the lives of his students. Or at least in Teabag's life. For instance, the principal is engaged in a kinky affair with the wife of a local drug dealer who is also the AA sponsor of Teabag's best friend, who got rich by suing a psychotherapist for convincing him that he was sexually abused when he in fact wasn't. And the dealer wants the principal dead. If this sounds like melodrama, or screwball comedy, it's neither. Lipsyte is just interested in shiftless fuckarounds and the high school history that unites them. The tragicomic meaninglessness of it all, the strange and disappointing paths our lives take--it all starts in high school.But the best thing about the book, really, the reason to read it even if everything I just wrote makes you want to gag, is the voice. It's indescribable, completely original as far as I can tell. The chapters are ostensibly "updates" written by Teabag for his high school's alumni newsletter, and within that format Lipsyte fashions an incredibly specific tone that incorporates irony, dazzling verbal wit, (pseudo)philosophical declamations, and an almost Greek chorus-like sense of tragic understanding. I don't know, I'm standing by "indescribable" because that description wasn't very good. But this book is written in the most spectacularly exciting voice I've read in some time.My only problem with Lipsyte here is that he sometimes uses bizarre sexuality as a crutch. It's this weird thing that some male writers of a certain demographic have...Jonathan Ames does it too, there's that ridiculously extraneous and awful sex scene that he made the centerpiece of the otherwise great novel Wake Up, Sir!. Don't get me wrong, Teabag's leg-warmer fetishism was funny. But the book goes to some self-consciously EDGY places with some sex scenes that don't really add anything. But you know what? Still five stars! That's how much I dig this book.Can't wait to read his other shit, including that new one, The Ask, as soon as I finish this pile of non-funny books I'm reading...or probably before I finish that pile.
In Homeland, Sam Lipsyte’s third novel, we’re introduced to the strange and deranged life of Lewis Miner, aka Tea-bag, aka the guy who just didn’t pan out. It’s a minimalist plot: Tea-bag’s life sucks, and his half-hearted excuses for himself are that he’s being weight of his own talent. Lewis starts writing long personal screeds to his high school alumni newsletter on his general state of being and daily trials and tribulations in an effort to breath truth and honesty into the superficial and predictable newsletter.Some of these up-dates are flat out hilarious, and the language and prose that Lipsyte is able to get away with through this crazy character is unique and exciting. I loved the first half of this book, and had a bunch of laugh out loud Tea-bag moments while reading it on my commute to work. Teabag’s relationship is with his best friend Gary, a drug addict, helps balance out the narrative because he is even crazier that Tea-bag himself. The strengths of this his novel are the narrative voice, authentic and often hyperbolic pathos that Tea-bag evokes through his updates, and his general philosophy on life. Perhaps the best way to describe this novel is that it’s like the Dude, from the Big Lebowski, stopped bowling and started writing. Gary becomes his Walter, and the two of them stumble through a story without any real plot. It’s a novel about nothing, and everything, all at the same time. Tea-bags worldview, dare I even say his philosophy on life, is best characterized by his struggle for honesty and truth. He’s content with where he’s at, but at the same time, knows that he’s capable of more. So while he sets out to write up-dates to his newsletter, knowing they will most likely not even get read, he writes nonetheless, in an effort to put his truth on paper. The novel was published in 2004, which, alas, was before the age of Facebook and Instagram--I’d love to hear what Tea-bag would have to say about his classmates on social media. Tea-bag brings a whole lot of truth in his up-dates, but at the same time, you feel somewhere between pity, and a desire to tell him to get his shit together, just like his dad, the tough-loving banquet hall owner.The only weakness of this novel is it’s repetitiveness. It’s 227 pages, so it’s quite short, but there is only so much Tea-bag I could handle at once. There’s very little character development. Tea-bag softens a little throughout the work, especially as his relationship grows with his old high school principal, Mr. Fontana. But as Tea-bag’s his anger weakens, and as it does, so does the hilarity, and his updates lose their luster. For me, the best update of all is the book’s first chapter, when after laying his claim to savage honesty, Tea-bag throws Principal Fontana under the bus after he and Gary see him waster at a strip club. I give this 3 out of 5 simply because the middle third of this novel drags on, and I had to put it down for a week and move on to other reading. The only thing that brought me back to finnish it was to see where Tea-bag ended up. Can’t say I’d recommend it everyone, but if you’re into great prose style, don’t care about the plot of what you’re reading, well Lipsyte creates a voice in Tea-bag that will certainly stick in your head.
Do You like book Home Land (2005)?
There are two kinds of readers in this country: those who know that Sam Lipsyte is the funniest writer of his generation and those who haven’t read him yet. Lipsyte’s new novel Home Land is the epistolary tale of Lewis Miner, aka Teabag, a freelance writer of bogus FunFacts and self-appointed chronicler of the strange fates that have befallen the Catamounts of Eastern Valley High. The novel is written as a series of updates to the alumni newsletter, but in Lipsyte’s capable hands the form is flexible enough to encompass not only Teabag’s travails but those of his tough-talking caterer father, his starfucked ex-girlfriend, his best friend’s drug-dealing AA sponsor, the B&D-obsessed high school principal, a coke-happy novelist of significant renown, a former leg-warmer-wearing member of the dance squad that Teabag has never managed to bring himself to stop masturbating to, and uptight-student-body-president-turned-uptight-Doctor Stacy Ryson. This may strike newcomers to Lipsyte’s fiction as strange, perhaps excessively so, but for long-time fans, Home Land is the apotheosis of a remarkable, yet under-appreciated, career.The tension in Lipsyte’s fiction comes from the relationship between the two losers at the heart of the narrative who are linked for the sole reason that no one else will have anything to do with them.This would be heartbreaking if it wasn’t so hilarious. Or maybe it’s the other way around, but it’s precisely this tension that drives the prose. Lipsyte will take your imagination to some dark places, but he’ll make you laugh, and you’ll be laughing at things you probably wouldn’t be laughing at if someone were looking over your shoulder.(Excerpted from a review that appeared on The Elegant Variation:[http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2...])
—Jim
i don't know if i'm just over holden caulfield or if sam lipsyte was only half paying attention when he wrote this. the blurbs on the inside cover make the comparison to salinger and it's easy to see why. there is absolutely no denying that lipsyte is smart, talented and can write some snappy dialoge, pinning down all the angst and horrible funny things that can happen in a day, or a lifetime. Lewis Miner,a.k.a. Teabag is supposed to be that lovable asshole. the guy that tells the truth, even when it's so ugly that hilarity is bound to ensue. some of it is really funny and there are a couple of poignant moments so maybe i was in a mood when i read this, or maybe i just didn't get the jokes. maybe i wasn't meant to. in a way, i felt like this was the male version of chick lit. you can only talk about boobies, leg-warmers and jerking-off for so many pages before i start to glaze over. i'm sure plenty of people will disagree with me on that one, and with that being said, i definitely know some guys in my life that would love this book.
—Heather
This is definitely an entertaining book. I don't think I've ever read anything quite like it before. The format is interesting, updates from a fuck-up to his alumni newsletter that he doesn't even expect them to publish. To say it is imaginative would be an understatement. Still, I expected the main character to be more insane. Maybe I'm just more messed up than I thought, but he seemed like a pretty normal guy to me by the end. You'll excuse me now, I need to go write a letter to my high school alumni association.
—David
