A few weeks ago, a musician friend of mine was strolling through San Francisco with a recording device in his pocket, occasionally turning it on to capture street noise to splice into electronic music.Down the street, a woman and man were arguing loudly, attracting a crowd. "Jackpot," the musician thought, and turned on the recorder.Listening to the rise and fall of the couple's fiery voices, he thought about how he would sync them with a beat, speed them up, slow them down, make them something easy to dance to.Then he heard someone say, "It's sad those two are fighting in front of their kids."Startled, the musician glanced over and sure enough, two small children stood in the shadow of the screaming couple. The kids looked devastated, and suddenly my friend felt a complicated sense of remorse: in his eagerness to capture an audio track of the moment, he had failed to notice the human dynamic.When my friend told me this story, I felt a glimmer of recognition: as a writer and photographer, I often catch myself looking at the world as something to be framed, to be recorded, to be interpreted, to be delivered to other people--and in my mania to record and remix, I sometimes lose touch with the underlying human aspects of my subjects.This mania to transform human beings into subjects is the focus of Sam Lipsyte's first novel, 'Subject Steve', with the protagonist, Steve, at the center of a hurricane of eyes, cameras, recording devices, probes, and stethoscopes. This over-the-top comedy delightfully exaggerates the postmodern condition, a state of being forcibly interpreted while begging for interpretation. The book's hellish (and sometimes nauseating) scenes are made palatable by the author's love of language.The more Steve becomes a subject of interpretation, the more he loses sovereign rule over his body and identity. First he encounters doctors who make him the subject of their analyses, convincing him that they understand his body, his fate, better than he, with Steve lead along by them, begging for answers. Next comes the group of defunct spiritualists, who pull Steve into their mountainside collective, trapping him in a place where he doesn't have the right to call himself "me" until it is by their terms. Then there is Steve's dysfunctional family, eager to videotape themselves saying nice things about him, eager to transform him into a character in their personal narratives, eager to turn even his attempted acts of rebellion into permissible symbols of their charity. And finally comes the group of media-makers who kidnap Steve, hijacking his body and transforming it into the centerpiece of an evangelical reality TV show. And amidst all of this is Steve, transforming himself into the subject of his own diary.In our strange postmodern period, it is sometimes difficult to remember if there ever was a time we were more than mere subjects--when a human life actually meant something even if no one (neither God nor the Facebook audience) was watching. Whether it's through prayers or feed posts or personal diaries, we fashion our lives so they can best be observed, placing ourselves at the center of self-constructed panopticons--as if, by believing that others are watching the recordable moments of our lives, we can shrug off the weight of being with ourselves for the raw, incommunicable moments of human existence. With human existence reduced as such, death becomes life's culminating moment, with the funeral as the reward for a life well-performed. There are three funerals in 'The Subject Steve', each less focused on the actual deceased individual than the last, with the final funeral performed with the person still alive, bound and gagged in an open grave....I like to believe that Steve found an escape from the hellish situation of perpetual subjectivity. But I guess we can never know what happened to Steve, because if he escaped being a subject, the book would have to end.
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 because, ya know, you can just read the summary above. 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
Do You like book The Subject Steve (2002)?
Lipsyte gets an accusation of writing great sentences and comic rants rather than novels. Never is this criticism more accurate than here for his first novel, which has an intriguing central concept that a more focused writer of existential musings would work the whole book around, but Lipsyte uses it as an opening salvo and then as an occasional echo that surfaces throughout all the noise. But, what noise! Medical industry, cults, dot com start ups, reality TV and a cast of nymphomaniacs, cokeheads, solipsists, and megalomaniacs make for a good cast for a satire, but Lipsyte slashes and burns rather than work up a good satirical steam. The Simpsons as rewritten by Beckett and Fellini is a good Hollywood sell of this material. (Which would never even approach Hollywood of course.)
—Adam
This book has some great absurdity and some wonderful lines. I do have to say that I enjoyed the bits outside Heinrich and his crew (whether in the compound stage or in the media production stage) more than the Heinrich and crew portions. Those portions were just so ridiculous as to be a bit over the top. I mean, the absurdity in the other portions came through better because of the juxtaposition to expectations and reason. The Heinrich and crew portions just didn't seem as funny or absurd because they lacked that normality reference point and were so over the top for so long that the absurdity started seeming normal after a while. In any event, the book is a lot of fun to read and has some interesting insights into modern western culture.
—David
It wasn't worth even one star. I hated this book. I paged through it, noted that all they talk about it how much they hate cunts, and promptly returned the book to the library. Judging from the cover and the back of the book, it was supposed to be a good book. I figured it would be like Girl, Interrupted but for boys. It is not like that at all. It is very rare that I would pick up a book and not read it all the way through because it was just that bad. This deserves a review simply because it was just that bad. Grow up. Women are people, not body parts.
—Anna
