undefinedPhoto Ceridwen Morris

The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next. From his debut, Venus Drive (2000), a collection populated by a string of outsiders and misfits (a tormented summer camper, a small-time coke dealer, a peep-show habitué and his comatose sister), to the near-future dystopia of Hark (2019), his fourth novel, the Lipsyte-verse is fueled by failed or failing relationships and the comically agonized involutions of liberal self-consciousness. His work is as endlessly self-correcting and ­unstable as Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, told with a compression and exacting attention to language that follows Stanley Elkin, Gordon Lish, and Barry Hannah. Lipsyte maps a world where the old-fashioned, middle-class American dream has been vaporized by rising inequality and greed, though his characters know full well—and won’t hesitate to let you know that they know, with the hangdog brio at the heart of his work—that the dream was never more than a corrupt, exclusionary sham from the beginning. 

Lipsyte was born in New Jersey in 1968, the son of the sportswriter and YA novelist Robert Lipsyte and Marjorie Lipsyte, a journalist and novelist. Refracted bits of biography are scattered throughout the fiction: the New Jersey upbringing, his mother’s death when he was in his early twenties, a writer father, a semiperipheral cultural Jewishness, a rock band (in the early nineties, Lipsyte fronted New York City noise band Dung Beetle, whose sound engineer, James Murphy, would go on to LCD Soundsystem). With his 2010 novel, The Ask, Lipsyte added to his earlier materials marriage, fatherhood, career, and the consolations and anxieties of middle age.

I spoke to Lipsyte three times for this interview: twice in 2017, and once this past summer. We met in a pair of large, mildly dog-eared offices at Columbia University (he moved buildings after assuming the chairmanship of the school’s M.F.A. writing program), and also in the nearby apartment overlooking Morningside Park where he lives with his wife, Ceridwen Morris, a childbirth educator and author, and their two children. At his home there are stacks of books everywhere, and art by friends and family; drawings of Morris and Lipsyte by their son hang on the refrigerator alongside black-and-white photos of Morris’s Scottish Australian forebears. The space is warm and open, yet cozily disheveled. Lispyte also showed me his writing office, a closet—literally, a closet crammed with books and papers, with just enough room for a small desk and chair.

If Lipsyte’s characters—most spectacularly Lewis Miner, narrator of Home Land (2004), his second novel—are capable of working themselves into brilliant lathers, drunk on an admixture of self-pity, rage, comic point scoring, and flop sweat, their creator is in person a far gentler and more accommodating presence, quick to laugh, alert to the absurdity of language, frequently circling back to qualify and undermine his recollections and pronouncements. He is very funny, in life as in his work, with a sense of humor wired to a brutal sense of where our politics and our choices may be leading us.

Mark Doten

 

INTERVIEWER

Why is failure so central to your work?

Sam LIPSYTE

I failed a lot. As a kid I experienced a sense of failure about many things, whether it was sports or even certain academic pursuits. I got shitty grades in every subject but English and history. And I see so much that is fascinating in failure. I don’t mean learning from your mistakes, or Beckett’s exhortation to “fail better”—though that’s all true and useful—but the opposition of success and failure as a central drama, particularly through an American lens. Failure becomes a locus of shame and anxiety for so many. We’re not enough, haven’t done enough. Just one more chance. This idea that each person sets out on an individual path that leads to success or failure. I see failure and “making it” as part of a story we have told—and sold—ourselves as a culture. As we know, it’s largely bullshit. So much is determined by factors outside of one’s control, and yet the myth persists.

INTERVIEWER

Did you write as a child?

LIPSYTE

My parents were both writers. No one said, You should do this, too, but I was the oldest son. I guess Freud’s been discounted, but Oedipus is real. I remember the first thing I wrote—mostly illustrations and captions—was called “Eddy’s New Adventure,” about a young boy named Eddy, who is the son of a notorious thief, an armed robber. Eddy grows up and becomes a policeman, and of course has to at some point track down his father and kill him.

INTERVIEWER

What did your father have to say about it?

LIPSYTE

He loved it. He put it in a fire safe, alongside his insurance documents.

INTERVIEWER

And after that, in terms of your writing?

LIPSYTE

When I was in high school, I just read every New Yorker story. I read ­twentieth-century American realism, but other forms, too. I wrote these heartfelt stories about children of divorced parents, down-and-outs, people feeling lost in the American West. There was something fraudulent about the whole thing, but it was okay for my age. Apprentice work. I became a Presidential Scholar in the Arts. My English teacher, my family, and I went down to D.C. There was a reception on the White House lawn and Ronald Reagan gave a speech. He said family values were important to him, which was why one of his favorite TV shows was the Michael J. Fox program Family Ties. Twenty-five years later, in a People magazine feature in which they asked celebrities what books they were reading, Fox mentioned one of my ­novels—nothing is random. After Reagan’s speech, Bill Bennett, the education secretary, put medals around our necks. I remember how big and striking Bennett was—his hand was the largest hand I’d ever shaken in my life. Then we stood around on the White House lawn and drank lemonade.

INTERVIEWER

Big moment.

LIPSYTE

That Championship Season. This New Jersey news crew came out to interview me and they said, How does it feel to be getting this award? I said, I’m happy about the award but I hate Ronald Reagan, and I went on this whole rant. That night I waited to see myself on the evening news and there was just a shot of me with no audio.

INTERVIEWER

What did your classmates think?

LIPSYTE

I’d never talked to people about the fact that I wrote. It was my secret. I was revealing something about myself. I was vulnerable but also triumphant.

INTERVIEWER

And then what?

LIPSYTE

I go to college, Brown, and I’m in my dorm room, probably smoking a joint or something. The phone rings, and I pick it up, and it’s Andrew Wylie. He says, David Leavitt gave me your story—I’d met David when I was in high school, at a time when he was having a very big moment himself. My history teacher knew the mother of his boyfriend, I think, had shown him my work, and he was kind enough to show it to Wylie. Wylie and I have a nice conversation. He says, If you ever put together a manuscript, send it to me. 

I started to get into the workshops and get serious. My writing completely changed. It got very experimental. I moved toward the postmodernists, began to think about and explore those modes.

INTERVIEWER

What texts were you reading?

LIPSYTE

There were people like Barthelme and Gaddis, Coover and Hawkes, but even poets like Ron Silliman. Fiction International was publishing Mark Leyner. I read a lot of theory and got very confused. It was all coalescing—and collapsing—in bizarre ways in my writing. I thought my senior thesis was groundbreaking, experimental work. I sent it to Wylie—

INTERVIEWER

Oh my God, he must have— 

LIPSYTE

I got passed off to some underling and told to go away. It was probably the best thing that ever happened to me, because it gave me time to figure myself out as a writer. Though who knows? Maybe it was the worst thing that ever happened to me. The stuff wasn’t publishable anyway.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean when you say that theory got you very confused?

LIPSYTE

Well, I read a lot of it and it screwed up my writing for a while. Theory wasn’t to blame. It was the way I was reading and internalizing it. It was destroying these ideas I had about what it meant to be a writer. Those preconceptions had to be destroyed—they were romantic and outdated and not useful. And eventually theory helped shape my worldview.

INTERVIEWER

But it sounds like you felt attacked on some level by capital-T “Theory.” Why take it so personally?

LIPSYTE

Because I grew up in a house where there were some ideas about the author. It’s like someone from a religious household who goes to college and learns there’s no God, and everyone’s like, What’s the big deal, why are you so fucked up about it? There is a struggle. Coming out of college, I didn’t even want to create text anymore. I didn’t want to utter a word.

INTERVIEWER

And this leads to your noise-punk band, Dung Beetle. This was like ’90, ’91, right out of undergrad.

LIPSYTE

With the band I could be gestural, theatrical. I did some random sloganeering, wept onstage. It was a kind of collage of text in action. There was a certain liberation in getting things down to this essence. The brutality of it, the collision of emotion and politics and just silliness, really seduced me. I enjoyed saying things from the stage like, You have a choice, police state or police state, and nineties slackers seemed to enjoy that. I was very happy I had lyrics for all these songs, but sometimes just having my screams heard by the audience was satisfying. Which was hard enough, with the guitar and bass up so loud.

INTERVIEWER

You were in an interesting zone. If things get too jokey, everyone turns off and thinks you suck. But it sounds like you were pushing right up against the edge of this sort of performance-art craziness.

LIPSYTE

Right, but it wasn’t jokey. There was no wink, and that was our actual credo. We got our semiotics TA to be our drummer.

INTERVIEWER

I read that you wore a cape.

LIPSYTE

I might have worn a cape. We were against flannel. Or the pose of authenticity it implied. I wore a tool belt covered in purple glitter so I could holster my mic. I once wore my friend’s mom’s pantsuit. Nothing too fabulous. It was the glamorous made abject. We did a rock opera about the space chimp Ham.

INTERVIEWER

Is there anything else in your life that felt like playing those shows, the performance?

LIPSYTE

I’ve done readings that felt like those shows. It’s more fine-grain but creates those same effects. I don’t see much difference—you have to create a persona that’s not noticeable to others but is you going out and reading your work. With that persona, the effects in your fiction can be realized live.

INTERVIEWER

Maybe there’s something about your use of sound and the way you put words together that lends itself to that.

LIPSYTE

The so-called, what Gary Lutz would call, the sonics—not to be confused with the band the Sonics—lend themselves to live recitation and reading. But if you write something good it will sound good read aloud, and if you write something bad it will sound bad read aloud.

INTERVIEWER

I wonder if the sonics, this timing, is more critical in funny writing—in delivering jokes, something that has to land on just the right word, getting to the punch line.

LIPSYTE

Yes, but one of the best landers is Cormac McCarthy, and he’s one of the least funny writers of all time. Though I guess he goes in for grim humor on occasion. You need syntactic precision, no matter what.

INTERVIEWER

What happened after Dung Beetle?

LIPSYTE

It was the midnineties. I was taking care of my mother. She was dying. I was recovering from a few bad years. Let’s just say I’d gotten too intimate with hard living. I had various odd jobs—substitute teacher, freelance writer, things like that. And I eventually started working for the website Feed. I was writing stories and sending them to Gordon Lish for the literary magazine The Quarterly, something I’d been doing since college, off and on. He took a few, which had been a dream of mine. I was very much encouraged. And then he offered me a chance to be in his class in New York. He was gone from Knopf, long gone from Esquire, and was in exile, in some sense, digging his heels in with teaching. I mean, that’s how I saw it. Teaching was the place where his exertions would be best served, for that time anyway.

INTERVIEWER

He ran those at his apartment? 

LIPSYTE

Someone else’s. Fifteen people sitting around on couches and chairs and on the floor. A lot of us were just broke young writers. He went easy on us. I remember one semester, he said to me, Get me one of those French press plunger things and that can be your tuition.

INTERVIEWER

That’s a good deal. 

LIPSYTE

It was a great deal. And I’ve never seen a teacher give as much of himself as Gordon gave to his students. We would go from six to midnight, usually, or six to one. And a lot of it was lecture, Gordon demonstrating prose composition in thin air. One of the few people in the world who could do that. 

The other thing he was teaching—without really announcing it—was how to be an artist. It sounds pompous, perhaps. But forming that identity can be important, because you do make certain sacrifices. I isolated myself and committed myself and trained myself by writing a lot of horrible shit. I believe those hours mean, or meant, something.

INTERVIEWER

We’re back to notions of the author, of authorial greatness. 

LIPSYTE

Though, interestingly enough, Lish was constantly drawing from and quoting from Kristeva, Deleuze, and Agamben. The theory came back in a bolstering fashion. This proved crucial. A new way into all this thought. And I always had a little bit of an academic inferiority complex. Failure again. But this relates to something Lish said, that you only have to be clever. That means you can write things beyond your intellectual capacity. If you stay in this act of composition, follow these objects, and stick to the sentences, they will lead you to utterances that you wouldn’t have thought of just sitting around trying to decide what to write. It’s a technique that serves ongoing discovery. I was just reading a quote from Henry Moore, I think it was. Someone asked him the secret to his longevity and happiness. He said, Pursue one goal your whole life, and make sure it’s unattainable.