Photo 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. 

INTERVIEWER

If Lish had the effect of sometimes breaking people down, maybe in your case he gave confidence?

LIPSYTE

I was already broken. I didn’t need to be broken down. He taught me to listen to myself, and that was the great gift. That’s what I want to try to teach my students. Some people write a paragraph and then think, Where am I going now?, not even looking at what they just wrote. They say the great actor listens to what’s happening in the room. One could expand this into a broader idea of listening to competing voices, to threads of poetry and logic, to rants and celebrations, all that fear and desire acquiring language inside of you. You listen to that. But also to what you just wrote. It’s the hardest thing.

INTERVIEWER

Both in talking to you and in reading your writing, that listening often goes somewhere dark.

LIPSYTE

It’s a chase. In life, in conversation, I want to build on something. I want to create absurd and hilarious, but also dark and revealing, edifices of language. Escalation. That’s what I like to do with my friends, too. Hanging out, joking around, we push the joke until it peels back its layers and allows us a glimpse of things.

INTERVIEWER

Often a glimpse of catastrophe—thoughts of humiliation, loss of family, annihilation.

LIPSYTE

You take it to the worst-case scenario. We do that naturally, and that’s what we do telling stories. You think, I could walk out this door and a giant anvil could fall from the sky and kill me. Then you say, Well, not kill me, but I’m in a wheelchair and I have a hard time adjusting to life in a wheelchair. But then I go to this convention of people in wheelchairs, and I fall in love with somebody who’s also in a wheelchair. But that person has an operation and then is able to walk and dumps me. Then all of a sudden . . . 

I walk around thinking things like that.

INTERVIEWER

Comedy is also a chance to be mean in ways that might not be otherwise acceptable.

LIPSYTE

I get low and mean sometimes, sure. But as long as you approach it as a murder-suicide, it’s okay. You’re taking yourself out, too. I don’t want to be up in the clock tower—we’re all going to die together down here.

INTERVIEWER

Your narrative voices tend to be self-lacerating. The uncomfortable is a constant in your work—you turn your airplane, your ship, whatever—you sail into discomfort.

LIPSYTE

Turn to the difficult. You’re always coming to a fork when you’re writing. There’s an easy way out, and there is a difficult, thorny direction. When that relates to subject matter, I’ve had to stay vigilant and not shy away from things now that I have children. Because before I was able to say, Fuck it, I don’t care what anybody thinks of me. Now it’s harder, because these little people are going to grow older and read your stuff—

INTERVIEWER

It’s one thing to have some idiot on the street think you’re a pervert. You don’t want your kid to think you’re a pervert.

LIPSYTE

Or the kids at school. Their parents tell them to stay away. Lipsyte’s a pervert. I’ve read his book. I’ve gotten that!

INTERVIEWER

What do you do?

LIPSYTE

I write off those people as enemies of feeling. It’s not my phrase, but that’s what I think of them. Even my wife has brought this up, not to censor me but to prepare me—the kids are going to read this stuff. But it’s who I am. And they’re smart enough to understand the difference between who I am in the world and in their lives, and who I am on the page. They’ve written weird shit, too.

INTERVIEWER

You’ve experienced it from both sides, as the child of writers, and as a father who’s writing about fatherhood and children.

LIPSYTE

There’s that great line attributed to Mark Twain—When I was fourteen, my father was so ignorant I couldn’t stand him. But by the time I was twenty-one I was really struck by how much smarter he’d become in just seven years. I became a writer like my dad is a writer, but I also became a different kind of writer and often write about men who have problems with fathers. Again, it’s that bind. My father and I have a very good relationship now. 

The scary thing is when you write yourself into jeopardy, when you make it a little dangerous. I mentioned subject matter before, but that’s not the deepest jeopardy. It’s not, Oh no, they’re going to find out that I took drugs or that I had sex with Doberman pinschers. In the end, who cares? What’s scary is letting everybody see from your perch, hear the world the way you privately name it, with all your little weirdnesses, obsessions. They see you linger over certain objects and ignore others. You are defining a world but also revealing yourself. They become privy to all the ways language itself has you. It’s like when people come over unexpectedly. There’s no time to tidy up. They see how you really exist. Like that, but a thousand times more intimate. 

INTERVIEWER

You create vulnerability within your characters that words can never quite capture. It’s almost slippery. In your novel Home Land, Miner, your narrator, can never reach a definitive statement of how he’s feeling or who he is—

LIPSYTE

With Miner it’s seeing through his poetic bombast to what he’s feeling, despite what he’s saying half the time. That’s how voice works often, too—it’s looking for where they’re wrong. That’s the whole idea of making a wrongness right, but it’s in their doing it wrong that you begin to see. It comes together poetically, and it also reveals whatever it’s going to reveal. 

INTERVIEWER

There’s also something about capturing the associative qualities in the brain. There’s a notorious line in that book, “ ‘Some nights,’ I said, ‘I picture myself naked, covered in napalm, running down the street. But then it’s not napalm. It’s apple butter. And it’s not a street. It’s my mother.’ ”

LIPSYTE

That’s an example of one you don’t think up before you write it. That’s one that comes out of your pen or your fingers and you just say, Yeah . . . 

INTERVIEWER

That’s one where you’re like, Should I leave that?

LIPSYTE

No, that’s you saying, If I take that out, I’m a coward. I had to get to apple butter, by the way.

INTERVIEWER

What do you mean?

LIPSYTE

Well, because on one level of the sound of napalm, the letters yield apple. On another level it had to have a little turn. It couldn’t just be butter. Butter is not enough. Peanut butter is not enough, and peanut butter is maybe more correct because napalm is designed to stick, but apple butter was a little odder, a little more wrong. As soon as I got it, which was a matter of seconds from butter, to peanut butter, to apple butter—that was five seconds. But I remember.

INTERVIEWER

Is it difficult to maintain or build on a sense of jeopardy in revision, as opposed to those first moments of composition? Can you increase jeopardy while also polishing?

LIPSYTE

Yes, it mostly happens in revision. The first drafts, I don’t even really call them drafts, but I begin. It’s a composition. It’s almost an improvisation, you’re just moving from sentence to sentence. It’s necessarily moving quickly. Not carelessly—as a matter of fact it’s often quite laborious—but you face certain choices and then you make that choice, and then you make another choice and then you have to make another choice, and this is what creates what Lish, in that class, would call the “consecution and the swerve.” If you want to create that tension you are probably in some way negating what you just said or qualifying or expanding, and it’s usually some mixture. This one we’re negating, this one we’re qualifying, this one we’re expanding, this one we’re pulling forward and cutting off at the knees. Undercutting is a big part of it. That’s where that torque and tension come from—those were Lish principles, too. In composition you’re not necessarily seeing the whole thing as you’re doing it. When you revise it’s not just fixing or polishing, it’s really pulling it inside out again. You are examining these sentences and asking yourself, Is this—not only is this the best it can be—but is it strange, is it charged, is it somewhere we maybe haven’t been before? Can you do that with every sentence in a novel? Probably not, but the point is it’s better to try and fail than to not think about that at all.

INTERVIEWER

Can you give an example of that line-by-line process? You making a choice, following the consequences, and it taking you some place unexpected?

LIPSYTE

An early story called “Cremains” (1999). There’s a guy with a drug problem using intravenous drugs and he has his mother’s cremains in a box. It’s an obvious synthesis—of course he’s going to shoot them in the end. Any idiot could tell you that was going to happen. But I didn’t know. I had to get there. And when he finally did it, I wrote the sentence, “Something is setting beautiful fires up and down my spine.” So I said, What’s going to happen next? Then I stopped and realized that actually the story was over. I didn’t know it was the end until I tried to move past it. And I didn’t know I was going to get to that place until I got there. There are people who have better processors and could’ve foreseen it all, but I need to get inside and let it lead me there. Not just because I’m slow but because if I’m rushing toward a conclusion I’ll miss a lot of opportunities along the way.

INTERVIEWER

The protagonists of your books, they’re in a tough position vis-à-vis heterosexuality. On the one hand they’re very aware of falling short of some idealized male standard, on the other they know that the standard itself is deeply fucked up. That heterosexuality itself, the institution, is broken, and probably always has been.

LIPSYTE

I don’t know whether heterosexuality is broken, but it’s broken under patriarchy. When you say, Listen, patriarchy fucks up men, too, and always has—I understand why people don’t want to hear that. It’s not to say that men have suffered anything like what women have suffered, or heterosexuals have suffered anything like homosexuals, but everybody has it bad in some way. Everybody is held up to certain expectations, gets judged and made to feel either brutalized or cut down. There are very few men who really benefit from the patriarchy without any spiritual, psychological, or material repercussions. We can call them the one percent. I don’t know them personally, but I guess for some reason I assume they are out there. Maybe the patriarchy makes me assume that. I work from that attitude. These guys I tend to write about, they struggle with their shit under the present system.

INTERVIEWER

Your books are about that struggle, in significant ways.

LIPSYTE

I’m stealing this line from somebody, but it’s like a hysteria of cross-purposes. These guys get worked up because they’re thinking, desiring in three, four different directions. What is it to know intellectually that something’s ridiculous and stupid and retrograde, yet in the moment, when you feel threatened on those terms, you still have this emotional response? It’s that meshuggaas that’s alluring because it allows me to play with the clichés and stock phrases that float around, but also to explore sites of real pain and confusion. I have a lot of fun with that.

INTERVIEWER

Can you talk about getting that onto the page, the simultaneity of all these opposing demands on a character—all the competing thoughts and feelings?

LIPSYTE

I do this especially when a character is talking in the first person, trying to show conflict as it finds language within someone being hailed by rival ideologies. From a technical standpoint you have to decide which threads the reader can pull out and examine. It’s how the reader can recognize, for instance, that the narrator doesn’t see this fact about himself, but does see that one. Where do these threads start to cross? Or braid? And how do you increase the tension?

INTERVIEWER

Spiraling hyper-self-awareness.

LIPSYTE

The spiraling is key. The tightening spiral. The trap closing.

INTERVIEWER

In your work, we see these issues when it comes to moving outside heterosexuality, which often ends badly. In The Ask there’s a foursome, the narrator, Milo, and his wife, with another couple in a Greenpoint loft, lots of cocaine. The two women start getting it on, and the other guy turns to high-five Milo, and Milo tries to stick his tongue down his throat. And the guy is furious!

LIPSYTE

Milo doesn’t know the rules, and he’s too awkward to ask what they are. He just has this egalitarian urge, Oh, well, the women are having sex, I guess the men should have sex. What’s going on in The Ask is this sense of rapid flux, new formations of thought and behavior. Milo’s desperately trying to keep up. 

INTERVIEWER

The Ask feels prescient about the Trump era. Not just the repeated references to a mysterious fake Internet but the words that open the book are essentially a Trumpian message, delivered by an economically marginalized young white man—America’s losing, getting its ass kicked. “ ‘We’re the bitches of the First World,’ said Horace, his own eyes braziers of delight.”

LIPSYTE

First of all, I think Trump is the most horrific example of something that’s been going on for a long time, not just the election, but talking about widening income gaps and the concentration of wealth. I had been sensing that pressure on regular people when I was writing The Ask, before the ’08 crash. I wasn’t thinking specifically that everything would crash right then. If you have even a vaguely Marxist filter it’s not hard to see what the deal is, where the money goes and how few people are doing well. Most people are suffering and juggling jobs, falling through cracks. In fact, we push them in. We being our economic and political system. Which is designed to maintain a few winners and lots of losers. I don’t feel like I was seeing so far into the future. I was just reflecting what I thought was happening at the moment, and it keeps happening. It keeps being perpetuated.

I remember a student saying, Well, since Trump got elected I can’t write because everything is different. It’s a new world and all bets are off. But all bets have been off in the past. You know, after World War I, World War II, the crash of ’29. There are seismic shifts all the time. We are so rooted in the now that when Trump was elected it seemed like the first time anything crazy happened, and it wasn’t.

INTERVIEWER

How did you come to the central idea of Hark, which is that a mindfulness technique called “mental archery” becomes a movement?

LIPSYTE

At the time I was very interested in the mindfulness industry. Not to make fun of it, but to really see people searching for some kind of meaning and inner peace and ability to cope with the stress caused by all these things we’re talking about, even before Trump. By the pressures that are being brought to bear on people. I noticed that everyone was reaching for a piece of spirituality or body practice that would deliver some calm focus. I didn’t want to write about yoga. But I started to think of something that was absurd but could be teased out and made almost plausible.

INTERVIEWER

I think your most brutal critique of mindfulness—

LIPSYTE

To be clear, it’s not a critique of mindfulness but of the commodification of mindfulness.

INTERVIEWER

Here it is. 

Everybody’s been handed this impossible situation. They’re supposed to be these multitasking device-enslaved zombies most of the time, and then they are told to make this swift transition into some mindful, authentic human for a few hours each day. And is it a warm, inviting home they are returning to? No, more like a mortgaged-up-the-brown-winker firetrap full of mewlers and bratty attention artists. And it’s your fault if you can’t just center yourself and deal, and heal?

That’s the crux of it—mindfulness itself becomes another oppression, another task you’re failing at. Something else you just can’t do. 

LIPSYTE

When that becomes another pressure—I’m bad at my relationship and I’m bad at my job and I’m bad at mindfulness—where are you?

INTERVIEWER

With Hark, your protagonist gets his start in stand-up comedy, and it shifts into the massive mindfulness movement. Can you talk about your own relationship to stand-up? Did you ever try it yourself? Did you listen to stand-up albums as a kid?

LIPSYTE

I love stand-up. Or the best of it, anyway. I had some records I listened to incessantly as a kid. Steve Martin, Richard Pryor. I had a Rodney Dangerfield record I loved—“I asked my dentist, What do I do about my yellow teeth? He said, Wear a brown tie.” I had Martin’s Comedy Is Not Pretty! I guess that title sums up my feelings pretty well. I could do the routines. Badly. They lived inside me, but strictly as prose, almost abstracted. I couldn’t master the delivery, the vocal aspects, the inflections, that precision. So I became a sit-down comic. Or comic-tragic? It’s a parallel pursuit. It’s a different syntax for a similar effect.

INTERVIEWER

Tell me about the process of Open City Books publishing your first book, the collection Venus Drive.

LIPSYTE

The Quarterly was defunct, and I was publishing a few stories in Open City. They had just started a book arm and published Actual Air by Dave Berman. And they wanted to do fiction. I wasn’t thinking about a collection, maybe because I didn’t have an M.F.A. or didn’t hang out with those kinds of people. I had a dim desire to publish a book of stories, but I didn’t really know what that entailed. My folks were writers, but not of short-story collections. That was a more rarefied thing. And I didn’t know I was writing stories that could be a collection. I was about three-quarters of the way to a possible book at that point. Rob Bingham, the late Rob Bingham, called and said, Come on, Sam, don’t sell out to the majors. Let us publish your collection. And I should have said, What collection? But I just said, Okay.

It never crossed my mind that I would have an opportunity to publish with a large house. It just seemed like a wonderful thing, this Open City offer, and it was. So I quickly wrote three or four more stories to finish out the book.

INTERVIEWER

What was the response to Venus Drive when it came out?

LIPSYTE

My dad felt bad for me that it was a paperback original. He took a copy and had it bound in this like weird Naugahyde or something, which I thought was a sweet gesture. Because it was coming out of nowhere, and it was a small press, people gave it the benefit of the doubt. It was a moment when there were a lot of questions about small presses and about paperback originals. But then it got some good reviews and good coverage, in no small part thanks to efforts of the editor, Joanna Yas. Years after its release, it continued to have a life. I met a lot of younger writers who had read the book in classes, with their friends.

INTERVIEWER

Different people have different favorite books of yours. A lot of people love The Ask or Home Land, but for many, their favorite is Venus Drive. Is that strange, to have people say, My favorite book is your first one?

LIPSYTE

Maybe years ago I would have been anxious about that. I’d think, Well, they like my first book, but I’ve published this other book now. Or this third book. But then you get people who have never read the first book. They love your fourth book. It evens out over time. And this is old hat, but as a writer you have to be concentrating on your next book, and not sitting around worrying, What if my second novel was my best? 

How else can this shake out? Who knows? Look at Sherwood Anderson—he wrote a lot of novels nobody reads. They just read that one collection, and a few other stories, but it’s fine. That Gilbert Sorrentino essay, “The Act of Creation and Its Artifact,” is it called? He talks about when you finish something, you’re bereft. It’s not yours anymore. You have your book only when you’re writing it. After that, readers can praise it, dismiss it, rank it, rerank it, burn it. Doesn’t really matter. You were abandoned by the book long before.

I’ve gotten emails written by people who are obliterated at two in the morning. I just want you to know how much your book has meant to me. But I’m just a shit. I shouldn’t have even written you. I’m sorry to bother you but I’m drunk. I love those notes. I feel the same way about the work of others. I write back. It’s the sad problem of not being able to gush when you want to gush. Especially for men, maybe. Masculine repression.

INTERVIEWER

When was the first time you were able to write about your mother?

LIPSYTE

In the story “Old Soul” (1999) the narrator has a dying sister and he goes to visit her. And I remember Lish read it and said, You know, that was a good substitution. Because I had made this lateral movement. I realized I wasn’t going to be able to write a story about a mom dying in a hospital bed without it becoming really mawkish. I hadn’t fully absorbed it all. And so I just made this substitution, and the story worked. I have a sister, and she wasn’t crazy about the story, but . . . in general, it worked. 

INTERVIEWER

But the mother—the absent or dying mother—occurs in your later fiction more than once.

LIPSYTE

It took a while for me to have enough distance to write about that in a way that wasn’t sensationalist or sentimental, that wouldn’t just feel like complaint. I do a mock complaint in Home Land, a rant from Lewis asking, Why do ­mothers have to die? That was a way to come at that. It’s hard to write about death, especially when the emotions are still so raw, and stupid. Eventually you get enough distance—you understand it’s universal. Which allows you, as it turns out, to write with particularity. There’s this generic way people try to get into that experience, by describing the hospital room and the flowers and the windows and the get-well cards—it’s supposed to be this dark irony between the grim situation and the cheery nurse. We’ve seen it before. And every undergrad has the grandmother’s-funeral story. It means a lot to the writer, but it doesn’t carry over. Give things time and maybe you can get to it eventually.

INTERVIEWER

The mother is powerful in a different way in The Ask. Powerful because she does not need Milo. She has a lesbian relationship, and she loves him but doesn’t seem to want him around much.

LIPSYTE

The thing that I’ve always been afraid of when writing about my mother was writing the son as some wonderful boy. Look at him feed his dying mother soup! I wanted to embrace the horrible complex of guilt, anger, resentment, weakness. In Venus Drive, he’s taking his dead mother’s pills, fantasizing about euthanizing other old women in the building. In The Ask, the mother not needing him but still being a source of, at least at one point, some comfort, goes back to not wanting your protagonist to be all victim or all victimizer, but looking for that balance. They both, mother and son, do loving things and shitty things. Sometimes it’s loving and shitty at once.

INTERVIEWER

Your mother published one novel.

LIPSYTE

It was called Hot Type, and it was based on her days working at the New York Times as a reporter. She covered sermons and did fashion and culture, music stuff. It came out when I was ten, twelve.

INTERVIEWER

I understand she spent the rest of her life working on a second novel.

LIPSYTE

Most of it, yeah. She didn’t get to that second novel for a while, but then she was playing around with this one book for a long time, during my teenage years and into my twenties.

INTERVIEWER

Do you still have the drafts?

LIPSYTE

They’re in storage. I haven’t looked at them in a long time. I can’t bring myself to throw them away. I don’t feel they’re mine to toss. They’re going to get thrown away eventually because—

INTERVIEWER

Your children will throw them away. Or let’s say their children. Your grandchildren will throw them away.

LIPSYTE

Maybe I should digitize. But that’s what drives me crazy—they’re not marked. I don’t really know which draft she would’ve been most comfortable with.

INTERVIEWER

Do you mark your manuscripts?

LIPSYTE

I do. I’ll email myself and say “latest.” I want everyone to know, if I die, it’s this one. Maybe it should be none of them, but I’ve always had this feeling of, This could be the last one. Sometimes I think I have years to go. I’ll get to write whatever it is I want to write. But I mostly feel there’s no time. Let me just finish this one.

INTERVIEWER

Earlier, you mentioned Gaddis, Coover, Leyner. Are you influenced by literature that’s coming out now? Has the idea of influence changed for you throughout your career?

LIPSYTE

In the past I was influenced by all sorts—as a novelist I was influenced by certain writers, with stories it was a different set of influences. I felt split. As far as today’s literature, I pay attention, though I can’t keep up with everything. Now it’s less a question of influence than it is of tracking what others are doing as a way to ask myself about my own work. I feel pushed by them in a good way.

INTERVIEWER

People sometimes talk about you as a post-Roth writer.

LIPSYTE

If you go to my Wikipedia page, there’s a picture of me at Roth’s birthday celebration, maybe it was, at the Library of Congress. Sabbath’s Theater is one of my favorite books, and I like a lot of Roth. But if you’re a Jewish guy raised in New Jersey during a certain era and you want to write fiction in a darkly comic vein, you’ve got to run from Philip Roth. Or at least I felt I did. The writers that woke me up to a funny, daring relation to language were people such as Barry Hannah and Thomas McGuane, but there were also Jews in the mix, like Leonard Michaels and Stanley Elkin and Grace Paley. Edward Dahlberg, even. Just maybe not Roth as much.

INTERVIEWER

You’re six books in—four novels, two story collections. How many books do you think you’ll write? What sounds like a good career, projecting forward?

LIPSYTE

I don’t think of a number. This is not an original thought, but you start out and you feel you’re in this competition with the mighty dead, as people put it, and with your peers, to a certain degree. Then you get to the point, most writers do, where you just want to be yourself, thinking, What directions do I still want to go in? What am I ready to try now? What’s been gnawing at me? What have I been afraid of? How have I changed? I’m not the guy who wrote Home Land. I’m not the guy who wrote The Ask. I’m not any of those people. I mean, parts of me are, but there are new parts, too, changed parts. So what is it now? The good career is one where you get to keep pursuing that. Like I said earlier, the unattainable goal.

A career has to look like a story even though there isn’t one. I was recently called by a newspaper to offer insight into somebody for whom they were writing an advance obituary. I won’t say which person, but I was thinking, Well, you’re just making up a story about an artist who did a lot of different things, who tried a lot of things. He wasn’t thinking about the narrative of his career when he was doing it. Or maybe he was. But I don’t think so.

INTERVIEWER

Isn’t the point of this interview to curate the story of you and the story of who influenced you and what you’re trying to do and how your methods work? You could be inventing everything. You could be just lying through your teeth.

LIPSYTE

Absolutely, I am. I am! I’m just fulfilling a lifelong dream. I remember being seventeen and walking around in this incredible frenzy of young egotism doing my Paris Review interview. Asking the questions, giving the answers. For two hours, I walked aimlessly in a park doing my Paris Review interview.

INTERVIEWER

Now that you’re doing it, you’ve reached this goalpost, I’d like to return to my earlier question about failure. What does failure mean to you—not as a child, not as a beginning writer, but today—in your life and your writing?

LIPSYTE

I was making pancakes for my ten-year-old and her friend the other day and they kept starting their sentences with the phrase, “I’m really proud of myself because . . . ” What the fuck? Oh, right, they’ve been taught self-esteem. They can experience a healthy sense of accomplishment. It’s wonderful. They should be proud of themselves. They do a lot of amazing things, most of which I can’t do anymore, if I ever could, including various mathematical operations and nifty tricks with soccer balls. My first principle was always, “I suck but maybe I can . . . ” I grew up with a certain anxiety about just being okay in the world. Partly it’s because I know I’m inclined to do absolutely nothing, to stare out the window and daydream. That’s my natural state—I’m slow. I move slowly, dreamily, narcoleptically. I step in dog shit even while looking at the dog shit on the sidewalk, pondering it. But when I feel the panic set in I will kick into this productive groove. When I catch something good in the writing, the panic recedes and then it’s the hum of composition. It’s a place not without frustrations, but it’s a spot I know and feel I have some control over. Or at least I feel patched in. I have connections with my interiority, with my relation to language. I know some people in there, might have some sway. I can make a couple of calls, know what I mean? I feel like a mob capo when I’m writing well. An earner! But I’m not earning money, though sometimes I am. I’m earning life. 

But this idea that was somehow inculcated in me, that you were on your own, and either you had the gumption or pluck or moxie or work ethic or whatever to make something of or for yourself, or you’d fall down the ladder and be lucky to survive, is coded deep in me. Part of it is that my father was self-employed through a large part of my childhood. He worked like a demon. But when I saw how unfair this construction truly is, not even to me, a privileged person, but in general, it became an important theme—the ways we live with the tension between the capitalist story, as it were, and our experience on the ground. There is so much to explore, especially the ways this tension distorts our sense of ourselves and one another and how it affects our relations and actions. It’s central to my work because it’s a core conflict in everyday existence. And also a laugh riot.