Home Land
by Sam Lipsyte
Following Venus Drive (Open City Books, 2000) and The Subject Steve (Broadway Books, 2001), Home Land is a book you’ll want to shy away from if the nihilistic treatment of sexuality, fragile emotions, and nihilism make you queasy. If you’re offended by the words, “pussy” or “fuck”, stay away—but if you can enjoy a pirate’s language, the colorful rendering of unique characters, and the biting satire of a high school deadbeat who injects realism into his high school alumni newsletter, then pick up this Picador paperback.
“It’s confession time, Catamounts,” is the sentence that begins Homeland, a novel about Lewis Miner, aka “Teabag”: perennial loser. The guy’s life is a joke by societal standards: health and hygiene in the gutter, world outlook in the shitter; he’s still stuck on high school, prospects: nil. Through careful scrutiny of his own defunct life and the puree of events, personalities, and emotions around him, Lipsyte’s Teabag dredges thoughtful insights from our own intolerably tolerable American lifestyles. In a paragraph about his landlord, Teabag writes to the newsletter,
Mrs. Hildebrandt, though, she kindly cured me of my sentimentalist streak. The lady was needy, belligerent. She did not believe in boiler repair, denied both the Holocaust and the very idea that I’d ever paid her a security deposit. Plus, she was wont to call the cops for a noise complaint if I did so much as quietly moan at my computer screen after dinnertime. It’s a wonder I stayed so long. When dementia crept up on her like one of those ancient guild ninjas, I began to enjoy corroborating her suspicions that her visiting nurse was stealing bits of hair and skin from the divan. ‘People will pay a fortune for a white woman’s slough,’ I told her. Mrs. Hildebrandt’s probably dead by now, buried deep in cold Wisconsin dirt, and I’d guess that Tommy and and the rest of her hand-eye Gandhi brood don’t kneel at her tomb too often, either (14).
What you read above is not so much a focus upon the insights of Teabag—as was mentioned earlier—but rather a sampling of the unique voice that Teabag writes his newsletters in, the voice that sets Lipsyte apart. As filthy as he is funny, Lipsyte mixes music and immodesty together, creating Teabag, a character who is as original as Shteyngart’s Vladimir Girshkin, yet who is as real as my own pal, Brad Hayes. It’s the combination of the two that make Teabag work as a character, and it’s the insights that Lipsyte provides that make Homeland work as a novel.
Lately, Lipsyte has been writing short stories, publishing “Expressive” in Tin House(Iss. 31) a “traditional” lit journal, “Paisley” in the West Coast experimental journal McSweeney’s (Iss. 22), a short story about a Duolo in Playboy, and another short story about “The Other Man” in Colors. “Paisley” and “The Other Man” can both be found online and can be read for free without signing up to anything.
5 out of 5
Reviewed by David
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