Sam Lipsyte: Home Land
[Published in PLAYBACK:stl, March 2005]
“Let me stand on the rooftop of my reckoning and shout naught but the indisputable: I did not pan out.”
Walt Whitman had his “barbaric yawp.” Home Land’s Lewis Miner, a.k.a Teabag, has here his barbaric yawn. His failures, his inactivity, his intellectual and emotional sluggishness, his pitiful existence—it’s all so paralyzing, so exhausting. How to move up? How to break out? How to look your peers in the eyes? About the best Teabag can do is muster up the energy to share his story, sing his own sad song of himself. In this much-talked-about novel (Picador; 229 pgs; $13), author Sam Lipsyte’s ingenious vehicle for sharing such a song: Teabag’s high school alumni newsletter, the Catamount Notes, to which he mails news (I miss my girl), and mails news (my job’s a joke), and mails news (See you at the reunion, you soulless overachievers).
You might have a ball with it. Teabag delivers some fine lines that memorably color in his feelings of failure: “I used to be bright for my age, but then I got older,” he laments. “We have no weapons, no nerve,” he says of those with whom he shares a rut. “We’re gentle rejects.” Even dressing himself has become a burden; when he attracts unwanted suspicion for his concert t-shirt—the band is Anal Jihad—Teabag shruggingly chalks up another lesson learned: “Catamounts, I don’t have the clothes for the new conditions.”
But as Teabag writes these alumni updates—together, they make up the novel—you might soon tire of him and his whole sorry state. After all, when you’re in the hands of a wiseass, rambling narrator without a plan, the book you’re going to get will be predictably aimless. And the author’s case is hampered a bit by the book’s comedic ingredients, which are overloaded with a vulgar wackiness that is sometimes confused for humor. By the time you’ve gotten through the inflatable woman and Charles Manson orgies and sonnets about yeast infections, it’s simply no longer that interesting or surprising when the elderly man in the grocery store uses the phrase “augmentation of the ta-tas.” It’s also no longer that impressive.
Is it fair, though, to ask such an unimpressive character to be impressive? To ask a man of no accomplishments to make one out of the book he’s narrating? Maybe, maybe not. It’s always slippery when one begins to tick off the faults of an intentionally grubby and slouchy satire. It’s not a novel of deep insights and profound meanings; if it were, Teabag wouldn’t have been let through the front cover.
But it’s Teabag’s book, and the guy does have his moments. Take this gem, wherein he defends the large gaps in his resume. “I’d tell interviewers to judge my employment history like a piece of music,” he says. “It’s all about the space between the jobs.”
That’s a great line. And some readers will dig listening to that space. Others will await the return of music.
