Lipsyte, Sam. Home Land. New York: Picador, 2004.

Don't bother reading this entry, because what all could I say about this book that hasn't already been said, according to the back-cover blurb copy, by something called LADS? (A, like, 20-second search on the Web for such a magazine turned up fruitless...could this be a manufactured blurb, or are we to just write it off to one of the dozens of lads-mags that are blossoming in the U.K. like so many shameful rashes?)

Sam Lipsyte has got balls the size of watermelons. He's ripped the piss out of his Yank countrymen so much that he gets published here in the UK first. He's one wicked sod. You'll love it.

Normally, I wouldn't touch a book with this kind of blurb on it, because I'm a snob and think that reported ball-size is in inverse proportion to talent and interest (imagine the size of Jonathan Safran Foer's or Sufjan Stevens's testes...marbles, surely, and isn't that so much better?), but I've liked Lipsyte ever since my pal Jim turned me on to his stuff back in Pittsburgh. He's got a brilliant story in Marcus's Anchor Book of New American Short Stories called "I'm Slavering," the title coming from a line of dialogue in which one character tells the central narrator/protagonist, "Look at you, you're slavering."

The conceit of this book is that the whole thing is written in the form of updates to a high-school alumni magazine. "Greetings, Catamounts!" is a common opener. It seems like one couldn't take a whole novel in this format, but one takes it pretty good. LADS would say one takes it like a man, right up the bleedin' arse, or some such. Lewis Miner, the narrator, is going nowhere in life and he's bitter toward the successes of his former classmates in an almost sweet-natured way, if bitterness can in fact also be sweet.

But Lipsyte allows Miner these moments (often toward the end of his chapters, which have titles, which seems rare these days) where he rises above his classmates, like, morally, and condemns them in the ways of some caped avenger. Let's see if I can find one of these.... Okay well here's one. Stacy Ryson was the class president and is editor of the Catamount Notes to which Lewis sends his updates, and after receiving the first few (each chapter, it seems is a separate update that Lewis sends, making the novel written in past tense, but unfolding much like a present-tense story, in that the narrator at the beginning of the book doesn't know how his tale will end), Stacy writes him a letter asking if he's ever loved, if he's ever been human, because he seems so bitter. It also turns out that she doesn't remember Lewis, despite his asking her to the Halloween dance. So there's a part where he's telling about the last time he saw his true love, Gwendolyn:

It wasn't a very heroic note to end things on, Catamounts. Here I was, ditched on the cobbles of a dead empire. Those squat rovers had ruled half the Pope-split world. I'd had the love of a goddess and relatively low upkeep. Now look at us.

Does all of this answer your query, Stacy?

Do I qualify as human, yet?

It was just a goddamn Halloween Dance.

The plot of the book is very steady and right on, but the whole thing is driven by the voice. Those squat rovers have ruled half the Pop-split world? No, I don't know what it means, but F, what a sentence.