Fiction
Home Land, Sam Lipsyte
A friend of mine tipped me off to Sam Lipsyte and said that he was the best comic novelist working today. Home Land seems to be his best regarded book, so I figured I’d start with this one. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to finish it because it was far too vulgar for me. For that reason, steer clear of this one.
I figured I’d still write for a minute about it, though. On the positive side, the premise of Home Land is brilliant: it’s a series of first person letters written by a thirtysomething loser to the “alumni notes” section of his high school newsletter. (Why didn’t I think of that?) Caustic ruminations and personal recriminations ensue. In addition, what I read of Home Land was pretty hilarious.
At the same time, Lipsyte’s humor, though laugh-out-loud funny, is also the problem. I couldn’t help comparing what I read of Home Land to another comedy, John Kenny Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces (see my notes on this book in my 2009 list). The latter novel also features an early middle aged, misanthropic anti-hero who never fits in and rails against the world. Here, too, caustic ruminations and personal recriminations ensue, but in Dunces, the humor is open hearted in a way that Home Land’s is not. The main character of Dunces, Ignatius J. Reilly, often works himself into a ridiculous lather over what he sees as deep problems in the world and in people, but I never felt like I was laughing in a way that denigrated either Reilly or his targets. On the other hand, Lewis Miner in Home Land is just as funny but far more cruel.
So, here’s the question: what makes some humor (including sarcasm) compassionate and inclusive, and other humor (including sarcasm) mean and exclusive? I don’t think the answer is that the better kind just isn’t as funny—Confederacy of Dunces is proof to the contrary. Instead, my guess is that positive humor, even when it’s biting, mirrors the impulse of Christ’s incarnation. Jesus came to earth and became man in order to express and experience solidarity with humanity in a fallen world. Everything that Jesus says to us in the gospels, even when it’s stern and it hurts, originates from a place of love and an understanding that we’re in this together. In the same way, comedy is “good,” even when cutting, if the funnymen put themselves in the same boat as their listeners and recipients. Cruel humor instead takes an anti-incarnational tack, in which the humorist sets himself above or against everyone else. With this kind of comedy, you may be laughing, but it’s always at your own expense.
General disclaimer: I’ve been reluctant over the last couple of years to start a blog, because I’ve thought to myself that I’d have trouble figuring out things to say, or spend too much time trying to fill a blogospace. But, it seems that one thing I could do would be to keep track of books that I’ve read (plus music), jot down a paragraph about each, and post everything online.
I hope that this list is helpful to people both to give some ideas about what to read (and what not to read), and also to open a window into how I personally process through books and consider issues related to Christ and culture. (In addition, I won’t try to write anything particularly controversial, but I offer these words just as one man’s perspective and maybe some food for thought for others. These aren’t ex cathedra pronouncements that bind anyone into agreeing with me.)