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« AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY DIFFERENT | Main | MCEWAN REVIEWED »

January 31, 2005

MORE LIPSYTE

Following up on Friday's Guest Review of Sam Lipsyte's Home Land, we've got this Globe and Mail review (thanks, George), as well as this one from a bit closer to home.  And finally, thanks to Dave Lull for sending us a long a PW interview with Lipsyte.  It's only available to subscribers but we offer a little taste after the jump.

UPDATE: In what could be the ultimate endorsement, that king of hard-living TMFTML adds his kudos to the pile.

Sitting in a diner in Astoria, Queens, not far from where he has lived
for five years, Sam Lipsyte recalls a childhood spent in a writing
household. For most of his childhood, his father, Robert, worked at
home in the basement. "It was magical to go to that cold basement where
he sat with his typewriter and his legal pads." It was a romantic
vision that gave Lipsyte, now 36, "the impression, probably to my
financial detriment now, that one could be a writer and not have a day
job. It was a nice fantasy."

Now Lipsyte is a published author in his own right, with Venus Drive, a
well-received short story collection, and The Subject Steve, his much
talked about first novel. And this month, he will publish his second
novel, Home Land, in which a 33-year-old barely scratching by in a town
much like Lipsyte's childhood New Jersey home, watches the shambled
lives of his high school classmates and offers brutally revealing
updates to the alumni bulletin.

His character's updates are invariably left unpublished and the novel,
too, very nearly was. Lipsyte's youthful fantasy has been replaced by a
more sanguine understanding. "The publishing world is a business," he
says. "You should really not make the mistake of thinking that writing
and publishing are the same thing. Occasionally they will intersect,
but they're completely different."

Lipsyte began his career early, winning a scholarship through "teen
imitations" of New Yorker stories. "I was sort of disgusted by them. I
felt like I had figured out a math problem." That disgust combined with
heavy doses of literary theory at Brown cured him of any writerly
ambitions. "It was a wonderful stripping away, but by the end of school
I wasn't the guy who was going to get an internship and write a
collection of short stories."

Instead, he spent a couple of years with a band called Dungbeetle,
which after a single and a couple of small tours, spiraled into
self-destruction. Broke and drifting, Lipsyte was asked by his mother,
now divorced and living in Manhattan, to move in and help her as she
battled a recurrence of breast cancer.

Partly to help him cope with his mother's illness, Lipsyte started
writing again. When a couple of stories were published in Gordon Lish's
Quarterly, Lish suggested that Lipsyte take his seminar. "Those kinds
of times you realize that it's not about rebelling or reacting but
about delivering yourself. Dealing with my mom and studying with Gordon
Lish was a pitched intense time and the class meant everything to me."

Lipsyte had placed a couple of stories with Open City magazine, when
Robert Bingham, one of its founding editors, called to say they wanted
to publish his book. "There wasn't a book to sell, but I said, sure,
you can have it. I then had 10 months to get a book." He pauses. "So I
guess the moral of the story is to lie."

It was at a reading of that collection, Venus Drive, that Lipsyte met
Gerry Howard of Broadway Books. Gerry was impressed enough to ask to
see the novel Lipsyte mentioned he'd been working on. Howard's interest
was an important source of solace to Lipsyte, who trashed hundreds of
pages looking for the right opening for The Subject Steve, about the
torments of a middle-aged man who seems to be dying either of boredom
or of the truly brutal cures. When Howard made an offer, Lipsyte was
"spared the experience of many, many rejections. That" he says with a
grim smile, "came later."

The Subject Steve was published September 11, 2001. "It was doomed,"
says Lipsyte. "On the 13th, I got a call from the publisher to make
sure I was on board with canceling my tour scheduled to begin the next
week. Their argument was that Salman Rushdie was canceling his, so
everyone else should, too. I pointed out that while his would be
re-scheduled, mine wouldn't. So I didn't cancel. It was an amazing
experience. Not because of the books sold, but because I got on a plane
on September 17th with three other people."

Home Land was less grueling to write, and it was sold immediately in
the U.K. to Flamingo in March 2003. Despite admiring reviews for both
The Subject Steve and the U.K. edition of Home Land, it took a full
year longer to sell Home Land in the U.S.

"My agent, Ira Silverberg, really busted his hump trying to sell it.
There must have been two dozen rejections." It was a low moment, but
there was an unexpected source of support. "People who ran small
journals, other writers, editors, their friends, heard about this great
novel that was being rejected everywhere. They were sending it around
among friends as an e-mail attachment." Then one editor who couldn't
take it, sent just such an attachment to another editor, Lorin Stein at
FSG. "Lorin knew the history of the book and had been a fan of it for a
while. He really went out of his way to make this co-publishing
situation with PicadorUSA work out."

Although grateful for Stein's enthusiasm Lipsyte's become more
philosophical about the publishing process as a whole. "Gordon Lish
once said that if you're doing this because you don't want to be a
dentist, that's not good enough. Though, God, I'd love to have the
stability of being a dentist right now."

Instead, he teaches in the Columbia University MFA program, does
reviews and, a clear reason for that yearning for stability, cares for
his four-month-old son. "And I'm working on stories. So I'm back to
where I started. Working on stories. Waiting for the call."

Posted by TEV at 12:15 AM |

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