Hark

by Sam Lipsyte

A brilliant send-up of our contemporary culture from Sam Lipsyte, the critically acclaimed author of Home Land , centered around an unwitting mindfulness guru and the phenomenon he initiates.In an America convulsed by political upheaval, cultural discord, environmental collapse, and spiritual confusion, many folks are searching for peace, salvation, and—perhaps most immediately—just a little damn focus. Enter Hark Morner, an unwitting guru whose technique of “Mental Archery”—a combination of mindfulness, mythology, fake history, yoga, and, well, archery—is set to captivate the masses and raise him to near-messiah status. It’s a role he never asked for, and one he is woefully underprepared to take on. But his inner-circle of modern pilgrims have other plans, as do some suddenly powerful fringe players, including a renegade Ivy League ethicist, a gentle Swedish kidnapper, a crossbow-hunting veteran of jungle drug wars, a social media tycoon with an empire on the skids, and a mysteriously influential (but undeniably slimy) catfish.In this social satire of the highest order, Sam Lipsyte, the New York Times bestseller and master of the form, reaches new peaks of daring in a novel that revels in contemporary absurdity and the wild poetry of everyday language while exploring the emotional truths of his characters. Hark is a smart, incisive look at men, women, and children seeking meaning and dignity in a chaotic, ridiculous, and often dangerous world.

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Book Club, Satire

304 pages, Paperback

First published January 15, 2019

About the author

Sam Lipsyte was born in 1968. He is the author of the story collection Venus Drive (named one of the top twenty-five book of its year by the Village Voice Supplement) and the novels The Subject of Steve and Home Land, winner of the Believer Book Award. Lipsyte teaches at Columbia Universitys School of The Arts and is a 2008 Guggenheim Fellow. He lives in Manhattan.

Reviews

[Anita Pomerantz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Snarky, irreverent, and absurdist best describes this tale of an unwitting guru, Hark, who becomes known and admired for his meaningless message instructing people to "focus". However, the book really isn't about Hark, but rather about the acolytes that latch onto him and his mental archery methodology. The book's tension mostly comes from the various attempts to monetize and use Hark for profit. But oddly,I found the book to be neither plot driven nor truly character driven, but more of a comedic stand up set in book form. There are elements of plot (mostly in the latter third) and stabs at character development, but what stands out are Lipsyte's skewering of everything from foodies to marriage to therapy to yoga to social justice to technocrats to child rearing to religion; little in today's society goes unscathed. And the characters are weird, but all basically losers or money hungry villians.

There are some truly funny moments in this book, especially in the dialogue. Truth be told, I'm probably not the very best audience for satire (I really couldn't bear The Sellout and that won the Man Booker), but this book amused me in a Monty Pythonesque way. If you like black humor and a sarcastic edge to your entertainments, it is definitely worth giving a try.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lipsyte, the closest we have as an heir apparent to Stanley Elkin, returns to the novel after a seven-year absence, his last The Ask in 2012. Not overly prolific, ne’ertheless Lipsyte carefully scrubs and buffs his clauses to a luminescent comic sheen, making every page a scream on the sentence level, throwing caution to the dogs when plot or coherence is concerned. Hark is a parody of post-New Age wellness health crazes with little substantive heft to them and many ways to subscribe for £££. The titular Hark is a wispy man with many nonsensical pronouncements on the art of “mental archery”, the endgame of which is to help people achieve full DFW enlightenment and focus more. The novel is more concerned with the loopy parasites hovering around Hark, among them a wibbly married twosome trying to keep a marriage afloat in a world unmoored from sense. An extremely silly, riotous chuckle in the face of a crumbling world, Hark is a fine antidote to weeping alonely into your eggnog.

[Hank Stuever · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having gone nutzo for Sam Lipsyte's previous novels and short story collection, I was eager to read this. And there it sat on my "currently reading" shelf for, gosh, five months. I took an unplanned break from reading books -- I'm not sure why. Lots of stress, for one thing, and feeling overwhelmed. Finally we went on summer vacation and I got to binge books for two delirious weeks. "Hark" was the perfect re-entry into reading. Lipsyte writes mind-alteringly great sentences and dialogue. The story, which takes place in a parallel and very similar modern world, is about a group of disaffected New Yorkers who find themselves inexplicably drawn to a self-help guru who seems like a total fraud. But the novel's caustic qualities tend to wear thin. By the end, it felt like Lipsyte sort of calls off the search for a real ending. Beautiful effort, though.

[Dave · Rating 2 out of 5]

Snarky, pretentious, satire of modern life. Using a life-affirming cultish guru who got his start giving corporate feel good lectures, the story circles around his bizarre but devoted followers of his mental archery program. Hark is an interesting character, but Michael Valentine he is not. Hope this works better for you than it did for me.

[Sherwood Smith]

The keelson here is strongly reminiscent of Being There, which came out when I was young. Alas, this revisit to the same idea nearly fifty years later pretty much covers the same ground, as hapless guru Hark Morner drifts into the morass of modern society, wanting everyone to "focus" by using "mental archery;" the act of moving and visualizing allegedly helps one achieve that focus.

Of course everyone around Hark wants to monetize the message, and so we get a series of sometimes funny but mostly absurdist characters in a satirical look at contemporary society that dips in and out of preachiness. No subject escapes being skewered.

I think the audience for this is the young and hip, or would-be hip, who haven’t read much, and so will find the innocent-guru-used-by-weasels fresh and new, and the satire ditto.

Copy provided by NetGalley

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Tom LeClair reviews ::
https://openlettersreview.com/open-le...

Let's listen.


"With Stanley Elkin and Philip Roth gone, Sam Lipsyte is American fiction’s foremost pitch man and bitch man, a master of Elkin’s crazed persuasions and Roth’s enraged complaints. "

"Although ostensibly set in a future several presidents after Obama, Hark is the best novel I know about Trump time."

"To Elkin and Roth as forerunners of Lipsyte, add William Gass and his insistence that fiction be written as intensively as poetry."

"Compared to those anti-Trump novelists I mentioned—Rushdie, Lethem, and Shteyngart—Lipsyte is both less direct and more passionate, an avenging angel smiting bourgeois self-helpers when political activists are needed."

'“broiled in hell-fire.”'

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lipsyte's upcoming (out in January 2019) is a hyper-charged tale of an odd guy who becomes a guru for his "mental archery" tricks of heightened focus. Lipsyte's descriptions and dialogue are as darkly funny and relentless as ever but the story felt too messy at times. Maybe with a couple less characters and stray subplots, I would have ranked this as high as his others (and his three other novels are ALL among my all-time faves). Much of the middle section (depicting the inner workings of his cult-like helpers) is hard to follow, but when it hums, it does so thrillingly despite all the goofballery. Eventually, Hark recovers in weird, unexpected metaphysical ways toward the end.

[Bandit · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a story of a guru. Or, really, the man who unwittingly becomes one due to having just the right thing to say (focus) at the right time (America in the throes of political and spiritual chaos). The guru links the way to enlightenment to archery and makes it all about perfecting the aim. And this mental archery concept becomes insanely popular with a bunch of variedly confused individuals, a few of whom specifically go to great length to popularize the message and the messenger and it is those few who are the main focus of the book. This is my first time reading the author, so I wasn’t sure quite what to expect, despite the ample praise lavished by the way of foreword. Satires are tough to get just right. This one came close. It did well at skewering a particular type of mentality…the first world privilege, upper classes on the verge of moral bankruptcy and the disgustingly wealthy, already past that verge and looking for ways to monetize whatever trends there may be. And the writing here was quite good, the author does some very clever verbal gymnastics and linguistic contortions. The book gets quite dark toward the end, almost incongruously so, but on the second thought it may well be appropriate. It certainly gives the book more of a punch. So as a satire I’d say it succeeds, but being as glib and sardonic as it was… it was a book easy to appreciate intellectually, but difficult to connect to emotionally. It entertained and offered some food for thought, but it didn’t wow. Still an auspicious introduction to an obviously talented author and if you’re in a mood for a skeptical cynical tale, this’ll do the trick. But more along the lines of interesting than, say, awesome. Thanks Netgalley.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

So sharp and hilarious. A marvel on the sentence level as well. This book nourished me.

[Leo · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book didn't do it for me, had hoped to like it as it's satirical look at gurus and mindfulness but the fun got lost on me. Didn't connect with either the characters or the story.

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lipsyte obviously has some gain-of-function mutation. You read him for the first time, and you find some different literary threshold. Oh, that’s what writing can be? He’s hilarious and skilled; every sentence is diametrically opposed to the canned stuff of custom. I’d love to hear plebs like myself give ‘Hark’ any critique, or rip and claw for its ‘ulterior meaning’, it’s target. But dumb proxies like that are just toys that Lipsyte throws in our playpen, while he smokes on the couch, dying laughing. The self help bullshit/ineffable profundity duality that lays at the center of the book makes for wildly inventive characters, themes, and most importantly—decorative writing that has me rolling laughing. Excited to read ‘The Ask’ next.

[Allen Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s very little overlap in the writing Venn diagram of “funny” and “literary” – even most ostensibly humorous literary fiction definitely deserves the scare quotes around “funny,” while genuinely funny stuff doesn’t often have the requisite stylistic heft to warrant the literary tag – but Sam Lipsyte lives right square in the middle of it all.

Lipsyte’s new novel “Hark” is another example of the author’s incredible gift for balancing poetry and potty humor, for blending the profound and the profane. This latest book – his first since the 2012 story collection “The Fun Parts” – once again places the American experience square in its sights, embracing the depths of inescapable weirdness that exist just beyond casual cultural perception.

It’s a quick-fire reading experience, with short chapters and frequent perspective shifts, capturing the kind of inner turmoil that can only come from discovering someone who you believe might actually have answers to the toughest of tough questions, namely: why?

In an undefined near-future America, one marked by end-stage upheaval on every possible front – geopolitical, economic, cultural, environmental, you name it – Hark Morner (yes, as in “The herald angels sing”) is the central figure in something he calls “Mental Archery.” This … whatever it is … stitches together half-baked mindfulness and ripped-off yoga poses with tossed-off riffs on misremembered history and mythology. Oh, and archery of course. It’s a slapdash pastiche of new age nonsense and platitudes.

And yet, it works.

At least for some. For people like Fraz, a man in his 40s who stumbled across Hark in a parking lot and found himself following the tenets of mental archery; his family life – wife Tovah, twin kids David and Lisa – might be crumbling, but he’s become an integral part of Hark’s circle. Ditto Kate, a wealthy trust fund kid who is the primary financial backer of Mental Archery and spends her free time as a volunteer escort for organ transplants. And then there’s Teal, academic high achiever-turned-embezzler, now an ex-con looking to find the connections and reconnections she seeks through social work and self-help.

And flitting around the margins is a bizarre collection of weirdos – self-styled culture warriors and social media tycoons, poets and tech titans, the flat-broke and the billionaires. All of them seeking the solace that they believe they can find with Hark’s help. But Hark isn’t even sure that there IS meaning here – his only aim is to help people find focus. What they choose to focus on is up to them.

Of course, with popularity comes problems. Hark’s circle steadily expands, meaning that the voices of even those closest to him can be drowned out by the roaring of crowds. For Fraz and Tovah, for Kate and Teal, this means digging deep and determining just what Mental Archery is – and who or what Hark really is, the man whose teachings they’ve come to love even if they don’t really understand why.

“Hark” is one of those books wherein the reader can do little more than hang on tightly, pulled with breakneck pacing through a joyfully anarchic and chaotic, yet delicately detailed world. The America that Lipsyte has constructed is a strange (but logical in its strangeness) extrapolation from now to then. The timeline is left deliberately vague, while certain details make clear that the history of this version isn’t quite what we ourselves remember.

The faux-wisdom of Hark, who could be anything from an accident huckster to the Messiah depending on who you ask, makes up some of the funniest material in the book. His speeches are meandering declarations packed with off-the-cuff explorations of half-remembered tiny truths; he spins these kernels into larger narratives that are offered as accepted reality, no matter how far from the real they actually venture. Combine that with the striking physicality of bowless, arrowless archery poses and you’ve got a delightfully odd send-up of the blurry gray area between seeking self-help and dogmatic indoctrination – an area that Lipsyte takes no little joy in examining.

Of course, a large part of what makes “Hark” such an enjoyable read is the prose styling with which Lipsyte presents these ideas. He’s unafraid to let his characters hold forth with lengthy diatribes. Nor will he shy away from long and intricate looks inside their heads. And his choice to build the story of his titular character entirely via the impressions of others – Hark is one of the few into whose head we never venture – is an inspired one. It lends itself beautifully to the idea that we can never truly know the inner realities of others – even those others whom we install as our own personal magnetic norths.

It's remarkable what we’re willing to do – and what we’re willing to give up – in our search for meaning. Many of us seek to understand our place in the world – some look for help in finding it, others want confirmation of the status they’ve already claimed. And while there will always be people out there willing to help, so too will there always be people who want to exploit your quest for their own gain.

“Hark” is a rare thing – a genuinely funny work of literary fiction. If it’s any indication of what 2019’s offerings are going to be like, it’s going to be one hell of a year for books.

[Rob · Rating 1 out of 5]

Hark (2019)*
By Sam Lipsyte
Simon & Schuster, 304 pages
★

There is a thin line between that which is snarky and hip, and prose that loses its impact. Sam Lipsyte's Hark weaves across both sides of that border on a regular basis.

The first chapter, which serves as something of a prologue, is so chaotic that I almost bailed on the novel before I even got started. I received an uncorrected advance copy, so perhaps editors have rescued the book's gateway, but the rest of what I read is a mix of sharp satire and sociology masquerading as fiction. Maybe Hark rushes to a brilliant conclusion, but I can't comment upon this. Hark is a work that I kept pushing aside in annoyance and picking up again in the hope that I was missing something. There will be no spoilers in this review; I gave up for good two-thirds of the way in.

Lipsyte's intent is to skewer celebrity culture, as well as Americans' rush to jog down a dollar-strewn path to bliss. His antihero is Hark Morner, who just wants everyone to "focus" and pay attention. His is essentially a Ram Dass Be Here Now point of view that replaces Dass' idea of building mental mandalas with "mental archery." What is mental archery, you ask? It's pretty much as it sounds. There are 52 exercises in which one strikes various archers' poses. There is no quiver or arrow; the act of moving and visualizing allegedly helps one "focus." This is an intriguing backdoor critique of the American Rut, one marked by rushing from one mindless task to another, and the anesthetizing effects of helter-skelter surfing in a plugged in and screen bound world.

Hark's only message is that we need to "focus," but American society isn't big on simple messages unless they can be monetized. Hark is a blissful naïf, but his devotees are neither. Lipsyte populates Hark's world with those who think mental archery is a marketable concept, though they've clearly failed to achieve the focused state Hark advocates. Or, more accurately, they are focused on quite different goals. Hark wants to give mental archery to the world as a gift; his devotees want to promote him as a pay-to-see guru.

Hark is thus shoved into a world of hucksterism and hype that he neither desires nor understand. Imagine a motivational speaker who only tells people to focus. No one would pony up to hear that, right? Wrong! The best parts of Lipsyte's novel probe how easy it is to get people to buy bromides and placebos, no matter how improbable or trite. Hark doesn't even tell his massed audiences what we should focus upon. He is akin to a benign and clueless Wizard of Oz, but there is no Toto to pull back the curtain. The problem, though, is that because we already know this, we plow through Hark hoping to find interesting character backstories. Alas, mainly we find a cast that's either amoral, dull, or both. What is left is a lampoon for the yoga-and-sprouts crowd that they probably won't get.

I leave open the possibility that others will find this book funnier than I. There is, however, no getting around the fact that we are riding the one-trick pony that is the runt litter of a mighty stallion: Jerzy Kosinski's Being There (1970). Hark Morner is an updated Chance Gardner, the shut-in innocent groundskeeper set adrift, and whose knowledge base consists of advertising hooks he overheard on television. Chance is similarly embraced and promoted by those seeking easy answers. Toss in the focus angle from Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) and Barbara Ehrenreich's Bright-sided (2009), her searing critique of the positive thinking movement, and you've got Hark.

There is, of course, room for revisiting old ideas; with the exception of Ehrenreich, we are talking about decades-old works. Alas, Hark is not that book. Lipsyte's pursuit of a hipster vibe that is just out of his reach is made manifest in a lack of thoughtful or likable characters. This distances the reader from both the humor and the author's chosen tone. Regarding the latter, there is a sense that maybe Lipsyte really wanted to remake the values-challenged world of Bonfire of the Vanities.

Once again, I cannot comment upon how Lipsyte resolved (or failed to resolve) all of this. I guess I lost my focus.

Rob Weir

* This book is scheduled for release in 2019, but it's already widely available.

[Ericka Clou · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing is good, and the subject of the book seemed like the exact sort of thing I’d love: an anti-modern-culture focus (mindfulness) guru turned unwilling cult leader. But the style was impossible for me to get past. I’m not a fan of absurdist ironic fiction such as that of Douglas Adams, but at least Adams’s writing has a light quality. This was absurdist and another reviewer used the word “caustic” and I can’t find a better word. The characters are real but the style makes them seem cartoonish at the same time. I don’t think I got anything from the book really.

[Keith Rosson · Rating 4 out of 5]

As ever, Lipsyte's new one, HARK, is funny, irreverent, so brilliantly dexterous, full of jaw-droppingly nimble dialogue, and - particularly the ending this time around - brutally f*cking depressing.

[Dale · Rating 1 out of 5]

Love almost all of his other stuff. Not this, a repetitive, unfunny grind. Don’t bother.

[SueKich · Rating 1 out of 5]

Didn't like; didn't finish.

[Anthony Crupi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Many of my favorite novels are of the shaggy dog variety; for reasons perhaps having to do with faulty wiring or plain cussedness, I tend to be drawn to books that hang together on the most feeble of premises, 300-page excuses for dopey jokes and arch wordplay, meta-narratives where someone is forever making the useful distinction between the concept of the death bed and, as is the case here, the "death futon." And while I rarely remember the endings to novels or films or even three-panel comic strips—OK, so there's Nick Carraway and his little "boats against the current" spiel and Rosebud the sled and that spiteful little fucker Shermy's "Good ol' Charlie Brown . . . How I hate him!" in the very first Peanuts strip—something about the way Lipsyte sort of blows the entire effort to Kingdom Come[stain]* really didn't sit well. It's as if he either was so blocked that he just gathered up all the loose threads and knitted a sweater bearing the legend FUCK YOU, I TRIED or he missed enough deadlines that Simon and/or Schuster's next step was to send some goons to pound some inspiration into him. Fearing the physical and mental upset that comes with the intervention of Publishing Muscle, the author stayed up for a few days mainlining NoDoz® and Soylent™ while bashing out the final 30-odd pages. None of which is to say that I didn't enjoy Hark after a fashion—Lipsyte's prose remains as hilarious and dark and sad and antic as when I first read Venus Drive nearly 20 years ago [!!!], and by God can the man write a sentence. But this would certainly not be the first book of his that I'd scramble to save when Anal Jihad** comes pounding on my door.

*ick, and I'm sorry, but that's the kind of thing that Lipsyte's characters are forever blurting out at parent-teacher conferences and job interviews
**now Home Land, that's a treasure

[Melanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I really wanted to like this book. Loved the title and the crazy premise of mental archery, of focusing … on nothing. And I was blown away by the wordsmithing. The voice is so unique, with Lipsyte often making up words -- or combining words that shouldn’t go together -- and making those weird phraselets work in the same way that clumsy German noun-clusters can sometimes convey deeper meaning. No, Lipsyte’s innovative vocabulary doesn’t always strike gold. Or at least I didn’t always understand the strange combinations. But most of the time it didn’t matter, because they underscored the weirdness of the book’s environment. I was too busy keeping pace with the narrative to parse the odd phraselets. The pace, driven by short, incomplete sentences, is fast. I enjoyed the ride -- until about halfway through the book.

Eventually my fascination with the wordsmithing was overcome by annoyance with the characters. I tired of the hipster mentality and found none of the principals likable. No, likability is not essential, but the key characters should IMHO be interesting. For me, only Hark approached that standard. More annoying than the difficulty mustering sufficient interest in the protagonists was my confusion over the point of the narrative. Sure, the novel is a satire. But of what? Society in general? The hucksters turning the most simplistic notions into a new religion? The gullible sheep who chase after the next shiny trend? The evil capitalists exploiting both the hucksters and the sheep? The jaded hipsters looking for release from their ennui and angst? On one level, the author seems to include us readers among the cognoscenti sneering at the fools around us. On another level, however, I suspect we readers may be the primary targets of the satire.

I received an advance copy free from NetGalley in return for an honest review.

[Magdelanye · Rating 4 out of 5]

History hides...behind other history. p4
If this was not an answer perhaps it was the path to one. p9

Focus does not mean to simply gawk at something . It is to transform it. p11

Hark, the novel, is the backstory of a phenomenon, a satirical account of the meteoric rise of an unlikely fictional reluctant guru with an adaptable message. Mental Archery requires most of all the ability to focus. \You are the arrow and the bow. Start with that. p87

The first arrow that hits you, that's the pain you can't control....the world doing its damage. But the 2nd arrow, that's the damage ...you do to yourself, with your fear, your anxiety, dwelling precisely on all the things you can't control. p88

I confess that I laughed my way through this acerbic spoof on the enlightenment industry, even with the realization that I am actually one of those being spoofed.

Ethics after all, is merely a dance, a daring jig on morality's wire, above the lava lake of annihilation. p193.

Information has buried us. p13

One could do worse than jump on the bandwagon and ride until the inevitable disillusion and crash.

Ethics is a void in a system designed solely for unethical behaviour. p195

The point is that people still have these big holes in their hearts. And it's hard to get off the couch to fill them. p216

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars, rounded up.

Thank you to Simon and Schuster via Netgalley for my digital copy of this book!

Uh, WHAT did I just read? Hark is a social satire about a man promoting his methods of mental archery - a combination of mindfulness, yoga, fake history, and mental archery. Even after reading the book I don't have the faintest clue what mental archery is. But this could have been the point the author was trying to make. I do think Hark is a good reminder of our times and how we are all a little lost and confused about where things are headed.

I found it extremely difficult to connect with any of the characters, and they had very few redeeming qualities about them. So much of this book involved me thinking, "OK, but what is the point of that?" I had to really push myself to keep reading and was wholly underwhelmed with the way things turned out in the end. If you aren't expecting much, I think you will do better with this book than I did.

I actually do enjoy Lipsyte's writing style, I just could not get into this book. I will read more from him and can appreciate how creative he is.

[Doug Moe · Rating 2 out of 5]

The writing can be so good and funny, but it's all too much so much of the time. I got tired of it. Your mileage may vary, and as a lover of sad-sacks, I will still check out "The Ask" and other Lipsyte works that might resonate more with me. I stuck with it after reading a review that noted a shift in the 2nd part; I would say that if you're not digging it in the 1st part, the 2nd part won't change it for you. If you're liking the style early on, you'll like the whole thing.

[EJ · Rating 1 out of 5]

What a piece of pointless drivel. Writing unlikeable characters is one thing but writing one this badly? Inexcusable.

[Gabriel Lister · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyed the characters and the general themes, but was hoping it would come together in a fuller sense.

[Nina Dinh · Rating 3 out of 5]

wtf did I just read

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Sam Lipsyte's THE ASK when it came out. Back in my brief and contended low desert valley period. Then I backed up and had at HOME LAND. When the story collection THE FUN PARTS appeared I eagerly breezed through it. I have become immoderately fond of Lipsyte. I am hardly alone. He is a genuine Archduke of comic gall, ace chronicler of the schlub and of the schlemiel. Much of his gamely disreputable high-wire drollery focuses on emasculation and varieties of dude lassitude, strains of spirited merry-making that will doubtlessly be received by different demographics in different ways, though it is my suspicion that for the most part hep men and women respond to it with a wincing, bemused knowing, though what precisely male and female readers have come to themselves know (personal experience as an ineffectual schlub as opposed to of their company) will certainly tend to differ somewhat in basic constitution. HARK strikes me as a praiseworthy development. To be sure. It is Lipsyte's most ambitious book, even if it does continue to practically extol the blithe shrugging off of taking all that much on. It is far-reaching and extremely timely. Though it would seem to take place in that ol' nebulous domain of the 'not too distant future,' in a world that has seen the coronation and kill-off a series of American presidents not hitherto familiar to the reader, there is no mistaking that its battle ground is the right now. The novel shares our horizon: bad woe ahead, Ted. Environmental cataclysm, economic uncertainty increasingly looking certain to portend disaster, dissolution of the basic social fabric, the level of discourse in the toilet. Dark times and unspeakably dire prognostications. “The cost of living will henceforth be your life.” HARK begins with one of the all time great ironic epigraphs. Job 29:20. "My glory was fresh in me, and my bow was renewed in my hand." Oh, Job. Smiling, obliging supplicant, paragon of faith, until he just goddamn couldn't anymore. Very appropriate ironic epigraph. Too appropriate. Hilariously appropriate. You see, HARK tells the story of a number of folks hovering around Hark Morner, guru of Mental Archery. Mental Archery? Help people focus. In the office or in the home. It is expressed precisely in those terms so that the credulous reader cannot fail to catch the charming inanity of the whole thing. Hark Morner is more than just inane, however, and more than just Chance from BEING THERE. He has a fascinating backstory and he may turn out to be far more than he appears, though he is allowed to be so only under terms set by irony itself. As an apex Lipsyte figure, Hark has a Lispyte-grade command of crazed hooey. Hark: “Almost everybody on this planet, and certain other planets, descends from a single splash of semen shot into the air by a masturbating Genghis Khan and caught in the vagina of a nude acrobat in mid-somersault.” Naturally Hark also wants to talk about William Tell. Naturally in doing so he wanders away from the historical record like a poorly-monitored senile geriatric stained with his own drool. He is a young guy, however, and has been steeped in a raw American reality. His overcoming does not suffer from entirely lacking a genuineness. Take note. Acolytes, followers, and newfangled predatory oligarchs conglomerate around Hark and populate the novel named for him. Enter Fraz Penzig, resident Lipsyte schlub. Fraz is of course in a stalled, grim marriage. The cup of American fiction runneth over with such marriages, often characterized as they explicitly are here by “destructive anxieties and bad faith.” This marriage crisis precipitates what may well be the best thing a marriage counsellor has ever said in an American novel: abstain from claiming to have made progress because progress "is a dangerous concept at the center of a bankrupt form of humanism.” Touché! The marriage counsellor is Teal and she probably should not be Fraz and wife's marriage counsellor because she is, like Fraz, an inner circle Harkist and hasn't finished her social work degree. But she's definitely an intellectual. You know that old truism that it takes a villiage to raise a child? Teal: “Because it takes a village. Even if it’s a Potemkin village. Which we have to destroy to save.” Nice one, Teal. Parenting. From marriage follows parenting. Parenting is a ... concern. Especially when you appear to be leaving your children to an over-hot planetary garbage dump, or perhaps the other way around, the over-hot planetary garbage dump to your children. Fraz bemoans that one is expected to impart endless important teachings to one's children, warning them about “unbleached needles, jack-off nooses.” Etc. Pure vintage Lipsyte. That Lipsyte's comedies are in fact tragicomic is testified to in HARK by a legitimately harrowing parenting mishap upon which I will not elaborate. At the heart of this very smart and very ruthless novel would appear to be questions about whether emphasis on self-care is ethical in lieu of the mandate to radically remake a world on the brink of utter four-alarm emergency. The book contains what one character calls, in relation to a crisis-situation oration from Hark himself, “insurrectionary murmurings.” Self-care versus substantive and comprehensive revamp of civilization? You know, I am fairly certain, ineffectual Lipsyte-esque schlub and lassitude dude that I am, that I will likely have better luck on the self-care front than the comprehensive revamp of civilization front, not only because I am a twelve-stepping recovering alcoholic walking around with the "Serenity Prayer" in his head like an advert jingle, but because I am, you know, halfway fucking realistic. Not soused and certainly not soused on diabolic utopian mania. Maybe Hark himself makes an extremely valid point by way of sudden outburst: the problem is “the fact that you people have no fucking sense of humor.” Laughter may be the best medicine after all, even when the shit is end-stage and your loved ones are gathered around you weeping. Sam Lipsyte is sly, nasty, puckish, sure, but he is also very, very brilliant. There are a lot of solid gold incidentals in HARK, such as a delightful MACBETH gag and a very subtle blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dig at David Foster Wallace. This is a novel in which one bosom buddy threatens another: “If I had the proper tool, I’d saw your head off on the internet right now.” HARK is, again, fantastically of our moment. One of the villains is "thirty-five-year-old social media tycoon Dieter Delgado, known to the world and his millions of virtual customers as Deets." There is some delicious comment thread acrimony, a phenomenon that seems practically to have been invented for Lipsyte. Europe off to the periphery appears to be undergoing some kind of wholesale yellow vest meltdown. We even have a renegade transgender woman bone marrow buccaneer. One reviewer with a legitimate gig recently invoked the great hyper-garrulous genius literary vaudevillian Stanley Elkin in relation to Lipsyte. I had not yet read Elkin back when THE ASK landed. Over the last couple years I have made it through a whole bunch of Elkin and he has become a top shelf hero. Lipsyte is definitely carrying that particular Jewish torch. To an extent. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the bone marrow riffs. The lists of code terminologies for bone marrow. “Maybe today it’s the marinade, the gravy, the gruel, the bloody goddess, the hema goblin, the caviar, the sour paste, the crude. Or perhaps it’s the Ronko, the root juice, the marbled Juan, the one percent, the Roman senator, the traveling salesman, red river, red rider, hip spooge.” A number of paragraphs later: “Strawberry jam, strawberry sturgeon, the shortcake, the hot shot, the cream of bone, the inside scoop.” Well over a hundred pages later: “The pink marinara, the snazz, the red flag, the crimson lady, the Eric, the tears of the iliac crest, Hematoad punch, Slice of Life, King Gazpacho, the sacred infusion, the marrow arrow.” Three more bone marrow terminologies on the second last page, two on the last. What can I say? I go weak in the knees for this stuff. What else can I say? This is a sublime literature of grisly jubilation. HARK is. Lipsyte is. Dark comedy, black dark even, that gallows joviality what remediates the doom slog. You even get a little transcendence. The transcendence, it must be said, is tethered to earth by tendrils of irony. Would you have it any other way? I mean, really? Are you easily suckered? You might be the kind of person to read HARK and not have the slightest notion that you are being had. Forewarned is forearmed. Tally-ho!

[Alvin · Rating 2 out of 5]

This zany romp satirizing self-help hucksters and all manner of modern dysfunction has a few laugh out loud moments. Alas, Lipsyte's prose style has evolved from whip smart to too-clever-by-half. The book is written in a weirdly clipped syntax and is full of what I can only describe as associative word puzzles. It would be unfair to expect suspense or emotional involvement from the plot of a satire, but all the same, for the whole second half of the book I was unpleasantly aware that I didn't care what happened.

[Nicole · Rating 4 out of 5]

“The news is this: we will all maul each other for the last tin of peaches fairly soon.”

I freakin loved this book. It’s the funniest thing I’ve read in a long time (and, possibly, ever.) It is prose-driven rather than plot-driven (and as a result, there is some weakness in the ending), but that prose is absolutely brilliant, hilarious, and 100% spot on in its observations of contemporary life. As a commentary on the current state of human existence, it is unparalleled. If you, like me, think the following passage is the most perfect and hilarious encapsulation of our current human condition, then this, my friend, is a book for you.

“He knows younger types already fried, or brined, not just with drugs or booze, but merely from rising in the morning, moving about in their private biospheres of panic and decay, the hours at work, the hours of work at home, the hours of work with spouses, fathers, mothers, children, the stresses laced into the simplest tasks, the fight-or-flight responses to kitchen appliances, not to mention the mighty common domes, with which the individual bubbles Venn: the fouled sky, the polluted food, the pharma-fed rivers full of sad-eyed Oxytrout, the jeans on outlet shelves in their modalities of size—skinny fit, classic fit, fat shepherd fit, all dyed a deep cancer blue. And the wave rot, of course, the pixel-assisted suicide, the screens, the screens, the screens.”

[Amy Gennaro · Rating 3 out of 5]

Thank you to the author Sam Lipsyte, the publisher and NetGalley for the ARC in exchange for my candid opinion.

I typically love satire and this book is transparent enough to sound somewhat like the current socio-political environment of the world and specifically the US. What I liked about it: it made some great points about the dangers of some current huge issues such as no one liking or believing anyone related to the government and too much digitalization/screen time. I did not really like the anti-hero Fraz who was not only sincerely self-interested, lazy, lacking any focus or motivation, who ultimately takes the easy way out. I found him , as well as many of the characters to be not only annoying but almost useless. I did like Hark who is a one-time comedian, one-time charlatan turned modern day messiah. He is the only one who tries to not sell his self-help as a religion. But things get away from everyone and they all become caught in a relentless spiral.

I also still struggle to really comprehend the conclusion to the book.

I really do not know to whom this kind of book would appeal.

[Joe Kraus · Rating 3 out of 5]

Before I started reading this one, I thought of Sam Lipsyte as possibly the funniest novelist writing today. (And that’s in a universe that includes Gary Shteyngart).

After reading it, I feel the same way, even though I think this one is a bit of a disappointment.

Page for page, this is hysterical. Lipsyte has a capacity for deadpan observation, for making the everyday miseries of life turn into humor, that never fails.

Here are a couple gems: At one point, our protagonist Fraz, who’s married to a woman most people recognize as out of his league, meditates on his place in her advice. As Lipsyte puts it, “His wife told him that life was not a zero-sum game, but he suspected he was the zero-sum if it was.”

In another, reflecting on some latter-day hippies, he observes they were on “the right side of history but the wrong side of glamour.”

The heart of Lipsyte’s description deals with Hark, himself, a guru who proposes a self-help program built around the concept of “mental archery.” The concept is at the perfect intersection of plausible and goofy, and Lipsyte runs on with it brilliantly. Even knowing it for a joke, I imagined taking focus from it, and then I laughed all the harder at the cleverness of the construct.

The trouble here, though, is that for all the humor and for all the brilliance of the situation – the hapless Fraz becomes an early Hark acolyte and leader in the cult of personality growing around him – there’s a limited central story. Hark is who he is, a finished product. And Fraz is a Schlub, but he’s a schlub who’s landed in enough clover to make his sad-sack experiences less interesting that in the even funnier and stronger The Ask, Lipsyte’s last novel.

I enjoyed the first half of this immensely, watching all the descriptions unfold. Then, as the second half took place, I found too much of the plot contrived. [SPOILER] Does Fraz’s daughter really need to fall into a coma? Does his wife really need to sleep around with his sleazy one-time best friend?

And then, while I continued to enjoy the language and inventiveness of the narrative, I found the end especially flat. [DOUBLE SPOILER] Lipsyte kills off Hark (in what I acknowledge, again, is a funny scene involving an actual arrow) because he seems to run out of things to do with him. And then, in the closing pages, he has Hark appear to various characters of the novel as a Christ-figure, as someone greeting the soon-to-be-dead to a kind of heaven. I get that it’s ironic, and I get that it comes as a kind of critique of the almost ubiquitous Christ-trope (as in Harry Potter, the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and many other places) – and I love the quick note that Fraz, as a Jew, is barred from heaven because “there are rules, of course” – but it seems an ultimate failure of imagination to travel so worn a path.

So, I simultaneously recommend this one and urge caution. And I leave it with the renewed sense that Sam Lipsyte is probably the number one writer I’d want the chance to sit down and have dinner with.