A REVIEW OF SAM LIPSYTE'S
THE FUN PARTS
BY DAVID HUEBERT
The Rusty Toque | Reviews | Issue 5 | November 15, 2013
 The Fun Parts: Storiesby Sam Lipsyte Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2013 Sam Lipsyte’s latest book of short stories, The Fun Parts, is a hilarious and lively collection. Lipsyte’s prose is bright and evocative, his dialogue sharp and vivid, his characters as vibrant as their travails are unlikely. Fans of writers such as Gary Shteyngart and George Saunders will find much to admire here: hysterical psyches, surprising language, and bizarre, playful plotlines. The Fun Parts includes a piece about a male doula losing his accreditation, the tale of an aspiring shot-putter meeting his dubious idol, and the story of an addict who hopes to break the spiral of his life by penning an inspirational children’s book. True to its title, which (who could’ve guessed?) turns out to be an allusion to male genitalia, this book is a lot of fun. But does it resonate beyond the comic?
In an interview with FSG Editor in Chief Eric Chinski, Lipsyte questions the binary opposition between comedy and literature: “I don’t see the comic and the literary as distinct categories. I think you have literature, and most of the good stuff is often very funny. Comedy and tragedy work best in tandem. Put them together and you have literature.” Whether or not we accept this definition of literature, there is merit in the idea that comedy can open a space for emotional revelation that can’t be accessed through purely serious modes. Certainly, some of the pieces in The Fun Parts achieve this effect. Stories such as “Ode to Oldcorn,” “The Wisdom of the Doulas,” and “The Dungeon Master” offer compelling narratives that culminate in moments of authentic revelation. These stories leave the reader feeling that she has experienced something more than the fun parts. The risk taken by straightforward comedy is if it’s not funny it’s not good. The gamble with more complex literary comedy is if it’s not good it’s not funny. In other words, if the ideas aren’t satisfying, the comedy grows tiresome. This is the unfortunate fate of several stories in The Fun Parts; they toy with complex thoughts, but end up bogged down in undeveloped ideas, offering neither humour nor insight. “This Appointment Occurs in the Past” pokes fun at critical theory and alludes to a Pushkin story while charting an unsuccessful plot and ending with a tacked-on love story. “The Real-Ass Jumbo” tries to explore the nature of the “soul wiener” through an apocalyptic prophet who uses DMT and communes with lamé-clad elves (213). “The Republic of Empathy” runs through the perspectives of several peripherally related characters, dabbles in meta-fictional ruminations, and closes with an explosion that seems to have no purpose other than ending the story. Unfortunately, appeals to magic realism do not redeem these erratic, wandering stories. They are neither particularly funny nor particularly good. The two stories featuring Tovah Gold may also fail to please some readers. “The Climber Room” follows 36-year-old Tovah in her hunt to find a father for the baby she has reluctantly come to crave. In the end, Randy Gautier, the wealthy, much older man Tovah has fantasized about nesting with, responds to Tovah’s somber speech on women’s rights by exposing himself: “Mr. Gautier had tugged his penis out of his tuxedo pants. He gave a shrug and, like a loved boy, beamed. ‘It’s okay,’ he said. ‘I’m listening’” (25). After flirting with serious issues such as modern female subjectivity and the ethics of bringing children into a world of limited resources, Lipsyte shies away from his own trajectory, opting for a comical ending that reads as a bit of a cop-out. Though “Deniers” is a clever and entertaining story, it is at times bogged down by its own antics. Here Tovah is a secondary character, an estranged friend to Mandy, the story’s protagonist. A recovering addict whose mother committed suicide some years ago, Mandy now struggles to care for her geriatric father, Jacob. Jacob is a senile Holocaust survivor who refers to the Holocaust only as the “whatchamacallit,” a tongue-in-cheek allusion to the common argument that it is impossible to name this event. At a moment of crisis, Mandy recalls reading renowned survivor/philosopher Primo Levi: “She consoled herself with something she’d read back in the days she still read about the whatchamacallit by the man who threw himself down the stairs: the good people died. Mostly only assholes made it out” (74). Mandy’s inarticulate recollection of Levi’s famous argument parallels the way Lipsyte deals with the Holocaust; rather than seeking a sober engagement, he confines this event to the realm of the farcical. No doubt this is intentional. Presumably, Lipsyte means to 1) dramatize the way this event eludes any form of ‘adequate’ artistic representation and 2) draw attention to its inevitable recession from cultural consciousness by ironically undermining its relevance. In the end, Mandy comes to terms with her mother’s suicide in a moment of catharsis: ... these things hadn’t killed her mother. Nor had her father, with his smeary, world-historical wound. What murdered her was her mind, a madness factory full of blast furnaces and smokestacks. Mandy’s mind had erected one, too, but Mandy would discover a way to raze it. She would grow a beautiful garden on the ashes of the factory. (76) Ultimately, then, the Holocaust becomes a site of renewal and
possibility. Mandy intends to make something lovely from the remnants of
catastrophe. The contentious question of whether it is ethically viable to
think the Holocaust as redeemable is, of course, not one we can expect Lipsyte
to answer. Nonetheless, his use of the Holocaust as theme is fresh and clever,
if philosophically questionable.
Whether or not “Deniers” succeeds in its attempt to deal with this extremely difficult subject, it falters at the level of character. Cal, Mandy’s repentant neo-Nazi boyfriend, comes off as more caricature than character. After seeking out the most attractive woman he can find at the Jewish Community Centre, Cal takes Mandy out to dinner and asks whether she is Jewish on both sides (65). Eventually, he tries to pressure her into watching “the most important movie ever made” (69), Schindler’s List. Mandy’s decision to continue to date Cal after he has revealed a strange complex about her ethnicity raises serious and interesting questions about her own relationship to her heritage. Nonetheless, Cal himself is flat. Cal’s counterpart in “The Climber Room,” Tovah’s nightmare-date Sean, also reads as one-dimensional. Sean designs “apps for apps” and uses words like “totes,” “epic,” and “rape-a-licious” (15). When asked about his diction he explains, “I work with a lot of young people. I pick up their lingo” (15). Rather than a genuine person, Sean comes across as an excuse for Lipsyte to have fun: “The shock about Sean was his shock of white hair” (14). Moments like this, when Lipsyte’s characters seem to exist primarily as fodder for ridicule, may sully the Tovah Gold stories for certain readers. Here the reader gets the impression that Lipsyte is writing to please himself, and it is somewhat unpleasant to watch the writer fondling his fun parts. When he is at his best, though, Lipsyte’s voice is pitch-perfect. “The Dungeon Master,” far and away the best piece in the collection, is told from the deftly rendered perspective of a 1980s high school student. The unnamed narrator/protagonist is involved in a Dungeons & Dragons game led by a borderline sociopath known only as the Dungeon Master. The Dungeon Master, who is rumoured to have given another boy brain damage with a baseball bat and exposed himself at a skating rink, is also the most sympathetic and tangible character in the collection. He creates bizarre, undignified quests for the players and kills their characters with mead bucket accidents and rectal cancer. These petty disasters are not random; instead, they are a projection of the Dungeon Master’s worldview: “as the Dungeon Master hopes to teach us, the world is not a decent place to live” (30). The story as a whole is fast-paced and effortless. Thematically, it oscillates pleasantly between social conflict and the world of D&D fantasy: ‘Infidel,’ Marco says. Throughout the story, the boys have craved a higher calibre of fantasy. But, now that they are finally entering the lair of a sleeping dragon, the narrator’s companions choose to collect the treasure at their feet and turn back. The narrator, outraged by the cowardice of his comrades, decides to fight the dragon alone and perishes in a humiliating turn of events. Tension comes to a boil when the Dungeon Master makes light of Cherninsky’s dead sister, causing an actual fistfight to break out. The Dungeon Master tackles the narrator and breaks his wrist before being mounted and bitten by another boy.
The players part ways, and the game is no more. The narrator goes back to his former routine of masturbation and peanut butter binges. The piece closes a few months later, when the Dungeon Master tries to make amends with the narrator by giving him a drive home. When the two boys part ways, the Dungeon Master provides fuel for the narrator’s cathartic epiphany: ‘Really,’ the Dungeon Master calls again. ‘No hard feelings.’ This is the most poignant and well-earned insight in the book. The story, which refuses to give the reader a direct experience of the narrator’s feelings, now leaves us to reflect on the awful confusion of emotions that must be swirling through his psyche. This is a character who has recently broken his arm, lost his only friends, and abandoned the fantasy-world that provided his scarce moments of pleasure. In the thrilling rush of the story, these details are easy to forget. But in this moment Lipsyte invites the reader to slow down and think through the implications.
Lipsyte’s protagonists are all sympathetic losers, but here we get the most genuine experience of what it means to lose. By refusing to describe the narrator’s hard feelings, Lipsyte allows his reader to feel them. And they do not feel good. In “The Dungeon Master,” Lipsyte leads us through the fallout of comedy, into the heart of the tragedy that lies beneath the fun parts. It is a deeply rewarding experience. |
DAVID HUEBERT is a PhD student in the English Department at The University of Western Ontario. His work has won the After Al Purdy Poetry Contest and appeared in journals such as Event, Existere, Matrix, Qwerty, Vallum, and The Literary Review of Canada. Recent work is forthcoming in The Antigonish Review, Grain, and CV2, and a first book of poetry is forthcoming from Guernica Editions.
