Sam Lipsyte. (Photo by Ceridwen Morris)

It was snowing, big wet chunks falling everywhere. Morningside Avenue and Morningside Drive are two different things, and this particular afternoon in February was a bad time to realize that, because they’re separated by a park with a steep cliff that drops off sharply, and I was at the bottom of the cliff. I believe I already mentioned the snow. By the time I arrived at the writer Sam Lipsyte’s apartment—40 minutes late—at the higher point of the journey, my clothes were soaked through with cold water and sweat and the sole of my right shoe had fallen off. Mr. Lipsyte answered the door looking surprised. I coughed twice.

This wasn’t the graceful entrance I was hoping for, but there was something appropriate about it; Mr. Lipsyte’s fiction is about lowered expectations. In his 2010 novel The Ask, the middle-aged protagonist, Milo Burke, a failed idealist and former artist who’s recently been fired from his job asking people whose lives worked out better than his to donate money to a university, thinks to himself, “How little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.” The novel is a comedic masterpiece, but depending on where the reader is in life, it can seem much less funny.

His new book is a story collection called The Fun Parts. There’s one about a struggling poet working as a part-time teacher who thinks she’s finally found some luck when the father of one of her students—a poetry patron—asks her to be his daughter’s personal caregiver; the job is great until the night she starts opening up to him and he begins pleasuring himself, reassuring her that he’s still listening. Another character is a male doula—a “doulo”—who loses his already tenuous accreditation due to his tendency to demonstrate how to breast-feed using his own mouth. There’s also an overweight child who starts smoking in order to stop snacking and grows dangerously envious of the other fat kid in his class, the one who has a gland problem and therefore an excuse for being the way he is.

There’s an irony to Mr. Lipsyte’s literature of failure. His excellent second novel Home Land, released in 2004, was rejected by 25 or 30 editors (it depends on whom you ask) before finally securing a place for Mr. Lipsyte as one of the great talents of American fiction. The more he writes, the more he cements that reputation.

Mr. Lipsyte, the son of two writers, grew up in New Jersey. His father is Robert Lipsyte, the New York Times sports columnist, and his mother wrote for local papers and authored a novel.

“I knew what a literary agent was before I knew all the positions in baseball,” Mr. Lipsyte told me. “And I remember once when I was a kid, my dad came home and said, ‘I fired my agent today.’ I burst into tears, because I imagined now this agent would have no money and would be wandering around the streets and maybe be homeless. Then the system was explained to me.”

Seeing his parents work demystified writing. (“My parents would say, ‘Wow, it’s pretty purple, your prose,’” he said. “And I was 11.”) He saw it as a routine, a discipline. We were sitting in the book-lined room at the end of his apartment where he writes, and it was decidedly unromantic, the floor scattered with toys belonging to his two young children. Teaching writing full-time at Columbia (he’s on leave, working on a new novel) and raising a family means he writes whenever he can get a spare hour or minute. But he wrote from an early age, in imitation of the stories he’d find in the stacks of New Yorker magazines around his parents’ house, trying for “spare, haunting stories about divorced couples, which is tough when you’re 15,” he said. He went on to Brown, where he read a lot of Baudrillard and learned to “denounce everything that came before me.”

“So I spent a few years after college just screaming into a microphone, not incoherently, but at a level below the guitar,” he said. He was the screamer in a hardcore band in New York. They called themselves Dungbeetle. He’s proud of the band, but he can’t help but chuckle when he says the name. “We all went sort of knowing we’d fuck ourselves up on drugs and be irresponsible and that our band would probably fall apart.” He paused. “And that’s exactly what happened.” He enjoyed his role as screamer because “I liked the idea that I couldn’t really be understood.”

After the band dissolved, Mr. Lipsyte was trying to get clean. He was mostly unemployed, aside from a few odd jobs. His mother, who had divorced his father, was dying. While taking care of her, he began submitting stories to The Quarterly, a journal edited by Gordon Lish and distributed by Random House. Mr. Lish’s rejection letter was several hundred words long and “very sympathetic,” talking about how hard it is to write and offering a novelty, “Try again,” a suggestion Mr. Lipsyte took at face value. Mr. Lish eventually published two of his stories and asked him to attend one of his legendary writing classes.

“Each class would be about six or seven hours,” he said. Mr. Lipsyte’s fellow students included Will Eno, Sam Michel, Noy Holland and Christine Schutt. “And [Mr. Lish] would talk. What you’d learn is that he was building this narrative out of several threads he had started earlier in the evening. Everything would build and unwind and crescendo. And then at the end of the class, he would ask people what they had. His assumption was that you were writing all the time and you’d just open your notebook and begin to read whatever you were working on. More often than not, he’d stop you. But then sometimes you’d have something good going, and you’d get to read it for a while. That was the moment of triumph in the class.”

Mr. Lish remembers his student as promising, but with a lot to learn. “One read aloud so long as one was capable of reading aloud, given the quality of the work,” he told me in a phone interview. “Sam was struggling, as was everybody else who was new to the setting. There were some that outpaced him, and then Sam progressively caught up, and as you know now, has outpaced a great multitude.”

The class ended, Mr. Lipsyte’s mother died, and his first book, a collection of stories called Venus Drive, was published by the small press Open City. At a reading, the editor Gerald Howard came up to him and said he wanted to see his novel. The Subject Steve, about a man, prodded by doctors, who is essentially dying from the illness of being alive, had the misfortune of being published by Broadway Books on September 11, 2001. Naturally, it was not widely read, though it did introduce Mr. Lipsyte’s concept of the 21st Century Man, who appears in some form in all of his fiction. Typically a chronic masturbator, who has long ago given up on hope and, though desperate for its return, has resigned himself to mediocrity, he is thoroughly modern but would rather be anywhere but the present. In the new collection, he manifests as one of Mr. Lipsyte’s more humorous losers, Oldcorn, from “Ode to Oldcorn,” an American shot-
putter who won gold at the Mexico City Olympics and is the childhood hero of the story’s narrator. Oldcorn, who has dropped out of society, shows up at the narrator’s high school shot-put event—he’s old friends with the team’s coach—and is a disaster. He “was as huge as I’d always imagined, but bald, with muttonchops whiskers and a gut that split his belt. He wore cop shades, a T-shirt for a titty bar.” One of the students asks him, “Do you want a beer?” “‘I want all the beer in your town,’ said Oldcorn. ‘And I want teen poot, if that’s available. Let’s ride.’” Then he asks the high schoolers if they want some coke.

The 21st Century Man is much bleaker in “This Appointment Occurs in the Past,” wherein a man, living (and sleeping) with his “ex-mother-in-law” in Michigan, travels to New York to see a college friend who called and said he was dying:

I’d booked a tiny room in the Hudson Lux in New York City, high up and hushed, a loneliness box of polished walnut and chrome. You could picture yourself dead of a hanging jackoff in such a room, your necktie living up to its name, your lubricated fingers curled stiff near your hips. I stretched out on the narrow bed, decided not to picture this. It wasn’t the kind of thing I figured I’d ever try. Aficionados cited the bliss spasm caused by air loss, but I wondered if most got orgasmic on the gamble. Anyway, everything in my life was a gamble, a wager that somebody would see to my needs.

The friend, it turns out, is fine and also quite wealthy—a common foil for the 21st Century Man; the dying story was a ruse to recreate a college party that featured an aborted game involving a Pushkin-esque duel. The narrator goes through a lot of trouble only to get shot in the ass.

Mr. Lipsyte’s second novel, Home Land, passed through the hands of dozens of American publishers before he eventually published it in England. People didn’t get it. It got to be an inside joke among editors, who all had a Word document of the manuscript on their computers.

“People would read it and send it around and talk about it,” said Lorin Stein, a former editor at FSG who finally published Home Land in paperback in America through a deal with Picador (it received nearly universal acclaim). He called it “the first e-book of my life. We talked about that book a lot. I remember going to a reading where Sam started reading from the first page and everyone started chanting along in unison. We used that book as Exhibit A for the stupidity of American publishing.”

Home Land is written as a series of open letters to a New Jersey high school alumni newsletter by Lewis Miner—unaffectionately known as “Teabag,” a guy who survives on odd jobs and occasional shifts at his father’s banquet hall. His unimpressive life culminates at his high school reunion, which ends with the usual rejection, embarrassment and, finally, murder.

Mr. Lipsyte’s own high school reunion, which he attended for the first time last year after avoiding it his entire adult life, didn’t fare much better.

“You know, I worried, of course, that everybody had read the book and would judge, but of course no one even knew that I wrote books,” he said. “I got a call from an old friend I hadn’t kept in touch with who mentioned another old friend I hadn’t kept in touch with. And he said, ‘We’re going. I know we haven’t seen each other, but you should go. I’ll drive.’ And it turns out one of them is an optometrist right around here. I actually got glasses from him. He cut me a deal. But the other guy, the guy who was driving, took us there. I was having a fine time reconnecting with some important people in my life, and then this guy gets me sort of alone. And he just starts attacking. He’s the only one who’s read my work and he starts attacking me. And not for the portrayal of high school, just his literary opinion. He orchestrated this whole thing so he could have this big moment telling me to fuck off.”

If Mr. Lipsyte’s fiction is any kind of model, it must not have been a very satisfying confrontation for the old friend, the 21st Century Man of this scenario. It makes me think of a line from one of the new stories, the one about the failed poet. For 16 years, she’s been pining after a man she met once at a party, one of her sister’s friends, and imagining what she’d do if she ran into him. He was her fallback plan. When she does run into him, he says, after a brief conversation, “Whatever the opposite of compatible is, that’s us.” “Was it possible he could be a moron and still be her savior?” Mr. Lipsyte writes. Of course not, but you still have to live with the disappointment.

mmiller@observer.com

The American Reader isn’t your average literary magazine. The Princeton grads who run it have barely closed their second issue, and already it is being hailed as the next Paris Review or n+1.

But Uzoamaka Maduka, the 25-year-old editor in chief, doesn't go in for the comparison. She’s looking for wider appeal.

“There’s a way in which both the larger society and the literary world have collaborated in allowing the literary world to be very hermetic and recede from the daily back and forth of culture,” she told The Observer over coffee last week at Jack’s Stir Brew Coffee in the West Village

Ms. Maduka, who goes by Max, and her boyfriend, Jac Mullen, came up with the idea for a new magazine on Mr. Mullen’s fire escape last winter while having yet another of their countless conversation about what’s wrong with the state of literature. They wanted something serious-minded that focused on Literature (with a capital‘L’)rather than the literary scene. They wanted to prove that their generation could read more than tweets. With funding from an anonymous donor, they  began reaching out to people they knew from college, like Alyssa Loh, their digital editor, who lives in the 10th Street apartment where they had their party.

Then they started pulling in the big guns. Mr. Mullen emailed one of his favorite contemporary writers—now Ben Marcus is the fiction editor. Ms. Maduka got in touch with Dean Young, her favorite poet—he is now their poetry editor.

“It’s like when you have a kid or a friend and you’re willing to do things on their behalf that you wouldn’t do for yourself,” Ms. Maduka said. “I would never email Dean Young and be like, ‘Let’s hang out.’ But I would for the magazine.”

Or maybe it’s the brazenness of youth.

“We are young, and when you are young, you have less inhibitions, and you just power through and don’t think about how it doesn’t make sense,” said the magazine’s 32-year-old creative consultant, Shala Monroque, a regular on the international art and fashion circuits who has been romantically linked with the art superdealer Larry Gagosian.

At their party, Ms. Maduka attributed the stylishness of the crowd to Ms. Monroque. Ms. Monroque attributed it to Ms. Maduka’s editorial vision.

“It was immediate, automatic; I was really inspired by what Max was saying about the magazine,” Ms. Monroque said. “I’m often really bored at fashion parties, and it’s nice to get to have intelligent conversations.”

Ms. Monroque was introduced to Ms. Maduka through the Reader’s editor at large Stephanie La Cava, whom Ms. Maduka met at a PEN event. The other editor at large is writer Sage Mehta, a fellow Princeton alum and a recognizable face on the literary circuit.

It’s an impressive masthead, and some of the credit for that is likely due to the editor’s persona.

Despite her youth, Ms. Maduka, who is Nigerian-American, is a commanding presence. Part of that is due to her height—she is over six feet tall—but it also comes from her style. An afternoon coffee merited an ankle-length black dress, dangly zig-zag-shaped rhinestone earrings, an oversize quilted black coat and liquid eyeliner.

“She is always so well-dressed,” said Ms. Monroque, who knows from well-dressed, being creative director of the art and fashion magazine Garage. “The first time I met her, she had on this blue turban to the side and her Afro hair was sticking out. She looked like a different version of the girl with the pearl earring. And then she opens her mouth and immediately is impressive.”

Impressive, but not aloof or off-putting. Ms. Maduka comes across as just another 25-year-old aspiring to work in the lit world, as though she could have climbed the editorial ranks at The New Yorker or Harper’s but instead decided to start her own thing, and just happened to meet the right people at the right time.

Ms. Maduka met Mr. Mullen, the magazine’s co-founder and executive editor, during her senior year at Princeton, when she was editor in chief of the student-run Nassau Weekly, the highbrow humor and arts alt weekly that was co-founded by David Remnick and John McPhee. Mr. Mullen, a year below her, wrote for the Nass.

“Working at The Nassau Weekly really primed me as a thinker and a critical writer,” she said. “I can’t imagine I’d be doing anything I’m doing today if I didn’t write for the Nass.”

Her path to The American Reader was somewhat circuitous. After graduation, she did a stint as an au pair in Switzerland, then wrote in Croatia for three months. Mr. Mullen took a year off of college to tag along. Back in America, Ms. Maduka interned for Verso Books, an independent publisher of mostly translated political theory.

Ms. Maduka grew up in Columbia, Maryland—a planned community between Washington and Baltimore. For her, the title The American Reader has something of a personal resonance: she is the only member of her intimidatingly accomplished family who was born in America. Her father, who emigrated from Nigeria with the rest of the family right before Ms. Maduka was born, is a doctor, her mother a chemical engineer. She has two older brothers who work in finance, and a sister who worked for the Clinton Foundation’s HIV/Aids Initiative, was the dean of Oprah Winfrey’s Leadership Academy and got an MBA from Harvard.

“I benefited from being raised always on the edge of something,” Ms. Maduka said. “I’m black, but I’m not African-American. I’m African. I’m Catholic. That sense of constantly being lost in translation allows me to stay marginal in a way.”

She is aware of something that many magazine editors probably don’t often stop to notice—that she is operating in a white world.

“The literary scene in New York is one of the last bastions of white male privilege,” Ms. Maduka said over coffee, explaining that it there is still a narrow framework for diversity. “Even when you bring in women or people of color, it’s still, like, Harvard, Princeton, Yale. I went to an Ivy. Look at what I’m wearing”—she gestured at her dress, rhinestone earrings, quilted coat—“This is ridiculous.”

The magazine is run out of a spacious Washington Heights office that doubles as Mr. Mullen’s apartment. Ms. Maduka lives nearby in a townhouse full of Juilliard students she found on Craigslist.

Visiting The American Reader HQ on a recent Sunday afternoon, The Observer was greeted at the door by Ms. Maduka, who was casually stylish in a long black jersey skirt and a striped sweater. Mr. Mullen, in jeans and a blazer, was fighting a cold—he’d spent too much of Friday’s party on the chilly roof.

Books were stacked on the floor in the living room, and dishes were piled in the kitchen sink. Mr. Mullen’s grandmother’s paintings hung on the walls. French doors separated the living room from the office, where whiteboards and Post-It notes spoke to the challenges of putting out a monthly magazine with a skeletal staff.

Before we left the office, Mr. Mullen asked us if we wanted to join him for a smoke on the fire escape. “That’s where a lot of this happens,” he explained.

Standing on the catwalk-like aerie overlooking an alley, Ms. Maduka pointed to a dead pigeon on the landing. “We were trying to get the super to take care of that, but he gave up,” she said. “That’s where the glamour ends. The other night, we came home after the party and there was a dead pigeon.”

But as for the glamour, it would seem that, on the contrary, it is just beginning. At the party on Friday night, best-selling authors were among those singing happy birthday to Mr. Mullen. He was turning 25.

Feeling a little clingy.

Everybody in New York publishing is very happy for Ira Silverberg. The former literary agent, a fixture in the industry for 26 years, started his new job as literary director at the National Endowment for the Arts earlier this week. And from the day his departure was announced to the day the job began, colleagues and clients have affected determined good cheer.

“I’m sorry for his writers,” said Sarah Burnes, a literary agent and friend. “But I’m happy for the writers of America.”

“It’s the perfect job for him,” said Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, “securing money for worthy projects -- especially projects that aren’t on the face of it worthy or obvious.”

But beneath all the breezy congratulations a hint of dread could be detected. Ira Silverberg might have left New York, but was New York ready to lose Ira Silverberg? Especially to Washington D.C.?

As an agent, Mr. Silverberg shepherded the careers of writers such as Neil Strauss, Sam Lipsyte and Dennis Cooper, but he has also served as the gay godfather to the rank and file of his profession. He has officiated at weddings, including the marriage of Twelve publisher Cary Goldstein. He provided the biologically necessary genetic material for two babies and serves as their "Uncle Mame" (they are raised by their mothers).

He is a man known for never shying away from a fashion statement, be it windowpane check or paisley, and for his expertise as a deal maker. Geoff Kloske, publisher of Riverhead, recalled how Mr. Silverberg helped him haggle for a dishdasha at the Abu Dhabi Book festival.

“I used to think Ira was all big talk and good looks until I witnessed him hondle on my behalf in a souk in Abu Dhabi,” wrote Mr. Kloske in an e-mail. “He is an incredible negotiator.”

Mr. Silverberg co-founded a club of editors-turned-agents who have met for lunch together at Japonica every six weeks for 14 years. He has hosted the annual Council of Literary Magazines and Presses spelling bee, strong-armed colleagues into bidding in silent auctions and buying raffle tickets, and served on the boards of the New School MFA Writing Program and BOMB Magazine. He also has a reputation as a good source for reporters (we’ve heard). Does this sound like an obituary? Good!

Mr. Silverberg got his first glimpse of the publishing world while still in college—enrolled not in an English literature program but in a joint six-year B.A./J.D. program offered by City College and New York Law School, which trained lawyers to work in underserved communities. But Mr. Silverberg’s career as a lawyer was short lived. At 18, over a drink at a bar on Avenue A, he met and fell in love with James Grauerholz, William S. Burrough’s longtime “manager and amanuensis.” The romance led Mr. Silverberg to drop out of school, move to Kansas and immerse himself in a world of aging beat writers.

“William was my mother-in-law when I was quite young,” said Mr. Silverberg of Burroughs.

He enrolled at the University of Kansas, cooked dinner with Mr. Grauerholz for Burroughs every night and absorbed the wisdom of Alan Ginsberg and Norman Mailer when they passed through town. At a conference celebrating the 25th anniversary of Jack Kerouac's On the Road at Naropa University in Boulder, Col., Mr. Silverberg met Peter Mayer, the founder of Overlook Press. When Mr. Silverberg’s sojourn in Kansas ended in 1984 and he returned to New York, Mr. Mayer gave him a job as a file clerk, then promoted him to editorial assistant. The job was fun, but paid only $10,000 a year, so Mr. Silverberg famously moonlighted as VIP doorman at the nightclub Limelight.

Silverberg, right, singing with Bob Morris in 2008.

“I probably made as much money in one night at Limelight as I did working 40 hours a week at Overlook,” he said. Even better, his two offices were close to each other. “I could leave work at Limelight, sleep on the couch at Overlook, and make coffee for everyone when they came in in the morning,” he said.

He then moved to Grove, where Barney Rosset hired him as its director of publicity in 1985, when Mr. Silverberg was 22. He left in 1990 to start a freelance publicity company serving small presses, non-profits and literary magazines and edit the US line of books for the British publisher Serpent’s Tail. After returning for another short stint at Grove, now under Morgan Entrekin, Mr. Silverberg decided he wanted to work more closely with writers. In 1998 he joined Donadio & Olson as an agent. The Japonica lunch group for editors who became agents began shortly thereafter, and they have met for lunch every six weeks ever since.

“It was started by him and Betsy Lerner,” said Sarah Burnes (Mr. Silverberg adds that Mary Ann Naples was another founding member). “We all made a similar transition which isn’t as easy as one might think.”

They discussed when, as agents, they should stop editing a client and how to deal with a hazard of being a former insider at a publishing house—when, as Silverberg put it, “you know too much.”

“We were probably too author-friendly and we all stayed that way,” he said.

Mr. Silverberg’s authors certainly remember him that way.

“I remember when no publisher would take my book Home Land Ira stood by me very bravely. He fought and fought,” recalled the novelist Sam Lipsyte in an e-mail. “At one point he said, ‘I'm not crazy, this book should be published.’ And even though I could hear a faint trace of ‘Am I crazy?’ in his words, I knew he would not let that thought win.” Mr. Silverberg did, however, mention that other of his clients had gotten real estate licenses.

“But that's Ira, covering all the bases,” wrote Mr. Lipsyte. “He speaks honestly to his writers, no bullshit.” Mr. Lipsyte said he hasn’t decided on a new agent yet.

“Ira is a great gossip and he’s mischievous and sometimes he likes to stir up trouble, but he never sacrifices the well being of the client-editor relationship as long as he can preserve it,” said Mr. Stein, who as an editor at FSG had a storied working relationship with Mr. Silverberg and published books by many of his clients. He added that Mr. Silverberg was usually “the grown up in any complicated situation.”

Given his experience as a publicist, editor and agent, Mr. Silverberg also had a reputation as a fixer.

“Ira is the kind of guy who knows everybody,” said Twelve publisher Cary Goldstein, who wrote Mr. Silverberg seeking a recommendation for someone licensed to conduct wedding ceremonies. Mr. Silverberg, who had gotten a license to officiate the wedding of food writers Christine Muhlke and Oliver Schwaner-Albright, wrote back a two-word reply: “I am.” To which Mr. Goldstein said he replied, “Shut the fuck up!” and retained his services.

“Long story short,” Mr. Goldstein concluded, “Ira, as he does all things, took it very seriously.” He invited the engaged couple to a “counseling dinner” to get to know Mr. Goldstein’s bride, Gina LeVay, and discuss the details of the ceremony.

“I have to tell you, in all honesty he performed the most beautiful wedding,” said Mr. Goldstein, who said that it opened with Mr. Silverberg welcoming guests to “Cary and Gina’s nondenominational nontraditional multicultural wedding.”

Mr. Goldstein sighed and said he would be missing Mr. Silverberg—but of course, “I think having somebody like Ira at the NEA is good for all of us.”

Mr. Silverberg will not be totally absent from New York -- his family, including his husband Bob Morris, is still here -- but he sounded wistful as he acknowledged the difficulty of saying goodbye to his clients, whom he called “people who I kind of can’t imagine a life without.

“For me it was very hard because it’s ending relationships that I don’t think I ever really thought about ending,” he said.

The month of long goodbyes culminated with a party on the rooftop of The Standard hotel on November 29. "No rsvp," said the invite, "just come & weep."

The night is young for style and business. (via @simonelandon)

Yesterday two New York Times sections declared the night young.

The Book Review was among the sections that managed to avoid the headline of the week, but they seem to be having a hard time staying away from the Lipsyte family. This week Robert Lipsyte, sports writer and YA author, wrote the essay, on children's literature for boys. It included the youthful reading habits of his son  Sam, the author of The Ask.

"The books that Sam read differed from the current crop in one significant way: They tended not to be gender-­specific. Many early Y.A. writers were women who wrote well about both genders, like the queen of coming-­of-­age lit, Judy Blume (Forever.) Others wrote under the guise of asexual initials: S. E. Hinton (The Outsiders) and M. E. Kerr (Gentlehands.) The better male writers also wrote about both boys and girls: John Donovan (I’ll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip), Paul Zindel (The Pigman) and Robert Cormier, my hero in the field and author of the 1974 classic, The Chocolate War."

Here's Sam Lipsyte on beginning to identify himself as a writer:

I started at parties in college. I thought it would impress women. Of course I was just a poseur, but so was everybody else, so it didn't matter. If anybody pitied me enough to offer some sort of physical contact, be it just a mild brushing of coat sleeves, I am sure it was despite the fact that I said I was a writer.

The real estate descriptions and grocery lists are very encouraging. Take heart, Unemployed Class of '10 Philosophy Major!

(Via The Book Bench)

One problem though: Mr. Lipsyte is not under 40. In fact, he is 41. And as such, he is part of a group of writers who were not far enough along in their careers to be seriously considered last time the New Yorker did a list like this in 1999, and are now just a year or two over the limit for the 2010 edition.  

New Yorker editor David Remnick was bummed when he learned that Mr. Lipsyte was ineligible.

"I just read Sam Lipsyte, and I think that novel's terrific," he said. "I just think he's got something that I hadn't seen 25 times before. And that was one where—I don't know how old Sam Lipsyte is now, but ... in any event he's not eligible this year."

Don't think it's some tragedy for Mr. Lipsyte's career that the timing worked out this way, though, Mr. Remnick said. "You have to realize—this is not the most important thing in the world. Inevitably what's most important is that really fine writers get read and this is just one way for us to do that."

Mr. Lipsyte responded in an email: "I wish the good people at the New Yorker would have taken into account the fact that I feel thirty-nine, tops."

As former New York Sun literary editor Tom Meaney explained it to us last year, “If you’re reading a galley on the subway, and someone comes to talk to you, you’re going to share a lot of things in common with them. You can have the right jeans or the right purse or whatever … but if you’re reading How Fiction Works in March, you know, three months before the book comes out, and you get the one girl who is interested in James Wood, well …”

Well, indeed! How Fiction Works was without a doubt one of last year’s most sought-after status galleys. Others included Roberto Bolano’s 2666 and Philip Roth’s Indignation. 

Getting on the subway yesterday and spotting someone with a Penguin Group totebag, we wondered: what are this summer’s status galleys? Are there any, or is everyone just anonymously reading Kindles now, as suggested by James Wolcott in this month’s Vanity Fair? 

We made some calls this morning and turns out there are a bunch! 

Joshua Ferris’s January 2010 novel The Unnamed, of which Reagan Arthur Books handed out more than a thousand copies during Book Expo in May, is among them, as is Lorrie Moore’s A Gate at the Stairs, which comes out in September. 

Consensus seems to be that the ultimate status galley this season has been Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, but actually it’s coming out in three weeks, and according to Tracy Locke, the publicist at Penguin Press, finished books are already being sent out relatively widely. But for a while there, only a very few people could claim to possess the ARC: per Ms. Locke, “They were ... on a very, very, very limited galley distribution. Basically what I did was I looked at what people’s deadlines were, so I went to all the monthlies first, and I sent them out as late as possible. It certainly would qualify as a status galley—we did our best to keep it under wraps.”

Lorin Stein, the editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, said that his author Sam Lipsyte’s follow-up to Home Land has been getting a lot of interest. “People really keep calling me to ask when we'll be able to show them Lipsyte,” Mr. Stein said in an email. “I've never had to answer that question so many times. The answer is: galleys by August 5. (And it's really great-looking.)”

Other books people mentioned include Richard Powers’ September novel Generosity: An Enhancement, Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City and Michael Chabon’s Manhood for Amateurs, both of which come out in October, and Mary Karr’s November memoir Lit. Sloane Crosley, the publicist at Vintage, suggested Dave Eggers’ Zeitoun, which comes out next week but which was never distributed in galley, and the Otto Penzler–edited doorstop volume The Vampire Archives, which Vintage will publish in October and at this early stage is only in the hands of 200 people. 

Plus, Philip Roth once again has a new book coming out, this one called The Humbling and scheduled for publication in November. According to the Houghton Mifflin Harcourt publicity department, there are 300 copies of that one floating around among critics and editors (500 if you include the ones sent to booksellers) but it’s already stirring buzz on the Twittersphere. Early last month blogger—and occasional book critic for The Observer!—Molly Young tweeted that she was about to go “wait near the mailbox till my galley of Philip Roth's upcoming THE HUMBLING arrives.” 

We caught up with Ms. Young over email this morning and asked her whether it had ever come. It had! Would she describe it?

“The cover is a grayish-pebble color and the book is very, very slim,” Ms. Young reported. “Almost pamphlet-sized. With big type. The cover looks like a typical Glaser cover, unobtrusive but immediately recognizable.” 

How did she happen to be among the lucky few to receive the book?  

“A kind editor sent me the book as a favor,” she said. “He was aware that I like Roth a lot—especially short Roth novels with lots of sex in them—and agreed to let me have a peek. The provision was that I not review or quote from the book, since there were future changes to be (possibly) made.”

She said she hadn’t spent any time reading The Humbling in public, and so could not say whether it worked the way a status galley is expected to. 

“[I] read it strictly in private, mostly because the content was racy enough to make me squirm,” Ms. Young said. “It's a very titillating book and I like to maintain a noble bearing in public, so this was not the reading material to support that goal."  She added: "Plus, if I saw someone reading a covetable ARC in public I'd interpret it as a weird passive mating call. I guess it's no worse than wearing an obscure band T-shirt—you're advertising your taste in hopes of attracting the select few who value that same object. But romances predicated on taste are sort of doomed, no? It's a flimsy pretext."

Just kidding. Those guys have been running the show for centuries. But it does seem like every other literary novel that comes out these days has at its center some variation on the classic antihero—a character whose flaws are worn plainly if not proudly, and who inspires in readers scorn and affection in equal amounts.

One strain in particular—characterized by a self-loathing impulse to confession, a kinetic demeanor and a claim to authenticity expressed through vitriolic social critique—has emerged as a dominant model. The patron saints of this mini-genre: Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, Salinger’s Holden Caulfield and pretty much every character Chuck Palahniuk has ever written. Readers can’t get enough of them, and writers—particularly young men—can’t seem to resist the temptation to put them in their books.

Gerry Howard, the editor at Knopf Doubleday, acquired the mega-best-selling 1996 novel Fight Club—a move that has put him in line to receive more Palahniukian writing for consideration than just about any other editor. Writers often miss the mark with their work for one of two reasons, though, according to Mr. Howard: either it is informed by too broad a view of what it means for prose to be “edgy,” or it is based on the mistaken belief that the essence of Mr. Palahniuk’s work is contained in the easily imitable aspects of his use of the grotesque.

So when agent Stephen Barbara came to Mr. Howard earlier this month with a manuscript written by 26-year-old Sam Munson, a friend Mr. Barbara had met during his days at the University of Chicago, the editor had reason to be skeptical; according to Mr. Barbara’s pitch letter, Mr. Munson could be “positioned” in the manner of Ned Vizzini (whose last book is about a suicidal adolescent’s experience in a mental hospital), Gary Shteyngart (whose most recent novel was narrated by an unpleasant, obese depressive) and, yes, Chuck Palahniuk, whose newest novel, Pygmy, due out in May, tells the story of a clandestine terrorist who despises the United States and is sent there in the guise of an exchange student to plot a massive attack.

And although Mr. Howard doesn’t see Mr. Munson’s book, titled The November Criminals, “as particularly Palahnukian,” it hooked him enough to enter a bid; Mr. Howard bought it last week at auction for a sum close to $100,000. The novel takes the form of an aggressively confessional letter written by a high-school senior in response to an essay question on the University of Chicago admissions application that asks him to discuss his best and worst qualities. Over the course of the book, Mr. Munson’s protagonist—named Addison—tries to illustrate at length the thesis that he actually has no “best” qualities—that he is irredeemable, pathetic and useless in every way, and excusable only as the product of a corrupt and shallow world. His misanthropy is expressed through various obsessions and enthusiasms, such as a penchant for Holocaust jokes, which Addison “collects” and deploys in order to offend people.

Mr. Howard said he does not get irritated when he sees young authors compared to Mr. Palahniuk, and thinks it’s natural that young writers would be attracted to drawing these kinds of characters. “There is so much pressure, I think, for young people to be adjusted and to get with the program these days that the fact that somebody like Chuck is out there saying ‘uh-uh’ is being taken as liberating,” he explained. “And obviously, if that sort of feeling is in the air, a lot of other talented young writers are going to channel it themselves.”

He went on: “There’s a huge amount of literature that suggests that the impulse to create art emerges from alienation, right? I don’t think people who have the impulse to engage in creative writing are doing so in order to, you know, affirm consensus reality. I think they’re looking to critique it. And there’s a model there in Chuck, ready to go.”

Joshua Ferris, the author of Then We Came to the End, a celebrated novel about office life that was chock-full of unpleasant and depressed individuals, said in an email that the modern antihero worked much the same as his ancestors, and that, formally speaking, the device is a natural thing to embrace if what you’re going for is social criticism.

“Dostoyevsky was interested in the new social and philosophical ideas of his time,” Mr. Ferris said. “The Catcher in the Rye, for all its enduring felicities and originality, grinds Salinger’s ax against phonies. And Chuck Palahniuk in, say, Fight Club, catches the zeitgest against IKEA conformity and the J Crewification of the nineties. This is best done with an anti-hero because an anti-hero is a hero in wolf’s clothing, saying and doing what no one else dares. They work a dark magic, dosing all the nitwits and dullards too stupid or afraid to say what must be said with a local, timely truth serum.”

Some of these characters are not far from monsters—not good underneath all their flaws but worth paying attention to because of them. Disfigured, pathetic, unapologetic and occasionally hopeless, they are, on the whole, contemptuous of the world around them because of what it’s turned them into and confident that the reason for their alienation is the inescapable, toxic nastiness of modern life. They are losers—spiritually dysfunctional, often ugly physically—with chips on their shoulders and resentment in their hearts that takes the form of a self-consciously unforgiving, bombastic mode of social criticism. 

Other contemporary writers who’ve embraced something like this approach in their work include Sam Lipsyte, whose most recent novel, the brilliant and finally life-affirming Home Land, features a sharp-tongued misanthrope named Teabag who submits sad, usually abusive letters to his high-school alumni newsletter; John Niven, whose recently published Kill Your Friends is narrated by an unscrupulous, misogynistic talent scout who sees rot in everyone and everything; Mark Sarvas, whose Harry, Revised is about a deadbeat in the throes of midlife crisis; and Alan Moore, whose massively popular graphic novel Watchmen has at its center a hard-right vigilante named Rorschach, who makes a life of hunting the cretins he believes to be responsible for the moral decrepitude he sees all around him.

Over the past decade or so, characters like these seem to have become the vehicle of choice for young male writers seeking to express a certain sort of disaffection. More than that, as Mr. Palanhiuk’s blockbuster success has demonstrated, they’ve become alarmingly lucrative cash cows—resonant with millions of readers and inspirational to scores of budding authors.

But why, exactly?

“Hard fought bitterness or acidity feels like it gives you a framework for a kind of angry comedy that is, if not necessarily cathartic, at least accommodating enough to encompass an entertaingly hostile, plausible inner life,” said literary agent Jim Rutman, who represents among others Beautiful Children author Charles Bock. “Everything that is potentially bothersome can be fit into that mold. It’s fun to write angry. And you can sort of take cover behind this deeply bothered persona you’ve invented and you can go anywhere with it. You grant yourself permission and access. I guess it’s a species of irreverence.”

Readers, in Mr. Rutman’s view, respond to such characters because “if you are self-loathing enough, then you have access to difficult truths that other people would be loath to put forth. If you are invested in the fact that you are not even a candidate for any meaningful connection with anyone, then you let loose with all the painful honesty at your disposal.”

Daniel Menaker, formerly the editor in chief of Random House and the fiction editor at The New Yorker before that, said the modern antihero—specifically as he appears in the work of young men—has his roots in women’s liberation and the ambiguity of gender roles. 

“I think maybe what’s developing here is there are two kinds of young, alienated heroes,” said Mr. Menaker, who has edited books by both Gary Shteyngart and Benjamin Kunkel. “One is the nerd: the somewhat indulged, un-grown-up guy who has sort of philosophical ideas or objections to society and doesn’t know what to do with himself. The other branch of people are ones who are not fully socially or politically integrated—they’re the tough guys.”

Both variations, Mr. Menaker said, can be seen as a “sociological outgrowth of some gender-role ambiguity introduced beginning in the ’60s or ’70s, when the way a young guy ought to be became less clear.”

Mr. Munson, for his part, who said he has read only one book by Mr. Palahniuk, chalks it up to the inevitable disillusionment of idealistic people.

“I just think it’s because of something enduring in the way our society is set up that makes it kind of eternally relevant,” Mr. Munson said. “I think, basically, we’re still living with the same kind of moral and political systems that saw the birth of the Underground Man and Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time. There are superficial differences, in the sense that now it’s much more permissible to be frank about violence and sex than it was even 50 years ago, but especially in America, where we kind of drink in these ideas about freedom and equality from a very young age, you have to be very, very unperceptive not to see the disjunction between what we aspire to and what we achieve, and I think for some people that’s a very tragic, embittering thing.”

lneyfakh@observer.com

I don't think it's just me. I thought it was a propitious sign that American popular culture was embracing Gulager when "Uncle Grambo," the proprietor of whatevs.org, the popular, pop-tart-obsessed Web site whose judgment has a kind of vox populi pop-culture street cred, interrupted some posts on Amanda Bynes and the like with the flat-out statement: "Gulager rulez!" And later posted a perceptive and even touching tribute to Gulager:

"Hands down, by far, without a doubt, dude …. the best show on tellyvision … it's truly been amazing to watch the transformation that Gulager has been through this season. He went from an oddball outsider with questionable bathing habits and even more questionable nepotistic tendencies to an endearingly patient and curiously intriguing talent … from someone you laugh at to someone you pull for."

"Who's Gulager?" many of you may be asking. Well, he's the first-time director chosen for the third season of Project Greenlight's nine-episode movie-making reality show, and he represents the rare appearance on a reality show of a real American character, a complex, difficult character, not the usual reality-show freaks who look like they're already auditioning for their stint on The Surreal Life.

Instead, John Gulager comes across as the real thing, a far more recognizable (but rarely seen on TV) character, the iconic embodiment of the abrasive misfit loser. Not a funny, lovable, self-congratulatory Seinfeldian loser-no Bart Simpson charm, Holden Caulfield naïveté, not even geek appeal-but an irritating, sullen, self-satisfied loser.

Come to think of it, there is one other character on TV whose Irritating Bad People Skillz evoke a similar kind of empathy or pity: Kevin Dillon's great touchy and resentful second-banana brother, Johnny Drama, on HBO's Entourage. True, he's a fictional character and Gulager's real, but I feel a trend coming on.

Regardless of how the movie he made turns out, Gulager has a chance to become a kind of catchword, a personality-type name-check. After all, just about everyone has a clueless Gulager within, and I have a feeling calling someone "a Gulager type" will become a recognized descriptor among a certain subset of the culture.

Probably a subset similar to those who felt that Sam Lipsyte's new novel Home Land spoke to them, with its hilarious celebration of the Poorly Adjusted and their Attitude Issues, and its protagonist, "Teabag," a Poster Boy for Bad People Skillz. Not surprisingly, it's a cult favorite among writers (including me) for just these qualities.

Gulager isn't as caustically, bitterly witty as Mr. Lipsyte's protagonist, but he shares his contempt for suck-ups; he exemplifies the attitude of those who would rather be a Fuck-Up than a Suck-Up (in the Manichean classification system of my colleague Phil Weiss).

Anyway, for those who missed the series, Gulager was living the all-too-real life of a loser schlub when he won the Project Greenlight directing contest and got a $3 million budget to make a genre horror script called Feast.

So he became the hero-well, hero isn't the word I want; the butt, for the most part-of the third season of the series, which has moved from HBO to Bravo. As you probably know, Greenlight is the Matt Damon–Ben Affleck production that chronicles the trials of the contest winners as they struggle to make their movie. While the first two seasons of the show were, to my mind, excellent TV storytelling, the characters-and the movies that resulted-were a little tepid, not nearly as interesting as the show made about them.

But this season, while they chose a standard horror script for the project, they chose a decidedly nonstandard type to direct it. Enter Gulager, a pale, pudgy, redheaded guy who, at 47, was scraping by making wedding videos and doing some freelance editing and camera work. He was the son of veteran genre-picture actor Clu Gulager. L.A. was his hometown, but he seems not to have picked up either the street smarts or the people smarts of the town. You could call him clueless Gulager.

But there was something appealing about his dorky insouciance. After being lectured by producer Chris Moore about the value of making human connections with his film crew-whose feeling for him could make or break the tough moments in the filmmaking process-Gulager seemed, at least at first, to ignore any collaborative instincts for the sake of "protecting his vision," which he always seemed to feel was threatened, although he never seemed to make clear to anyone what that vision was.

He really looked like he didn't care what people thought about him. Unfortunately, he acted that way, too.

The real drama of the third season of Greenlight was whether or not Gulager's People Skillz learning curve would overtake his Poor Adjustment and Bad Attitude before they undermined his "dream." A situation some of us could relate to.

Anyway, that's how the Project Greenlight series shrewdly set up the dramatic arc of the episodes-which, it must be admitted, may have been given a more pronounced shape in the editing room.

Still, one has the feeling they weren't inventing Gulager's Bad Attitude out of thin air. You just couldn't make that stuff up. Gulager immediately distinguished himself by his self-destructive, passive-aggressive posture, lack of camaraderie and collegiality, his complaining, suspicion, paranoia, whining, self-subverting actions and other poorly adjusted, antisocial behavior. Gotta love it.

Actually, it was a little uncomfortable for me, because after a while, you couldn't help wondering if his maladjusted-loner attitude had something to do with his being-like me-a redhead. Or with the utterly unfair myths and prejudices that redheads have to deal with. Especially redheaded men.

True, there are some myths about redheaded women. I remember a gun-toting D.A. in Tyler, Tex. talking about redheaded women while showing off the submachine gun he carried in the trunk of his Camaro. He always liked to put redheaded women on death-penalty juries, he told me. "They're mean!" he stated emphatically. (Not true, I feel compelled to say, of my two redheaded exes.) And for the most part-"scarlet woman" stereotypes aside-redheaded women have it better than redheaded men. They're seen as "Pre-Raphaelite," prima-ballerina types, ethereal, aesthetic and regal rather than mean.

But redheaded men …. You know, of course, that in the medieval Passion Plays and in Shakespeare's time, both Judas and Shylock were played with red wigs, the scarlet color betokening their Luciferian nature. It hasn't gotten much better since then. We're either bad or crazy like Van Gogh. I don't think Eric Stoltz evens things up. Redheaded women may get called fiery and passionate; redheaded men, just bad-tempered.

Frankly, for all the conscious and unconscious prejudice we suffer, we deserve, if not minority status, at least handicapped parking spaces.

And now there's Gulager, who embodied all the most irritating traits that inevitably would be added to the ledger in the case against redheads, I thought.

The guy walks around muttering self-pitying asides to himself-just about the only person he talks to. He thinks the casting director is going behind his back (she is), but in a passive-aggressive way he waits till what she's doing is a fait accompli and then throws a loud sulk. Meanwhile, he tries to hire no less than three members of his own family (and his girlfriend) for the movie.

He has a sullen standoff with his director of photography, climaxing in the following childish spat: Gulager asks the D.P. to get "coverage"; the D.P. asks him how he wants it done; Gulager says, "Just do it"; the D.P. says, "Tell us how"; Gulager says, "Just do it, smarty-pants."

Cringe.

In addition, he's a fount of low self-esteem. His best mood is sullen. Most of the time, it's self-pity. Here are some inspirational quotations from Chairman Gulager:

"It's a sad day in Gulagerville when things go wrong."

"I just feel like a complete failure …. I'm full of self-doubt, and all I can think of is, 'You let everybody down.'"

"I was really worried. I fell into a funk."

"Sometimes I get really bummed out."

"I'm [doing it my way], even if it sinks the fuckin' ship."

Great leadership abilities, Chairman Gulager! Great motivational skills! He's the Tony Robbins of Low Self-Esteem; he's the guru of the Seven Bad Habits of Self-Destructive People.

He doesn't get much better. He seems like the type who can make even an easy task hard for everyone around him, but he keeps on stumbling forward with the film, and the various producers eventually begin saying they like what they see in the dailies. He gets a little better in dealing with people-but not much. He seems to believe that having independent creative vision and being aloof and off-putting are inseparable.

Which, of course, raises an important question about the relationship between art and life. Is it necessary to be obnoxious to pursue one's "vision"? Or does that just obtain in Hollywood?

There's a fascinating life issue here. As someone who's quit three good jobs because I couldn't contemplate getting along with a new boss (or out of loyalty to an old boss), I've thought a lot about people skills. That doesn't mean I've developed them, but I've thought about them.

Actually, watching Gulager, it occurred to me that while I've at least sought to develop the rudiments of them, Gulager didn't seem to know they existed.

It seems to me there really is an area between Suck-Up and Fuck-Up. That going a bit out of your way to get along doesn't necessarily make you a suck-up, and that standing up for your vision doesn't necessarily condemn you to being a fuck-up.

But if it comes to a showdown, I'll still root for the fuck-ups, the Gulagers of the world, over the suck-ups and the smooth operators. After all, America was founded, the continent was explored and populated, by gnarly individualists who didn't play well with others. And I'm still such a sucker for the romanticism of the Beautiful Loser that I'll even find a place in my heart for an ugly, pudgy loser like Gulager. Although God help us if he turns out to be a winner.

And then you begin to wonder if Gulager is playing a "deep game." That he's not risking his 15 minutes of fame on some schlocky gorefest horror movie, but on establishing himself as a personality, a star. The Omarosa strategy, perhaps? Or maybe he's deliberately seeking to teach us Zen lessons: Obi-Wan Gulager!

And then there's the even deeper question: What part of his bad personality is due to his redheadedness, what part is due to looking like a fat loser, and what part is sheer orneriness? And perhaps most important of all: Does he actually have the talent that (sometimes) barely excuses bad attitude and self-destructive behavior?

I almost don't want to know. I kinda like the mystery that the series leaves you with (his movie, Feast, isn't scheduled to open until December, so we won't know till then, if then).

But I like the fact that people like Uncle Grambo can relate to Gulager. I think he appeals to the vast, unspoken contempt that most of working America has for the suck-ups and smooth operators of the world. Appeals to all the people who get called abrasive because they can't conceal their contempt for the ass-kissers among them. Sure, he goes too far to the opposite end of the spectrum. But better an abrasive redhead than an all-too-slick brown noser.

Bravo would be crazy not to rerun the whole series.

Gulager Fever: Catch it!

What to call male, unmarried life between the age of 27 and 40? Sunset youth? Still-coming-of-age? These are years of rejiggered aspiration, metabolic slowdown, waning cool.

Boo-hoo. It ain't prostate cancer. It ain't Falluja. Does anyone want to read fiction about not-quite-still-young men contemplating their place in the world?

Sam Lipsyte must hope so: It's his turf, the furrow he's plowed through three books of light-show prose. His very funny new novel of early-midlife male drift, Home Land, contains some of the most entertaining sentences I've read since Martin Amis was hot. But-wisely, perhaps-it claims no spot-lit seat in the canon. "I do not write for the dead," Lewis (Teabag) Miner tells us. No, indeed; his life story-told in a series of personal updates to his high-school alumni newsletter, Catamount Notes-is really for guys like himself, guys who'd lift a weary salute to his page-1 mea culpa: "It's confession time, Catamounts … I did not pan out."

Mr. Lipsyte has had a certain niche appeal since his 2000 debut collection of stories, Venus Drive (published by the book arm of New York's literary magazine Open City). The stories were hit or miss, but the hits-"Ergo, Ice Pick" and "Torquemada" especially-were knockouts. Are you up for heroin, elderly abuse, incest and rough sex? Read Venus Drive. The book's battering, jump-cut prose and shock-tactic plots could be a little wearying, and many readers likely tired before the end. Nevertheless, Venus Drive showed indelicate, unembarrassed talent-the best kind.

The Subject Steve (2001) was a more polished effort. An existentialist text for the 30-ish, defeated set, Mr. Lipsyte's first novel followed the adventures of an ex-advertising man condemned to die of a mysterious disease. The central notion here-dying is a metaphor for living-would be depressing without Mr. Lipsyte's extremist imagination. The disease-afflicted Steve gets entangled with a redemption cult of New Age sadists who offer purification through torture. Funny, right? Somehow, it is, thanks to Mr. Lipsyte's prose: "Heinrich's punch landed somewhere in the vicinity of my liver. Next thing, I was performing a sort of fetal waltz across the floor planks." The first half of The Subject Steve is bravura stuff, but the novel goes loose and meandering in the second half. Here's the thing: For all his brilliant set pieces, Mr. Lipsyte's work lacks forward throttle, what-next momentum. Reading a Lipsyte book is like watching a talent show, not a play.

This is true of Home Land, a lightly plotted book of racy sentence rhythms, conjured verbs and quick-witted exchanges. It's not a page-turner-but the writing is so lively I didn't really care. In too much new fiction, the prose is just a delivery system for plot, character and theme, full of pre-fab, cliché-studded formulations. Such narrative moves along-too well. To read Mr. Lipsyte is to linger a little, to savor the riffs and punchlines.

Here's our narrator recalling the scene of his first sex: "We popped each other's cherries down the shore after the prom, both of us gooned on Sambuca while that motel TV filled the room with game show."

Here he is talking to his stoner friend Gary:

"So, exactly how high are you?"

"One to ten?"

"Sure."

"Wait, one to what?"

What makes Home Land work isn't just the humor-nor the anecdotes of kinky sex and madcap violence Teabag relates to his fellow Catamounts (amusing as they are). Ultimately, Home Land works because Mr. Lipsyte has become a little less savage, a little less grim. Teabag, a wallowing, mistake-prone, not-quite-still-young man, becomes someone you actually care about by the end of the novel, an affecting turn that makes up for the book's idling plot. Here's a guy with no girlfriend, dead or unloving parents, intermittent, barely remunerative employment and only one friend-but he's lousy with wit, sturdied by a core of pride and, finally, sort of wise.

Our loser hero knows as well as anyone the pitfalls of our hyper-aspirational culture, the way we all figure ourselves to be budding celebrities, nascent rock stars, maverick artists-to-be. Beware such ego, Teabag warns: You, like me, may not pan out. He writes, "Not to say I never had any plans. I had plans. I could picture myself in various places. But I was never doing anything in these pictures, these places. I was just sort of standing there, being congratulated for something. Sometimes I had a glass of punch in my hand." The lesson of Teabag's disappointed 30's is that such narcissism can be dangerous. What do we really need to be happy? Follow the guy all the way to the end of the novel, through his raucous, bloody Eastern Valley High reunion, and you'll get your answer: a sense of humor, a talent for the nicely turned phrase-and, most importantly, the capacity for love.

"You're an enemy of feeling," Gary tells Teabag midway through Home Land. In the end, I'm happy to say, Teabag proves him wrong.

Taylor Antrim is an associate editor at Forbes FYI.