REVIEW: HERE COMES ANOTHER LESSON by Stephen O’Connor

Stephen O’Connor’s Here Comes Another Lesson offers a rare virtue among short story collections: if one story isn’t what you’re looking for, chances are the next one will be. The sheer variety of narratives offered in this collection is virtuosic. O’Connor writes from such a multiplicity of voices and with such a wide spectrum of concerns, running the gamut from a Minotaur awakening to his own angst to an actor playing himself in a movie based on his life to a graduate student struggling to finish her thesis in a disturbingly isolated house, that considering the collection as a whole becomes a rather dizzying task.

The recurring centerpieces of Here Comes Another Lesson are the adventures of Charles, an untenured Professor of Atheism. In each of the five stories devoted to him, Charles is ruthlessly thrown into a theological scenario that implicitly refutes everything Charles’s world view is based upon; the hopeless unbeliever takes a vacation to Eden and is visited by God and angels. Pretty clever gimmick, right? And in lesser hands, that is exactly what these stories would be: a gimmick. But what O’Connor does with the Professor of Atheism stories is much more complex and satisfying, the humor dark and twisted. What Charles eventually learns every time is not that he is wrong, but that, in a way, he is right. If God truly exists in this world, Charles discovers, then we are probably worse off for it. What could have been a series of casually cruel set pieces instead become the trials of a man grappling with an impossible ideal.

This unpredictability is true of most of the collection; O’Connor consistently zigs when you think he’s going to zag. Take “Disappearance and” for example, where an ornithologist learns the exact moment his death is going to occur. From the opening, where a soothsaying cormorant touches down on a plastic tablecloth, you could be forgiven for expecting the story that follows to be clever, to follow some path to self-defeat and irony, to end with the ornithologist’s death as some sort of punch line. Instead, what O’Connor eventually delivers is a quiet, lyrical meditation on a man struggling to be alert to his life during his final moments on earth.

O’Connor’s eventual purpose in these stories somewhere between the realist and the fantastic. At his most imaginative, O’Connor still manages to pull his fantastic creations back into a more recognizable emotional landscape. “I Think I’m Happier,” where a man is followed home by his dead father, is reminiscent of Donald Barthelme in both absurdity and tone, but O’Connor is softer than Barthelme, tender where Barthelme often relied on artifice. The result is both harrowing and touching. And at his most naturalistic, O’Connor can’t help but veer into the horrific, the odd and the unbelievable. “White Fire,” told from the perspective of a soldier fresh from Iraq, skirts around the war for as long as it can, the soldier using “like” and “you know” to avoid actually saying what needs to be said. But the flat, clipped conversational prose only continues to grow in resonance and weight until, hopelessly pulled by memory, the soldier finally reveals the horrors he’s seen. And once it’s been said, you wish it could be unsaid again. Not for your sake, but for his. And in “He Will Not Seeing Me Stopping Here,” a dinner between two old friends borders on a Lynchian nightmare without ever abandoning its realistic conceit. O’Connor seems to take just as much joy in revealing the peculiar quietness in the ordinary as he does in humanizing the strangest realms of his imagination.

Here Comes Another Lesson is a collection of people lost amidst a world stripped of meaning and purpose. Whether that world resembles our own or merely mirrors it, O’Connor manages to find the beauty, the brutality, and the sublime buried within and offers it all to his reader, unflinchingly.

Stephen O’Connor’s Here Comes Another Lesson is out today, Aug. 3rd, on Free Press.

- Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer. You can find him here.

The Ask

Sam Lipsyte is the poet laureate of the American loser. If there was any question about this before, his new novel, The Ask, has settled the matter. Lipsyte is the kind of comic writer who has his finger on the pulse of the most pathetic possible way of living in America at any given time. The Ask does for the recession what The Subject Steve did for the malaise of the late ‘90s and Homeland did for aging loyal Reaganites in a post 9/11 world. It’s narrated by Milo Burke, who is a former development officer at a third-rate university only referred to as Mediocre University. Newly unemployed and unable to support his family, Milo is given one last chance at his old job: charming a potential donor—a major “ask” in development parlance—who happens to be his old college roommate. And if, in the process, Milo becomes an indentured servant tasked with covering up his old friend’s sordid past, then so be it.

Lipsyte has always excelled at a certain kind of first-person protagonist, the self-aware, self-righteous misanthrope who refuses to buy into the system. The kind of failure you can’t help but cheer for. In this sense, Milo Burke is cut from the same cloth as Teabag Miner, Homeland’s protagonist. In fact, everything that is wonderful about Lipsyte is present in The Ask: the cripplingly hilarious dialogue and observations; the ability to find comedy in the most dismal of circumstances; the male friendships, equal parts homoerotic and homophobic; the sudden rhapsodies of beauty and despair sandwiched between assaults on the mundane and ponderous.

But in The Ask, Lipsyte’s view of America has evolved and become more complex than anything seen in his earlier novels. The rants are less myopic; resentment has turned into anger. For better or worse, Milo is aware of the systems of power that surround him. Lipsyte’s narratives have always ultimately been about class, the anxieties of a lower middle class peering in at the world of privilege that lies frustratingly beyond its reach, but this quality has never been clearer than it is in The Ask as Lipsyte focuses his considerable talent on the broken promise of a liberal arts education and the fallacy of social mobility.

The ultimate lesson of The Ask is that everything is bound to disappoint: your job, your marriage, your friends, your children, your parents, your dreams, your talent. And as the last few chapters of The Ask fail to coalesce, when the climax peters out and fails to delivers on the pay-off you’re expecting, you realize that Sam Lipsyte is bound to disappoint you as well.

But I like to think that Lipsyte meant it that way. Things don’t usually work out for the losers of the world. Satisfying conclusions are rare and hard-fought. It’s a difficult truth, but there’s no one I’d rather hear it from than Sam Lipsyte.

- Stephen Aubrey is a Brooklyn-based writer and performer.

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte, Farrar, Straus and Giroux ($25, 296 pp.)