On Beauty v. Home Land
presented by
ROUND 4, ZOMBIE ROUND
On Beauty
v. Home Land
Judged by Andrew Womack
Based on recommendations of friends and the out-loud laughing of subway riders with their noses buried in Lipsyte’s book, I’d been itching to read Home Land for a while now. A few months ago, I even zipped into a Barnes & Noble to pick up a copy for myself. After flipping through it, however, and getting pummeled with this “Catamounts! Catamounts! Catamounts!” prose, I shelved it and went to look at the DVDs.
So when I found out I was to read it for the Tournament of Books, I was half hopeful and half cringing. But what it would take to get me fully cringing would be the epistolary of emails that open On Beauty. Zadie Smith may have written three novels, but has she ever composed an email? They just sounded…fake—all this clumsy exposition and obvious foreshadowing. Sure, people don’t continuously address each other as “Catamount,” either, but at least Lipsyte offers an explanation—though it’s a weak one, I’m afraid.
Thankfully, On Beauty eventually gets past this turbulence and settles into an engaging clip. The writing is gorgeous, for sure, and the plot unfolds in some genuinely unexpected ways. I was honestly in love with this book. But then it began to drag, and Smith tells us more about these characters than we will ever need to know—who’s an intellectual, who’s not, and how that makes them feel, really and truly, and over and over and over—that the plot halts and dies at midpoint. When Smith begins her lengthy introduction of a young student, Katherine (Katie) Armstrong, whose only purpose is to underscore the already re-re-reinforced point that her academic characters are dishonorable people. Her appearance lasts only five pages, yet I’m told her full class schedule. It was all so manipulative and aggravating that I fought through the remaining 200 pages only out of duty.
He wants me to believe in his world, and that’s too good an offer to turn down—especially when the other novelist vying for my attention appears to have so little regard for it.
Did I love Home Land? Oh, yes, I did, though I have a major complaint about it. All this “Catamounts” business? It’s a pretense about how the narrator is sending off-color updates to his high school alma mater’s newsletter. It’s irksome every time Lipsyte summons it, and the book would have been far stronger without it. Instead, it’s like the Yoko songs on Double Fantasy, and I for one can’t wait for some specially abridged edition.
But what happens between the bumps is utterly uproarious. These characters are drawn enough to tell the story here, and characters and story both are joyfully disturbed: an A.A. sponsor who’s also a drug dealer and thug who threatens addicts with violence; the narrator’s best friend, who gains and loses fortunes through accusations made during regression therapy. Everybody in Home Land is an anomaly in an everyday setting. So normal are these surroundings that it’s easy enough to feel like Lipsyte is drawing you right into the novel: Maybe none of us pan out?
And so, despite my complaints, I’ll go so far as to trust Lipsyte to know better than I do when it comes to high school newsletters and mountain cats. He wants me to believe in his world, and that’s too good an offer to turn down—especially when the other novelist vying for my attention appears to have so little regard for it. So while On Beauty left me high and dry, Home Land won me over so completely that I’m proud to say:
WAY TO GO Catamounts! And good luck in the finals!
Advancing:
Home Land
Match Commentary
with Kevin Guilfoile and John Warner
GUILFOILE: Perhaps it’s time to recap the improbable journey taken by Sam Lipsyte’s book from unpublished manuscript all the way to the Tournament of Books final. For those who don’t know the now familiar story, Home Land was rejected by publishers 11,417 times. It was rejected by all the major publishers, then all the small houses, the university presses, HR newsletters, skateboard zines, and Pennysaver classifieds. At one point a Ritalin addict working the night shift at the Court Street Kinko’s even refused to make a copy of it. Finally, a desperate Lipsyte hired Lithuanian monks who could not read even a word of English to transcribe the manuscript by hand and then, after a week of collating and stapling, he smuggled eight boxes of them to England in a shipping container with three dozen Russian prostitutes, who were very grateful just to have someplace to sit.
When it finally found an American publisher, Home Land was released as a PBO, or “paperback original,” a format which, until very recently, was considered by many to be the publishing equivalent of a humorous Dorf on Golf instructional video.
I say until very recently because I think Home Land is one of the books helping to change that.
John, I remember last year when you and I were both reading it and we were calling each other back and forth just to say, Damn, this shit is funny. And that’s saying something because, like all individuals who occasionally attempt to write humor, we rarely admit that anything written by anyone else has made us laugh, much less figuratively pee our metaphorical pants.
WARNER: Amen to that, my friend. When I read a funny book that I haven’t written, I literally go through the five stages of grief:
Denial: “This book actually sucks, right? I’m laughing because I’m just sleep deprived, or there’s a leak at the nitrous plant.”
Anger: “Holy fucking Christ! This book is funny. Damn it!”
Bargaining: “My book is as funny as this book, isn’t it? I mean, I could’ve written this book, if I’d wanted to, couldn’t I?”
Depression: “Who am I kidding? I’ll never write a book this good.”
Actually, come to think of it, I generally just stop and stick at depression. This is why I’m so fond of the Tournament of Books. Sure, there’s going to be a winner at the end of all of this and that winner is going to be the proud recipient of a live cock, but there’s also going to be 15 losers. And thanks to your Zombie Round, two writers are going to get bounced twice, with the lurching, slobbering, brain-eating version of On Beauty meeting its second final demise thanks to the judgment of young Mr. Womack here.
All of this is to say that I feel a little bit better knowing that at least my book was not not chosen as the best book of 2005 twice.