Day 149: The Ask

The Ask by Sam Lipsyte.  ISBN: 9780374298913.

There weren't a whole lot of redeeming qualities in this book for me.  It just wasn't my thing.  It reminded me too much of screaming at Catcher in the Rye when I was forced to read it in high school.  I was probably the only one out of 30 students who didn't think Holden Caulfield was just the greatest thing on two imaginary legs.  But we're not talking about Salinger, his ego gets enough feeding, dead or no.

One of the things I did like about the book was the Tourettes-like cursing of randomly cobbled together images.  I'll give some examples, because they really are the highlight of the book. 

"I don't give a slutty snow monkey's prolapsed uterus for your office politics." Page 25.
"wrinkled old spider cunt" (this one was about our "hero's" mom by the way, classy.)  Page 77.
"He's the cream of the crop, and best left alone to gather his own intel, set his own traps, and take down the enemy like a freaking phantom ninja born straight out of Satan's blazing quim." Page 227. 

I gotta say, those are some pretty fantastic highlights there.  Too bad the rest of the book is filled with pretentious and supposedly clever dialogue.  But there is such a thing as too much clever dialogue, so it ended up not being darkly humorous or insightful.  I did laugh at these, because the phraseology is frankly amazing.

I have my own occasional moments of Tourettes-cursing.  It usually happens when I'm driving.  Possibly the most memorable one I've come up with is Ass Habit.  I like it because it can imply several things: that you have an ass habit, that you are someone else's ass habit (and are therefore frequently buggered), that you are frequently an ass and it has therefore become a habit, and my fiance's favorite: that you wear a habit on your ass.  Apparently my language centers and my driving centers are very close together, but not close enough to function coherently under stress.  

I believe Ass Habit occurred around this time of year when all of the college students returned to Kent State.  These kids either cannot drive, or simply ignore any kind of good or polite driving behavior in favor of being a total menace to everyone else on the road.  It's hard to tell.  I do remember Danny being in the car with me for the inception of Ass Habit, and while he gets really nervous at my road ragin' and often foul mouthed derision of other drivers, I'm pretty sure I remember him laughing for a good 10 minutes straight.

Anyone else have some creative cursing I can add to my vocabulary?  I particularly like the ones that don't actually contain curse words, but are actually dirtier than the seven banned words. 


My review can be found on Goodreads.

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