Hunter Braithwaite writing for BOMB on Sam Lipsyte (CRF 2012)’s novel Hark.
He writes, “Always hilarious, Lipsyte has often been something of visionary: a subway howler, an outer-borough oracle. Over his previous three novels and two collections of stories, he’s satirized the present day.”
“Hark does not shoot straight. It buzzes and bobs until it crashes into its target, at which point, the reader might stop to think, maybe the story isn’t the point. It’s a book about how language can build and dismantle reality… Lipsyte’s language maintains a flexibility, a resilience, that feels quite necessary in a time of oversimplification and duplicity. The novel’s two themes, faith and fraud, are both rooted in rhetoric, in the massage of the message. In Hark’s final pages, as the story takes on messianic velocity, Lipsyte turns somber. The laughter stops, and the novel becomes, if not profound, then at least elegiac—which is perhaps satire’s bullseye.”