The Fun Parts is precisely the type of collection one would expect from the author of novels like The Ask, a biting satire about a disgruntled college fundraiser. Together, these 13 acid-tipped stories, many of which appeared in publications like the New Yorker and the Paris Review, paint a grimly funny view of contemporary American life.
Sam Lipsyte's stories often feature wildly improbable premises that seem completely plausible in his sure hands. In "The Wisdom of the Doulas," a hapless Mitchell Malloy, who "just sort of fell into this work while stalking my ex-girlfriend," tries to become the first male birth coach in his city. Another story is constructed on a set of interlocking narratives describing an incident where one man throws another to his death from a high-rise building; another portrays a modern-day prophet named Gunderson who receives the disturbing news that the timetable for the end of days he's predicted will occur a few years hence has been accelerated--what he calls "a revised time frame for the Big Clambake" makes his search for a television contract even more urgent.
Several stories revolve around protagonists in some stage of drug addiction, but that affliction seems relatively benign, more a way station to some other status than a permanent sentence. The narrator of "The Worm in Philly," planning to write a children's book about the middleweight boxer Marvelous Marvin Hagler, announces he "was no longer experimenting with drugs," because he "knew exactly what to do with them." Mandy, the child of a Holocaust survivor who finds herself dating a recovering neo-Nazi in "Deniers," is "three months clean" and "had some fluorescent key-ring tags to prove it."
Lipsyte shows he's adept at capturing the speech rhythms of teenage boys in "The Dungeon Master," the story of a board game that threatens to turn deadly, and at poking fun at the absurdity of trendy names like Ewen, Juanito, Medgar and Shalom, some of the children at a day-care center in "The Climber Room," a sometimes creepy look at a middle-aged man's infatuation with a younger woman.
There isn't a lot in Sam Lipsyte's stories that will make you optimistic about the future of humanity in this "world gone berserk with misery, plague, affinity marketing." But at least he will have you laughing all the way as we stumble toward the apocalypse. --Harvey Freedenberg
Shelf Talker: In this collection of 13 often riotously funny stories, Sam Lipsyte takes a dim view of contemporary life.