The Art of Fiction / Sam Lipsyte

PHOTO CERIDWEN MORRIS

Sam Lipsyte, The Art of Fiction No. 242

Interviewed by Mark Doten

ISSUE 227, WINTER 

The characters in Sam Lipsyte’s fiction exist in a fog of neoliberal precarity and despair, hustling for affection, for drugs, for a paycheck, for a new story to tell, ranting and bantering their way from one dead end to the next. From his debut, Venus Drive (2000), a collection populated by a string of outsiders and misfits (a tormented summer camper, a small-time coke dealer, a peep-show habitué and his comatose sister), to the near-future dystopia of Hark (2019), his fourth novel, the Lipsyte-verse is fueled by failed or failing relationships and the comically agonized involutions of liberal self-consciousness. His work is as endlessly self-correcting and ­unstable as Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, told with a compression and exacting attention to language that follows Stanley Elkin, Gordon Lish, and Barry Hannah. Lipsyte maps a world where the old-fashioned, middle-class American dream has been vaporized by rising inequality and greed, though his characters know full well—and won’t hesitate to let you know that they know, with the hangdog brio at the heart of his work—that the dream was never more than a corrupt, exclusionary sham from the beginning. 

Lincoln in the Bardo is such a marvelous novel / George Saunders by Sam Lipsyte

George Saunders
Photo by David Crosby

George Saunders

by Sam Lipsyte

"Lincoln in the Bardo is such a marvelous novel."

Sam Lipsyte

BOMB 139
Spring 2017

I've known George a little bit for a while now. We've chatted and emailed each other praise and encouragement. So it was a great joy to finally sit down with a writer whose stories have astonished me for years. His new novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, takes his gifts into deep, expansive territory without sacrificing the comic concision and emotional explosiveness of his earlier work. No one has shaped the landscape of recent American fiction quite like Saunders. No one has shaped the lives of students in recent years quite like Saunders, either. A writer who studied with him at Syracuse University once said to me: "George taught me how to write, but more than that, he taught me how to be a person." There are no real surprises when you meet George Saunders. He's the kind, curious, witty, thoughtful, and open-hearted man you might expect from his writing. Which is not to say he can't be viciously funny when the moment calls for it. We met at his hotel in New York City for over three hours. We ate a big plate of fruit and drank a pot of coffee.

 —Sam Lipsyte