- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Broadway (Sep 11 2001)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0767908856
- ISBN-13: 978-0767908856
- Product Dimensions: 14.8 x 2.3 x 21.7 cm
- Shipping Weight: 408 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #924,724 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
The Subject Steve, Sam Lipsyte's remarkable debut novel, is an ebullient, bawdy, and idiosyncratic assault on American consumer culture. Like fellow mercurial satirists Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, Lipsyte is an impressive stylist. His argot is the psychobabble of corporate jargon, advertising slogans, and sound bites. Wordplay rather than characterization is Lipsyte's métier and his language positively fizzes with invention. The characters here don't so much converse as exchange obtuse epigrammatic non sequiturs and indulge in linguistic quips. This should, of course, be utterly infuriating, but it isn't. The dialogue, like the rest of this savage, absurdist take on contemporary life (and more precisely our horror of death), is startlingly acute and unrelentingly funny.
The eponymous Steve (who claims his name is not Steve) is a mild-mannered 37-year old ad man who pens slogans celebrating the "ongoing orgasm of the information lifestyle." Unfortunately, he's dying, but "he's dying of something nobody has ever died of before: he's actually going to die of boredom." The scientists (who may not be scientists although they do wear white coats) "calculate that there can be no calculations" about how long he has left to live. Faced with this eventuality he embarks on a particularly wayward sexual, narcotic, and religious odyssey. Lipsyte fills Steve's journey with so many oddball doctors, multimedia weirdoes, dysfunctional gurus, and bizarre sexual encounters that it's actually rather difficult to imagine anyone dying of boredom. Exhaustion, perhaps. Ludicrous and occasionally even a little bit sick, Lipsyte's surreal, intelligent black comedy proves that death really can be a laughing matter. --Travis Elborough, Amazon.co.uk
From Publishers Weekly
Lipsyte's latest is a dark satire in which a protagonist named Steve is diagnosed with a vague but deadly disease called Prexis that sounds suspiciously like terminal boredom with modern life. Steve's doctors, two shadowy figures known only as the Mechanic and the Philosopher, try a variety of equally vague experimental treatments on him until their programs are exposed as fraudulent. His bizarre illness sets off a panic and a media frenzy, and Steve finds himself drawn to a clinic in upstate New York called the Center for Non-Denominational Recovery and Redemption run by a shady former torture expert known only as Heinrich of Newark, who uses pain-based "treatments." The cultish clinic proves equally ineffective, so Steve takes a couple of stabs at alternative medicine before heading west into the desert to join a futuristic cult called the Realm, where he prepares to meet his maker through a strange series of therapy sessions and off-the-wall broadcasts. In the stretches between the erratic and often bizarre plot twists, the author explores the disaffections of a divorced middle-aged man, delving into his professional disappointments, the emptiness of his marriage and love life, and the death of his best friend. Lipsyte (Venus Drive) has come up with an intriguing experimental concept, but the absence of coherent, linear plot means the commentary must be particularly sharp and interesting, and much of what Lipsyte offers is rambling, self-absorbed and at times just plain annoying. The troubles of the alienated and estranged offer plenty of opportunities for an adventurous approach, but much of what Lipsyte submits is familiar, a mannered echo, product of a sensibility halfway between Lish and Vonnegut.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
2.0 out of 5 stars
Weird,
By
This review is from: The Subject Steve (Hardcover)
I was intrigued within the first 50 pages or so because of the direction it seemed to be heading. Then it got bland in the middle . It just seemed to be the same thing spit over and over to the reader. It did have its high moments in the middle. Then at the end of the book it got better, but it was hard to get through the 2nd third of the book, it probably goes deeper than i gave it. I really didn't get into it, so that may be why, also I am still a teenager but I did get most of the satire. My recommendation is that it's one of those books you have to read yourself to judge because you may take it a different way. It just wasn't for me.
2.0 out of 5 stars
The Subject Boredom,
By Jake006 "rjberry8" (The Couch) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Subject Steve: A Novel (Paperback)
The book consists of a terminally ill guy doing weird/odd/normal things. Note: not weird-interesting or weird-really-neat, mostly weird-why-am-I-reading-this. To be fair I must admit I could not bring myself past page 175. I forced my way through pages 2-175. Enough is enough. Man against book...a timeless struggle. Maybe pages 176-200something hold the meaning of life. Amazon recommended this to me; I am currently in the process of re-associating my rankings on previously purchased items. Beware of this book if you are here by recommendation. I almost submitted this as 1 star, whoops. I forgot to mention the two really cool characters: The Philosopher and Mechanic. Hmmm, so I guess the first 20 pages were actually quite good. Unfortunately these characters did not get enough screen time. They at least indicate potential in Mr. Lipsyte and I will at least read the back of his next endeavor.
5.0 out of 5 stars
upi are tje ja;fwot, or, Can't You See I'm Blind, You Fool?,
By
This review is from: The Subject Steve: A Novel (Paperback)
Relax, I was hungry when I wrote that. The book really helped once my wife diced up some Chinese pillaries. They help the apoplexy, really.Hey, wouldn't we also read them aloud to our friends, and our friends-to-be, and our enemies, and our enemies-to-be? Would we cradle the book tenderly near our crotch(es) and croon it to our children-to-be? Would we go to the nursing home and holler it into the ear trumpets of the corpses-to-be? I'm all for this public reading stuff, but your proposition--it cries out with a mighty shriek to have its reductio ad absurdum illustrated, especially since you called me a halfwit. Hey--maybe we'd be reading them to a friend and the act of reading it aloud would transform that friend into an enemy-to-be; would similarly transform a lover-to-be into a nodding acquaintance-to-be, or even a person-who-crosses-the-street-when-they-see-us-to-be. We might go to a special ed class and read them to our halfwits, and halfwits-to-be. Just a thought, articulated within the framework of several complex "sentances" utilizing serial commas, written with concentration, intensity, and love toward a lover-to-be.
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