We Are All Cold Callers Now: Sam Lipsyte’s Savagely Satirical Fiction
“The consolation of acute bitterness is the biting retort.”
Hark
1.
“Is it too soon?” It’s one of those recurring cultural questions that has lately been revived in the context of the #MeToo movement, regarding the matter of when, if ever, such high-profile sexual abusers as Charlie Rose, Louis C.K., Mario Batali, Garrison Keillor, and Kevin Spacey might make their way back into the public sphere, or at least a paying job. Alpha males, however disgraced, get twitchy on the sidelines, and so, as James Wolcott put it in his Vanity Fair column on “The Return of the Scuzzies, “we hear the # MeToo Men tap on the microphone as they seek to reintroduce themselves.”
For a male fiction writer, a foray into this massively trip-wired territory might seem about as inviting as a several-mile stroll atop a third rail. Yet there, in the pages of the Nov. 19, 2018, issue of The New Yorker, was the fearless edgemeister Sam Lipsyte with “Show Recent Some Love,” surely the first male work of fiction to address, in no way obliquely, the issues raised by the movement. To do this in what we call “the current climate” was an act of perhaps foolhardy courage; to have pulled it off with as artful and well judged mixture of sensitivity and sharpness as Lipsyte did, is a high-wire achievement of no small dimension.
The story succeeds in “going there” without inducing moral nausea because the ogre of the piece, the abusive and predatory Mike Maltby, CEO of Mike Maltby Media Solutions (now renamed Haven Media) is unambiguously presented as one of “history’s ceaseless cavalcade of dickheads.” Left to navigate the treacherous cross-currents of Maltby’s ignominious departure is Isaac, his one-time stepson, whom Maltby rescued from a life of video gaming and Jagermeister shots by giving him a job as a copywriter. Not unreasonably he fears for his position now, given the toxicity of his association with Maltby; underneath Isaac’s vocal disgust he also experiences involuntary and unnerving spasms of sympathy, as confused and anxious humans will do.
