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    The Ask: A Novel
    The Ask: A Novel
    The Ask: A Novel
    Audiobook8 hours

    The Ask: A Novel

    Written by Sam Lipsyte

    Narrated by Sam Lipsyte

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the author of Home Land and Venus Drive comes Sam Lipsyte's searing, beautiful, and deeply comic novel, The Ask.

    A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice

    Milo Burke, a development officer at a third-tier university, has "not been developing": after a run-in with a well-connected undergrad, he finds himself among the burgeoning class of the newly unemployed. Grasping after odd jobs to support his wife and child, Milo is offered one last chance by his former employer: he must reel in a potential donor—a major "ask"—who, mysteriously, has requested Milo's involvement. But it turns out that the ask is Milo's sinister college classmate Purdy Stuart. And the "give" won't come cheap.

    Probing many themes— or, perhaps, anxieties—including work, war, sex, class, child rearing, romantic comedies, Benjamin Franklin, cooking shows on death row, and the eroticization of chicken wire, Sam Lipsyte's The Ask is a burst of genius by an author who has already demonstrated that the truly provocative and important fictions are often the funniest ones.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Audio
    Release dateMar 2, 2010
    ISBN9781427210050
    Author

    Sam Lipsyte

    Sam Lipsyte is the author of the story collections Venus Drive and The Fun Parts and four novels: Hark, The Ask (a New York Times Notable Book), The Subject Steve, and Home Land, which was a New York Times Notable Book and received the Believer Book Award. His fiction has appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Best American Short Stories, among other places. The recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, he lives in New York City and teaches at Columbia University.

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    Reviews for The Ask

    3.5/5

    232 ratings24 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Hilarious. Loved all the stuff involving the narrator's young son and his preschool
    • 3/5
      A dark, modern comedy with ruined-relationship ends strewn through old friendships and fiendish colleagues, Milo Burke goes through life in a seemingly endless game where he's suddenly rehired at his old job, specifically to successfully lure a big donation from an old friend.

      Lipsyte's second most-used weapon is using the protagonist as a simple prop to display interesting characters and milieus, but his forté is wordplay; sometimes, he seems to me a bit like an old man trying to play younger than he really is:

      He was the kind of man you could picture barking into a field phone, sending thousands to slaughter, or perhaps ordering the mass dozing of homes. People often called him War Crimes. By people, I mean Horace and I. By often, I mean twice.

      Other times, he mashes words into something new:

      "I mean," I said now, "I used to know him." "Well, that's just swell," said Cooley, rose, petted his mustache with a kind of cunnidigital ardor.

      Yet, when at his seemingly least lucid, he conjures up magnificent sentences using quite a few words:

      I felt as though I were snorting cocaine, or rappelling down a cliffside, or cliffsurfing off a cliff of pure cocaine.

      Lipsyte's writings about Milo's connection to his child and his estranged wife range from so-so to excellent; diamonds are found in the rough.

      The same goes for Milo's connection with his old friend Purdy, the former school-mate who made a fortune in IT.

      All in all, the humor is tight and the flow is good. It's a recommendable book which needed more editing.
    • 3/5
      This was a difficult, if well-written, book to listen to. The eloquent use of language created a smart satire, although I found its angry sarcasm hard to take in such a large quantity. The plot, about a man trying desperately to find some sense of meaning in the contemporary, urban world, portrayed a painfully demanding and soul-sucking life. The only character which brought some relief was the protagonist's son, young Bernie. Tough read!
    • 3/5
      "The Ask" is about a jaded development officer as a third-tier college who is invited to make an "ask" (i.e. solicit a large charitable contribution) from an old college friend who has since become quite wealthy. As it turns out, the friend has a big "ask" to make of the development officer, too.

      Wasn't sure I'd like this book in the beginning, as the protagonist, in his unvarnished cynicism, seemed pretty hard to like. But as the story progressed, the reader is made more aware of the character's vulnerabilities, and sympathy builds.

      There's some sharp, funny dialogue in the book--and that's really it's highlight. Especially hilarious are the jabs the college dean makes at a meeting of his development staff--it's sort of "Glengarry Glen Ross" married to Mel Brooks. (As someone who works in the development field, I especially related to it.)

      Overall, I'd award the book 3.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      I have been put off of most contemporary fiction because I felt most books were trying to be clever but were neither funny nor insightful. The Ask was both and more. This book is the best possible guilty pleasure.
    • 1/5
      Milo Burke is a development officer at a third tier university. His job is to set up potential donors for “the ask”, and the bigger the ask the better. Unfortunately Milo isn’t very good at his job. And he isn’t very good at any else either — his marriage, his role as a father, his painting, his friendships, his relationship with his mom. Things aren’t good for Milo and they are about to get much worse.Fortunately for Milo this is Chucklit. So Milo is bound to have old friends with oodles of cash. He has women who find him funny and possibly attractive, though not as attractive as he finds them. His problems, such as they are, are really other people’s problems — his cheating wife, his looney mother, his rapacious employers, his manipulative friends. Milo may be a sad sack, but at least none of it is his fault. And even the bits that are his fault, he can simply own them. Yes he is bitter at others and himself. Yes he is probably an alcoholic. Yes he is a misogynist. But we all still love him, right?No, we don’t.At one point Milo’s friend wants to relate something to him in the form of a story. Milo’s asks if he couldn’t just tell it to him in the form of a joke instead. And that pretty much sums up both Milo and this book. For me, it was too much to ask.
    • 3/5


      Cynical, sarcastic and snarky. I almost gave it up after 30 pages, but kept reading and am glad I did. It's a modern day Lucky Jim, only set in the Development Office of a mediocre university. There's no sympathizing with any of the characters here, but eventually you understand their motivations.
    • 3/5
      Has anyone else noticed that there is a new grammatical person? We've always had first ("I fell") and second ("You fell") and third ("She fell.") But now we have the first middle-aged white middle-class reasonably well educated underemployed male person, "I fell into a [sea of references], and made a joke about it, but mainly focused on my self-pity and my loathing for my self-pity." Ladies and Gentleman, this is the literary form embodied in The Ask. It could be much worse; it could be 'The Financial Lives of the Poets,' which is the same book with none of the anger at social and economic injustice. As well as the first m-a.w.m-c.r w e.u.m person, it's full of gimmicks, the plot is tenuous at best, and the prose is simultaneously over-caffeinated and under-cooked.
      Putting all that aside, though, it has some funny moments and the satire is much more controlled than in The Subject Steve. People say it's 'sad,' but really, for 'sad' you would need to feel something for the narrator other than boredom. It doesn't give you a happy ending, though, that's for sure, and it has that over Financial Lives as well. This book, too, could have ended up with the narrator and his wife putting their marriage back together and living on austerely ever after. Instead, it bears some resemblance to the real world. Hopefully next time Lipsyte will step out of his comfort zone, write (in the third person?) about a compelling man (or group of people or even a woman) in a story which actually involves something other than random happenings and the same old plot twists (marriage fails! man loses job! rich people do something of dubious morality!); and do all this while keeping the satire and the humor. Fingers crossed.
    • 4/5
      Passages so funny that you spend more time re-reading than simply moving forward!!
    • 3/5
      This is a weird book. It's not very original (beta male works at/gets fired from job at mediocre college where he begs rich people for money), but it's funny enough and occasionally succeeded in making me feel slightly uncomfortable. Lipsyte knows how to make words his bitch, which results in some lovely turns of phrase, but he can't quite achieve the emotional connection he's looking for. Or maybe the point of the book is that it's about someone who doesn't count, so we don't care ("Stories were like people. We pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did."). Perfect book for the holiday season.
    • 5/5
      Audiobook read by the author. This is an incredible piece of writing. Social commentary, themes, and whatever else aside, the language in this, the use of irony, the absurdity, all the crazy crap comes together as an amazingly entertaining, hilarious, pathetic whole. I loved it.

      Re-listened in Dec 2012 and also read it some time this year (forgot tot enter). Still amazing as ever.
    • 4/5
      Very smart and nonstop about that. I never quite warmed to it but it's not a warm novel, really. But funny, sharp, snarky, and almost oppressively true - I laughed a lot, even if the nonstop variety show of black humor got exhausting after a point. Still, really well done.
    • 4/5
      A very clever novel. I will write more when I am able to. Sam did a great job with this book. Well worth reading.
    • 3/5
      I read a review prior to buying this book which claimed it was hilariously funny. It's clever, it's even brilliant in places, but it's not funny unless you find hilarity in the embarrassing failures of TV reality show contestants. Which I guess a lot of people do. There's no one in this book to like very much, but a lot you can feel superior to, if that's what you need today. The protagonist does his best--not very good--with the situation a few years of least possible effort have brought him to, and not surprisingly fails to rise above it. Everyone else achieves about the same, as well. The book is largely a vehicle for clever (and I did say sometimes brilliant) observation, but of the sort that involves making fun of the hopeless from a distance.
    • 5/5
      A hilarious take on American decadence. I didn't know how he'd top his previous effort, Home Land, but he did.
    • 3/5
      Yes there are some laugh out loud moments here looking at the labyrinth of mid life crises. However it often felt as though many of the situations the main character finds himself in were a little contrived. I expected a real tour de force of original writing but what I got really was a very good humourous madcap novel. One for the beach.
    • 3/5
      Washed-up would-be painter Milo Burke works as a fundraiser for the art department of a mediocre university, going home every night to a long-sparkless marriage and a child on whom he practices the latest parenting techniques but for whom he feels little real emotion. Then he loses his job after making some intemperate remarks but is offered to the chance to get it back by coaxing a large donation out of an old college buddy. Or something like that. The plot details honestly don't seem that important. Mainly, it's a satire on modern American life, specifically the lives of artsy middle-class liberal Americans. Unfortunately, I found it only intermittently humorous at best. There are flashes of an impressively acerbic wit, but mostly it's a mishmash of the crude, the pretentious and the pathetic. In fairness, all three of those are quite deliberate, I'm sure, but on the whole it just didn't do much for me. No doubt part of the problem is that I felt no sense of connection with the main character whatsoever. At one point in the novel, he actually says that if he were a character in a novel, no one would like or identify with him. He's not wrong, but pointing it out doesn't do anything to help. It's possible the book might have worked better for me if I lived in or came from the kind of world it depicts -- I went to a college that didn't even offer a liberal arts program -- but I'm not at all sure about that. Ultimately, I'm left feeling as if Lipsyte has simultaneously laid his satire on far too thick and failed to make any coherent point with it.
    • 4/5
      Fraternal and modern anxiety explored through many themes, including social role, work, success, friendship, manhood, parenthood, and employment. Enjoyed the diverse characters and their struggles to understand and accept themselves.
    • 3/5
      Enjoyable in parts, some very clever prose, but too much free association that sometimes can leave the reader scrambling behind. Some quite accurate and depressing observations on the state of modern professional life and the inadequacy of a college education in preparation for it. But too fantastic in parts, particularly the bits about the narrator's ex-college friend and now wealthy business associate, and his recently lesbianized mother and her partner. Some vivid atmospheric descriptions of Queens. And I got something from the character of the veteran stumbling about on his prosthetic legs, but again it was too over the top to be truly affecting.
    • 4/5
      Most 'hilarious' books are anything but, yet this one's full of wit and imagination. It takes the cast of a slacker college comedy and jumps forward to adulthood, with a lovable loser protagonist who has somehow managed to pick up a wife and child along the way. A very enjoyable read.
    • 5/5
      Great book!! Wonderful use of language. It showed a lot of depth and creativity. I had to really think about some of the references but the result was a great read. Very funny. I found that some of the negative reviews in Amazon seemed to be miss the point of the novel. There was much to dislike about Milo but is that a reason to not like the book? The fact that you dislike Milo means that Lipsyte did a good enough job to make you care enough to not like him. Some of the absurdity reminded me of Joseph Heller and I like that. I definitely intend to read more books by Lipsyte.
    • 4/5
      Almost tossed the book. It was recommended as hilarious but I wasn't much amused by the vernacular of what seemed more a verbal sewage processing facility than a college development office. I was glad I held on, the opening chapters fortunately giving way to keen observation displayed in very fine writing. While not a laugh-out-loud story, it was an often artfully-told story. Worthwhile.
    • 4/5
      This book is written totally from the point of view of Milo Burke, who is working in the office of development at a college in New York, which he jokingly calls Mediocre College at New York City. It consists entirely of Milo's internal thoughts and his interactions with the people in his life. At the beginning of the story, he gets fired for losing his cool and telling off a pampered and spoiled brat of a student whose parents donate large sums to the college. But, then he is called back on a temporary basis to work on developing a large donation from an old college friend of his who has insisted on working with him in order to agree to a large donation. He is told that he will get his job back if he succeeds. But, his old chum also has another job for Milo - to help him address a problem he has dealing with a son that he fathered many years ago, an Iraq war veteran who is lost both of his legs in the service.Whether or not you enjoy this book will depend on whether you find the writer's humor to be funny. It seemed to me to be the humor of a college age male, often sarcastic and sexist. I have no sympathy for the targets of the humor here, and being an older male who has never completely grown up, I enjoyed the book's tone and attitude.The book reminded me in its structure and tone of Joseph Heller's “Something Happened,” which I read a long time ago and recall only slightly. It is not until the last quarter of the book that the following exchange occurs between Milo and his boss at work: “No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?” “I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can't think of anyone who would. There's no reason for it.” Is this just supposed to make us feel stupid?
    • 2/5
      Some good writing, but really depressing. Not a fun read.