THE SUBJECT STEVE
By Sam Lipsyte
I usually don't quote at length from the books I review, but in the case of Sam Lipsyte's The Subject Steve there
is a passage that I think deserves some attention. It comes near the end,
as part of a long monologue:
There are beautiful things in this world, and if you can escape your
narcissism, or the collective hallucination of the media, or the singular
hallucination of your narcissism, you might get to see them sometime. But it's
like you're encased in some kind of fucking titanium pod cruising through the
atmosphere, you're not quite the pilot but there's a joystick in your hand, and
it feels like you're steering but you've never been steering, never in your life
have you been steering, not when your dad remarried for the seventh time, not
when your mom got weird and distant, not when your brother tried to butt in with
the raising of your dog that you alone were raising from puppyhood, you've never
been steering anything, really, you've just been cruising along in this pod with
all of these gleaming buttons on the control panel but they don't connect to
anything, and you're just whistling along through the dead air, dead space,
through the nothingness of the world's chatter and the nothingness of your
own-most you jabbering away in your head, and you just have to get out of that
pod, you must eject from that fucking pod, and you're like, Oh fuck, I must
fucking eject, I must, I must fucking eject . . . and then you notice a little
button that's gleaming, that's glowing a little differently from the others, and
it's got a big E on it and it's glowing and it's even kind of blinking as though
maybe this button, as opposed to the other buttons, maybe this button actually
fucking works, so you hit it, you it hard . . . "
It shouldn't come as any surprise that the young man making this speech is
publicly masturbating. The calls to eject/ejaculate and the reference to the
pilot not quite in control but with a joystick in his hand help paint the scene.
In this there may be something allegorical. Isn't there something about the act
of masturbation that reflects the condition of the artist in modern times? Is it
not the
representative act of these lonely people? Attempting to describe the changing
role of the artist at the beginning of the industrial revolution, "cut off
from a recognizable function, patron or public and left to cast his soul as a
commodity upon a blind market," Eric Hobsbawm imagines a
figure "shouting into the night, uncertain even of an echo." It is an
image only slightly less poetic than Shelley's, reporting on the same
transformation, describing the poet as a nightingale "who sits in darkness
and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds." Is today's portrait
of an artist the picture of a wanking man?
We know the young man is the figure of an author because of how sensitive a
guy he is. He speaks in metaphors and is resentful of the modern media (which,
we can safely assume, ignores him). All that
"nothingness of the world's chatter" and "dead air" is
wormwood to the poet. And then there is the way he
speaks. His monologue is full of the verbal overload and gnawing repetitiveness that has come to replace the
quality of rhythm in today's prose. There are also the familiar non sequiturs
and paranoid mutterings, as well as the blending of the domestic with the
fantastic that critics are so fond of saying "makes
us see the familiar in a different light" (which it
doesn't).
The rest of the book is not always up to this. The Steve of the title (though that isn't his real
name) is diagnosed with a terminal case of something unknown to medical science,
but which is dubbed PREXIS by a pair of quacks. In an attempt to find a cure for
this uncertain death sentence he betakes himself to the Center for
Nondenominational Recovery and Prevention, an upstate cult run by a sadistic
warden named Heinrich of Newark. Escaping, he realizes there is really no
escape.
The Subject Steve is, in short, another tract in the now thick
American tradition of paranoid culture novels. That it is literary fiction is
evidenced by its emphasis on language. The fact that Steve's disease has no name
is typical of a world where words can never be found to express anything
important. As an ex-advertising man, Steve is representative of the way the
empty media communicates by cliché (remember that "nothingness of the
world's chatter"). Characters are always saying things they don't really
mean, and having it pointed out to them. The only safe speech is tautology, such
as we hear in the babble of the Center's cultspeak.
Even Kafka sometimes went on too long. Without a human center, dream
narratives tend to lose their grip on the reader's attention. We feel the double
edge of allegory when we get to the point where we've figured it out, or given
up trying. Like many of its paranoid cousins, The Subject Steve is a
possibly profound yet weightless exercise.
Notes:
Review first published online November 1, 2001.
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