{"id":12360,"date":"2014-04-28T00:12:21","date_gmt":"2014-04-28T04:12:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/?p=12360"},"modified":"2014-04-30T12:02:09","modified_gmt":"2014-04-30T16:02:09","slug":"sam-lipsyte-the-naturals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/2014\/04\/28\/sam-lipsyte-the-naturals\/","title":{"rendered":"Sam Lipsyte: “The Naturals”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Click here<\/a> to read the story in its entirety on The New Yorker<\/em> website. Sam Lipsyte’s “The Naturals” was originally published in the May 5, 2014 issue of The New Yorker<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Click<\/a>
Click for a larger image.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Betsy<\/strong><\/p>\n

I loved Sam Lipsyte\u2019s story, \u201cThe Naturals.\u201d A story about death, it\u2019s crammed with life.\u00a0It\u2019s funny, poignant, awful, wonderful, thoughtful, scary, and witty.\u00a0It is so filled with acts of love by such flawed people it\u2019s like watching a Cirque du Soleil put on by the local Lions Club. How dare we live when we\u2019re so bad at it? How fair is it that we die, when, occasionally, we\u2019re so good at life?\u00a0How do we deal with it all, anyway?<\/p>\n

Caperton, a single guy with business problems, has to fly home. His father is dying — again.\u00a0Home means revisiting his mother\u2019s death, his lonely childhood, and his father\u2019s failures as a father. Home means, in the words of his step mother Stell, the temptation or even compulsion to unleash the inner \u201ccrumbun.\u201d Life, the way it does for all of us, seems to be happening all at once to Caperton: his father is dying, the love of his life has left him, and his consulting business is falling apart.\u00a0That is not to mention the fact that Caperton has to watch his step-mother and his father\u2019s best friend take solace in each other.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve been in a house where someone is dying, right? It\u2019s not all hospice and honey.\u00a0(Though Hospice is one of the great, great inventions of the twentieth century.)<\/p>\n

Caperton seems to have a split consciousness: that life ought to be capers and cream cheese, on the one hand, and that life is as heavy as heavy as a ton of bricks, on the other.\u00a0He is filled with \u201can unassuageable rage,\u201d and he tells us about how he is periodically seized by \u201cThe Intermittent Belt of Sorrow,\u201d something that feels an awful lot like an impending heart attack to the reader.\u00a0So familiar to me, and maybe to you, too. Is he going to make it, the story asks? Or, if he does, how?<\/p>\n

I loved this story, I loved these people, I loved the riffs on food, and I loved the offhand fruitcake m\u00e9lange of serious literary stuff.\u00a0How do we deal with death? One way we deal is we eat. One way we deal is to flounder around. Inevitably, we deal by behaving really badly. In the house of death we even fight with each other.\u00a0Sometimes we even rough each other up. Oh, so sad! So totally off-base! So true!<\/p>\n

But way more to the point, we tell stories. That\u2019s what Lipsyte does, and that\u2019s what the characters in this story talk about — they talk about stories! But how they talk! Like real people.<\/p>\n

Each of the characters in this story has a take on how stories work and why they\u2019re important and what they should be. This potpourri about story-telling is fabulous and worth the read in and of itself. I want to take a minute and remark that TV, the internet, movies, memoir, advice, and stories are all legitimate parts of their discussion, and in fact, a rave about a TV serial (what Roddy Doyle would have called a \u201cBox Set\u201d) \u00a0turns out to be pivotal in the way Caperton\u2019s father is able to give him a parting gift.\u00a0Lipsyte is echoing Roddy Doyle: writing comes in all forms, and readers come in all types.\u00a0I even wondered if either Lipsyte or The New Yorker<\/em> editors were reacting to Roddy Doyle and the pull TV had for his characters a few weeks back in \u201cBox Sets.\u201d Caperton and his father discuss which version of The Natural<\/em> is better, the movie, with its changed ending, or the dark, dark book. This is not so much a discussion of craft as one of philosophy: how should you look at life? What gets you through?\u00a0But also, talking about stories is one of the ways we talk to each other.\u00a0What we talk about when we talk about stories is what matters most to us.<\/p>\n

In \u201cThe Naturals,\u201d Lipsyte says:\u00a0 life is full of love and death.\u00a0And we\u2019re so-so at both, and occasionally we\u2019re god-awful, and occasionally we\u2019re great.\u00a0In talking about Thomas McGuane\u2019s \u201cHubcaps,\u201d I remarked that a couple of his characters chose love. But that was a dark, dark story, and we weren\u2019t sure how McGuane\u2019s boy would survive, even if a couple of people showed him love when his own parents didn\u2019t. Lipsyte is more hopeful than that. In \u201cThe Naturals,\u201d people are broken, limited, silly, and selfish, but they also redeem themselves with surprising, right, natural, wacky, wonderful acts of love.<\/p>\n

Lipsyte makes a point of this. A guy Caperton meets on the airplane, a pro-wrestler named \u201cThe Rough Beast of Jerusalem,\u201d is love itself, pumped-up, turned-on, unacceptable, larger-than-life love.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t want to overstate the point of the wrestler\u2019s name. Lipsyte doesn\u2019t. Lipsyte is moving so fast in this story that he doesn\u2019t linger or overstate. But the bravery! The writer embraces the idea that even a crumbun deserves love, and crumbuns though we all are, foolish and selfish as we are, we sometimes find the means to give it. Though he does echo the idea that it\u2019s a choice.<\/p>\n

I love the way the writer uses being funny to bear the weight of this lyric idea. I also love the way he says\u00a0 that stories are part of how we survive.<\/p>\n

What a great story. Lipsyte debates Yeats on the nature of the rough beast slouching toward Jerusalem.\u00a0There\u2019s a lot there to think about. But what craft — to be so real, so funny, so literary, so touching — in such a small space! What a great story.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This week’s New Yorker<\/em> story is Sam Lipsyte’s “The Naturals.” Betsy gives her thoughts. Read the full post<\/u><\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12361,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"libsyn-item-id":0,"libsyn-show-id":0,"libsyn-post-error":"","libsyn-post-error_post-type":"","libsyn-post-error_post-permissions":"","libsyn-post-error_api":"","playlist-podcast-url":"","libsyn-episode-thumbnail":"","libsyn-episode-widescreen_image":"","libsyn-episode-blog_image":"","libsyn-episode-background_image":"","libsyn-post-episode-category-selection":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_thumbnail":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_theme":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_height":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_width":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_placement":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_use_download_link_text":"","libsyn-post-episode-player_custom_color":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-explicit":"","libsyn-post-episode":"","libsyn-post-episode-update-id3":"","libsyn-post-episode-release-date":"","libsyn-post-episode-simple-download":"","libsyn-release-date":"","libsyn-post-update-release-date":"","libsyn-is_draft":"","libsyn-new-media-media":"","libsyn-post-episode-subtitle":"","libsyn-new-media-image":"","libsyn-post-episode-keywords":"","libsyn-post-itunes":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-season-number":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-type":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-title":"","libsyn-post-episode-itunes-episode-author":"","libsyn-destination-releases":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-enabled":"","libsyn-post-episode-advanced-destination-form-data-input-enabled":false,"libsyn-post-episode-premium_state":"","libsyn-episode-shortcode":"","libsyn-episode-embedurl":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[94,254],"tags":[],"coauthors":[505,504],"class_list":["post-12360","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-new-yorker-fiction","category-sam-lipsyte"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/04\/Lipsyte-The-Naturals.jpg?fit=233%2C320&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pqqvZ-3dm","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12360","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12360"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12360\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12437,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12360\/revisions\/12437"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12360"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12360"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12360"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mookseandgripes.com\/reviews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12360"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}