Tung's review
Home Land: A Novel
by Sam Lipsyte
Tung's review
Home Land: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte
Tung's review
rating:
This book focuses on a loser ten years removed from high school, and his struggle with drugs and not having any life ten years later. The principal of his school and former members of his graduating class form the rest of the main characters. The prose is told as a series of fictional letters to the school alumni bulletin, but is just a different take on conventional first-person memoir narratives. As a strung-out loser, the prose ranges from longwinded rants about nothing to surreal wordplay (Random sentences like “Don’t wash buck turtles” or “I want to fly on the moon with wings made of recycled love”). Overall, I didn’t find it very good. The main character is so completely unlikable, that when the obvious redemption moment for him comes (at the class ten year reunion, of course) it loses any sense of climax. There have been plenty of books about life after high school, the disillusionment of this generation of kids, and drug lives of young people that are just much...more
