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<a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/544046.Home_Land_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&amp;utm_source=blog_review" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img alt="Home Land: A Novel" border="0" src="http://s3.amazonaws.com/photo.goodreads.com/books/1175660588m/544046.jpg" /></a> <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/544046.Home_Land_A_Novel?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">Home Land: A Novel</a> by <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2282.Sam_Lipsyte">Sam Lipsyte</a> 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2417274?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review"><h3>My review</h3></a>
 rating: 5 of 5 stars There are two kinds of readers in this country: those who know that Sam Lipsyte is the funniest writer of his generation and those who haven’t read him yet. 
 
 Lipsyte’s new novel Home Land is the epistolary tale of Lewis Miner, aka Teabag, a freelance writer of bogus FunFacts and self-appointed chronicler of the strange fates that have befallen the Catamounts of Eastern Valley High. The novel is written as a series of updates to the alumni newsletter, but in Lipsyte’s capable hands the form is flexible enough to encompass not only Teabag’s travails but those of his tough-talking caterer father, his starfucked ex-girlfriend, his best friend’s drug-dealing AA sponsor, the B&D-obsessed high school principal, a coke-happy novelist of significant renown, a former leg-warmer-wearing member of the dance squad that Teabag has never managed to bring himself to stop masturbating to, and uptight-student-body-president-turned-uptight-Doctor Stacy Ryson. This may strike newcomers to Lipsyte’s fiction as strange, perhaps excessively so, but for long-time fans, Home Land is the apotheosis of a remarkable, yet under-appreciated, career.
 
 The tension in Lipsyte’s fiction comes from the relationship between the two losers at the heart of the narrative who are linked for the sole reason that no one else will have anything to do with them.
 
 This would be heartbreaking if it wasn’t so hilarious. Or maybe it’s the other way around, but it’s precisely this tension that drives the prose. Lipsyte will take your imagination to some dark places, but he’ll make you laugh, and you’ll be laughing at things you probably wouldn’t be laughing at if someone were looking over your shoulder.
 
 (Excerpted from a review that appeared on The Elegant Variation:
 <a target="_blank" href="http://marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2005/01/guest_review_a_.html">marksarvas.blogs.com/elegvar/2...</a>)
 
 
 <a href="http://www.goodreads.com/review/list/141982?utm_medium=api&utm_source=blog_review">View all my reviews.</a>

Jim's review
rating:
recommended for: Lovable losers

There are two kinds of readers in this country: those who know that Sam Lipsyte is the funniest writer of his generation and those who haven’t read him yet.

Lipsyte’s new novel Home Land is the epistolary tale of Lewis Miner, aka Teabag, a freelance writer of bogus FunFacts and self-appointed chronicler of the strange fates that have befallen the Catamounts of Eastern Valley High. The novel is written as a series of updates to the alumni newsletter, but in Lipsyte’s capable hands the form is flexible enough to encompass not only Teabag’s travails but those of his tough-talking caterer father, his starfucked ex-girlfriend, his best friend’s drug-dealing AA sponsor, the B&D-obsessed high school principal, a coke-happy novelist of significant renown, a former leg-warmer-wearing member of the dance squad that Teabag has never managed to bring himself to stop masturbating to, and uptight-student-body-president-turned-uptight-Doctor Stacy Ryson. This may strike newcomers to...more

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