Becky Ohlsen

In my office there's a woman who uses the word "wrap" as a universal replacement for the word "lunch." "Want to get a wrap?" she'll ask, daily, as if no other possible lunch existed. She can't conceive of a hoagie, a pasta salad. In the office, lunch equals wrap. On TV this might be played for laughs. But in Sam Lipsyte's new novel, The Ask, which is constantly hilarious, the wrap is a sad thing indeed. The turkey wrap, in particular, serves as both emblem of and paltry consolation for the enslavement of practically everyone to the imagination-starved regime of late capitalism.

Think about it. Wraps, as the author explains in a phone interview from his home in Manhattan, are "perfectly designed to keep you at work." They're foldable, sauceless, tidy: you can eat them at your desk. It would almost be weird to eat them anywhere but at your desk. You can type or hold the phone with one hand while eating the wrap with the other. They echo the shapes of various ethnic foods, but all the interesting parts of the cuisines they copy have been erased, leaving them free of startling variations, so you can concentrate on your spreadsheets.

"There's something really dispiriting about it," Lipsyte says. "And the turkey wrap, that was sort of the apex of that predictability and despair. There's not a lot of autobiography in the book, but my confronting what the turkey wrap means to me comes from experience." He pauses, chuckling but not entirely unserious about this turkey-wrap riff. "It's something we all feel."

Which isn't to say that the novel hinges on a turkey wrap. But if you had to pinpoint just what exactly has enraged Milo Burke, hero of The Ask, it would be a good start, or at least a telling example. After all, as Milo says near the end of the novel, "I believed in symbols and the wondrous ways they could wound." The benign turkey wrap, as a symbol, is far from harmless.

Milo works for the fundraising arm of the arts department of what he calls the Mediocre University at New York City. He's not very good at his job. He was an artist in college, a painter, "at least at parties." But somehow that idea faded, and now he's an office guy with a 4-year-old son he loves to pieces and a beautiful wife he hasn't touched in a long time.

When, inevitably, Milo is fired—for lashing out at an "arrogant, talentless, daddy-damaged waif" who visits his office—he finds himself adrift in the lousy job market, unable to find work. "The whole work thing was over," Milo concludes. "I'd grown morose, detached, faintly palsied. I stopped reading the job listings, just rode the trains each day, simmering, until dinnertime."

Fans of Lipsyte will recognize that simmering detachment from his previous novel Home Land, an underground hit written in the form of outrageous letters from a guy called Teabag to his alumni magazine in the months leading up to a class reunion. Lipsyte, who was born in 1968, says he started working on it around the time of his own 10-year reunion. "I think I wrote that book to deal with the fear of going," he says. "And I still didn't go."

The two novels are similar in tone, though Home Land tackles crises that tend to occur about 10 years earlier in the standard American timeline. Both books culminate in episodes of ill-advised but wildly satisfying violence, and both are hysterically funny. But The Ask is more expansive and varied, both in plot and in emotional tenor, with subtler and more sophisticated levels of sadness balancing out the humor on its surface.

"I didn't really mean for Milo to be like Teabag 10 years later," Lipsyte says. "They do share certain kinds of disillusionment. The real difference is that Teabag has this streak of romanticism that may have been beaten out of Milo a little more."

The novel makes reference to The Infortunate, a real-life narrative of an indentured servant, William Moraley, in Philadelphia during the Ben Franklin era. "He seemed a very contemporary character to me,” Lipsyte says. “He's not coming to the New World for religious or political reasons—he's just coming to the New World because he's in debt. It’s like he's run up his credit cards or something. It's a miserable story and he's kind of a miserable guy." The contrast between Moraley and Franklin, the ideal of American resourcefulness and ingenuity, parallels the relationship between Milo and his former college buddy, Purdy, now his big “ask.” Both, like Teabag, are American archetypes, adding weight and depth to these highly entertaining books.

When he's not writing, Lipsyte teaches creative writing at Columbia. "I really like teaching," he says. "I think it informs my writing a great deal. I get energized—I recognize patterns in my work and in other people's work. I get out of the workshops the same thing the other people get out of them, and hopefully give something, too. But it is hard to do both at the same time. Most of my writing happens in the summer. I love and need both, but they don't happen at the same time for me."

We readers can be greedy things. Mere books are not enough for us: We want the authors, too. We want their autographs, their photographs, handshakes, interviews. We want them to tell us all the secret things they didn’t put in the book—we want it all, the entire package. And these days, they’re more or less obligated to sell it to us.

In her hilarious, merciless, entirely delightful new novel, Amy Falls Down, Jincy Willett digs into this phenomenon from several angles. Our protagonist, Amy Gallup, is a contentedly washed-up fiction writer in her 60s who spends most of her days teaching writing classes online from her California home. Then one day she trips in the garden, conks her head on a birdbath and proceeds to give a newspaper interview she doesn’t remember doing.

The interview, and Amy’s intriguingly odd (because totally concussed) behavior during it, leads to newfound fame for the long out-of-print writer. “You’re not gonna understand it, but you are gonna have to trust me,” her agent tells her. “You’re not just a writer now. You’re a package.”

Amy finds the sudden attention at various points invasive, thrilling, oppressive, scary, sad and gross. Even as she resents the way in which a writer’s work has come to include the roles of performer and media personality, Amy learns to make it work for her. Turns out, she has a knack for it. One of the many pleasures of Amy Falls Down is watching Amy venture out of her shell and have fun toying with the media, the publishing industry, her students and pretty much everyone else. She has nothing to lose, and no interest in impressing anybody; consequently, she has no filter, and she gets away with saying things others won’t.

When a writer suffers a bump on the head, her literary career gets an unexpected boost.

Willett has many things in common with her protagonist, including that same amused befuddlement regarding the “packaging” of writers. By phone from her home in Escondido, California, where the Rhode Islander has lived since 1988, Willett talked about publicity, humor, David Sedaris and the curse of potential, among other things.

Amy’s biography matches Willett’s in several ways: same age, similar geographical background, nearly identical smart-aleck websites. Both teach writing online. Some of the lines Amy spouts in the book turn up in Willett’s interviews. The parallels are noticeable.

“My feeling about using autobiographical material is, I’m completely free to use my own character, but not free to use anybody else’s,” Willett explains. “She’s a lot like me, but that’s it.” Everything else is invented—and in fact, as Willett sees it, Amy actually “has nothing to do with me.”

“It’s lazy, that’s all,” she explains. Using a character that doesn’t need to be invented from whole cloth makes it easier for the author to spend her energy playing with ideas and themes. “The more you make things up, the more likely you are to discover things you didn’t know about yourself,” she says. “Whereas when you’re actually working with what you know, what you’re really doing is crystallizing things you’ve been turning over for a long, long time.” This leads to fiction that engages in the world of ideas and arguments, Willett says. “Not that you have a message—because that’s obnoxious.” The goal has more to do with “exploring certain issues you think are important, and you want to see if you’re right about them.”

Then, too, there’s the fact that using a protagonist only slightly removed from oneself adds to the fun of Amy’s unguarded venting, which focuses on the absurdities of the publishing world. “It was wonderful for me to be able to rant on and on about this stuff,” Willett says. “She does sort of go on.”

Late in the novel, Amy ends a speech by telling the crowd, “I am here accidentally and just for the moment.” Willett seems similarly unimpressed with the idea of fame. It means nothing, she says, except in the sense of still being known 200 years from now—“that’s a big deal.” But the thrill of writing lies elsewhere: “It’s communication, that’s all it is. You can reach out and you can actually communicate with people, even after you’re dead. All we’re doing, really, is talking to each other.”

Willett says she “stumbled into” writing in her 30s (unlike Amy, who was a promising young superstar). “When I was a child I lived in my head entirely, and of course I wanted to write,” Willett says. She finally composed one sentence at age 10, and found it so terrible that she “stopped forever.” But she fell back into writing in college, when she took a random creative writing class while majoring in philosophy. She really just wanted an easy A (“I was trying for a 4.0!”), but once she’d submitted a story, the professor told her she should send it to magazines. This sort of thing might be thrilling to some, but Willett was devastated. “The truth is, it’s one thing to have this daydream,” she says, but when it becomes a real possibility, then it’s suddenly your fault if the dream doesn’t happen. “Great, thanks!” Willett thought. “I was perfectly happy as a philosophy student!”

Nevertheless, she kept writing stories, and her first story collection, Jenny and the Jaws of Life, was published in 1987. She might have continued writing fiction in relative obscurity except that David Sedaris discovered and fell in love with the book, and raved about it publicly. 

“That was a very happy circumstance for me,” Willett says. “The thing I like about it is that it’s not a networking story—the only reason we got connected is that he discovered me in a library.” The two have since met and become friends. The Sedaris connection was particularly exciting for Willett because of her fondness for his particular lineage of American writers, especially the humorists of the ’20s and ’30s (S.J. Perelman is a favorite). “There aren’t many people doing that anymore,” she says, adding that writers today hesitate to make light of things. But the fact that something is funny doesn’t mean it has no weight, she argues: “If you’re doing it right, it doesn’t make light of anything.”

Illustrating the point, Willett’s prickly, unvarnished protagonist is at once gruffly funny and unexpectedly touching, the sort of curmudgeon who imagines she’s driving people away but is in fact winning their devotion, wholly by accident. A large part of this ability comes from the accumulated wisdom of having been around a while—something else the author and her character share.

“Writing is an older person’s game,” Willett says. “Experience helps, living helps.”

It’s striking, once you notice it, how important books and reading are in the work of Daniel Handler. Handler is probably best known as the inventor/alter-ego of Lemony Snicket, author of the sensational children’s book series A Series of Unfortunate Events. 

In those stories, the three Baudelaire children are frequently able to outsmart their enemies because of something they read in a book.

Similarly, in Handler’s new novel, We Are Pirates, the action hinges on how the story’s teenage protagonist, Gwen, reacts to what she’s been reading: namely, a bunch of old-fashioned pirate novels with titles like Captain Blood.

“I find reading exciting,” Handler explains in a phone interview from his home in San Francisco, “and in the moment we’re in, in which there are so many different types of entertainment, the thing I like the most about books is their bookishness. I don’t like books that feel like a season of TV.”

Handler was a devoted bookworm from a young age. “I was a voracious reader and a big rereader. I believed that the more you reread a book, the more secrets you could draw out of it.”

Some of the authors he liked best as a youngster are very much in line with the tone and aesthetics of the Lemony Snicket series: Edward Gorey, Roald Dahl. But he fondly rattles off the names of a wide range of other writers as well. “And I fell into a pit of Nabokov when I was in college that I don’t think I’ve quite come out of yet,” he adds.

Handler tends to like stories that are straightforward about exactly who is doing the telling: Stories that, like the Lemony Snicket books, go through a clear narrative framework.

In his rollicking new book, the storyteller’s identity is less clearly defined, but it’s still crucial. In the first few pages, a mysterious “I” leads us room by room around a party at the home of the Needle family. Very quickly this narrator vanishes, or rather, seamlessly blends into the story, and the two main characters, Phil Needle and his daughter, Gwen, take over.

The story is powered by Gwen, a frustrated teenage girl who has just been caught, uncharacteristically, shoplifting at a drugstore. (Importantly, it is Gwen’s alter ego who did the deed.) As punishment, her parents send her to volunteer as a companion to Errol, a gruff old man in a nursing home who, as he keeps repeating, has a problem with his memory. Errol supplies her with armloads of books about pirates, and Gwen is entranced.

The books are exactly the kind of old-fashioned, swashbuckling pirate lore that Handler had in mind while writing—the kind of stories where a crusty fisherman with a pegleg sits down at the bar and announces he’s going to tell you a tale.

In this case, the story is set in the present, but the storyteller’s filter still does the same trick: It’s a reassurance for the reader. “You know [the story] ends at a party where everyone’s okay,” Handler explains.

That reassurance is especially useful here, because there’s a moment when We Are Pirates takes a bloody turn, and if you didn’t know everyone was going to be okay you might worry. To simplify the action-packed plot a bit: As Gwen spends more time with Errol, she takes his stories of life on the open sea evermore seriously. She meets a gung-ho girl at her dentist’s office and they become inseparable, calling each other “wench” and quoting key passages from the pirate books to each other. The three solidify into a crew, and they devise a brilliant plan for escape. Suffice it to say, all does not go as expected.

“The idea was to think about what happens when you step outside the law, outside the boundary,” Handler says. “You think, ‘Oh, it’s going to be so much more fun,’ but there’s a reason we have laws.”

Gwen is a great character, immediately real and as tormented as any teenage girl struggling to figure out who she is. Even when her decisions are profoundly wrong, you understand exactly why she made them. Her observations are blistering. (“Who does not see rich people on a boat and want to destroy them?” Handler writes, as Gwen gazes at a yacht and eloquently seethes.)

“I knew some Gwens when I was that age, and my sister was kind of a Gwen,” says Handler, now 44. “I see such a restlessness and a fury in many young women around me. There’s a lot of narrative crackle there.”

The storyline shifts between Gwen and her father, Phil, an equally fascinating character. Phil is a radio producer who seems to be tragically deluded about nearly every aspect of his domestic and professional life. He wants to be good, but it means he’s constantly censoring his thoughts and impulses. He’s a classic lost soul, and his internal musings are as heartbreaking as they are bitingly funny.

Handler has lots of practice at figuring out new ways to tell troubling stories. His first novel, The Basic Eight, was based on an actual high-school murder from his childhood; he says he approached the arrangement of the narrative structure for maximum impact “almost like a mathematical equation.”

The impressive tonal balance between sadness and comedy in his latest novel comes in part from what was going on in Handler’s life. He’d started writing this novel years ago, but found that it was too light and “goofy” for what he wanted to do. So he set it aside. Time passed, until Handler found that his situation had changed: not only was he a father, but his own father was suffering from dementia.

“I was in effect handed front-row seats to an experience that I had previously had no access to,” he recalls. “It’s a long disease—there’s time for all of the emotions.”

If his father could see himself in Errol, Handler says, “He would be absolutely tickled.”

This article was originally published in the February 2015 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.