Publisher's Weekly Review
At the start of this charming comic mystery set circa 1993 from Lipsyte (Hark), 20-something Jonathan "Jack" Shit, who plays in "the Shits, a fast-disintegrating band" on the fringes of Manhattan's East Village music scene, is awakened by a call from Dyl Becker at King Snake Guitars. Dyl tells Jack that the band's smack-addled lead singer, the Banished Earl, was just in his store with Jack's bass guitar trying to sell it days before a big gig. Earl disappears, and the stolen bass, probably swapped for drugs, ends up in the hands of a thug named Mounce, whom Jack confronts as Mounce also tries to sell the instrument. A subsequent murder raises the stakes. Jack soon connects Earl's disappearance with an aggressive real estate mogul known for stiffing his business associates while scheming to profit at any cost from the urban renewal of New York City. A wild array of neighborhood characters and scenesters guide Jack, including Corrina, an affectionate devotee engaged in mysterious art projects. This whodunit homage comes complete with dark satirical observations of New York 30 years ago. Spinal Tap fans will want to check it out. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME. (Dec.)
Kirkus Review
A portrait of the young bass player in 1990s New York, with a mystery to solve. Just as Jonathan Liptak changes his name to Jack Shit, because what could be more perfect for a member of a band called the Shits, he discovers that his frontman and roommate, the Banished Earl, has stolen his bass, undoubtedly to raise funds to purchase heroin. No sooner does Jack take in the situation than he receives a call from his friend at the pawn shop--the bass has been spotted. But before he can lay hands on either his vanished instrument or his strung-out friend, the situation becomes categorically more complex. There's a murder. There's a prospective girlfriend and a potential gig. There's a visit from a couple of New York's finest, a run-in with Donald Trump, and a brief retreat to the Liptak homestead in New Jersey. But most importantly, there's a flaming truckload of humor, wit, and joy in the creation of this best-of-times, worst-of-times moment in New York music history, from the band names (Mongoose Civique, Count Fistula, the Annihilation of the Soft Left) to the dive bars, restaurants, and clubs and the ragtag musicians and neighborhood characters, among them scene patriarch Toad Molotov. "To watch Toad munch a revolting quantity of his beloved mint-jelly sandwiches, swill Cuervo Gold, and scratch unrelentingly beneath his fatigue shorts at his hairy legs and crotch was to come of age in the rock underworld." Lipsyte clearly knows whereof he speaks, evoking with verisimilitude and even fondness the experiences of snorting "nose Comet," of dealing with a clogged bar toilet, of acting in a short film that requires being drenched in menstrual blood, and of playing "post-wave neo-noise art punk with a sincere approach to irony." Of the Shits: "When we are on, we are still terrible but also one of the best bands you ever saw." No doubt. A badass book with brains, wit, moral decay, and radical outrage to spare. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Lipsyte's latest careens through the early 1990s Lower East Side, affectionately lampooning the writer's own art-punk roots. Our protagonist is Jonathan Liptak, New Jersey-born and semiotics-educated but better-known these days as Jack Shit, bass player for the "writhing, shimmering society of the spectacle" that is the Shits. The band has a gig coming up at Artaud's Garage, but Jack's bandmate, the Banished Earl, has absconded with Jack's beloved bass. The whole aesthetic project, already as precarious as an unofficial Avenue A sublet, is about to disappear, just like everything else, into the "black, ragged wormhole" in the Earl's arm. Jack is a classic Lipsyte narrator, edgy, confessional, cracking jokes while scoring from the bodega or staring into the abyss. His sentences are as pungent and hard-hitting as the Shits' set list. Fans of Lipsyte'sThe Ask (2010) and Hark (2019) will appreciate a rollicking, cartoonish side-plot sending up an all-too-familiar real-estate developer. But Lipsyte, famously, was once the "lead screamer" of noise-punk outfit Dungbeetle, and the novel's autobiographical touches, especially regarding drug abuse and success-envy, temper its satire with a refreshing new vulnerability.
Library Journal Review
In 1993 Manhattan, New Jersey musician Jack makes his way through the drug-heavy, dive bar--littered East Village in search of a band member who has absconded with Jack's precious bass just day before their breakout gig, presumably planning to sell the instrument for a quick fix. Billed as literary, described as suspense, and aiming at readers of both; from the author of Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book.
Excerpts
Chapter One ONE The day after I decide I'm Jack Shit, the Banished Earl steals my Fender Jazz Bass. Dyl Becker at King Snake Guitars wakes me with a phone call before I even know it's gone. "Jonathan," he says. "I'm Jack now." I stir sugar into a cold mug of yesterday's Bustelo, stare out my smeared kitchen window at the brick facade across the air shaft. "Jonathan," Dyl says. "The Earl was just in here with your bass. I could tell it was yours from that little Annihilation of the Soft Left sticker on the headstock. Hey, I thought you weren't friends with those guys anymore." "I'm not," I say, "but it's a pain to scrape that thing off. Did you buy the bass from him?" "He didn't have the papers. Even if I hadn't known it was yours, I wouldn't have bought it. You've got to have the papers." "He left with it?" "Yeah." "Fuck." "What's wrong?" "He'll just trade it for a measly bag of dope." "Hey, it might not be measly. But yeah, that sucks." While I hold the phone to my ear, I scan the Rock Rook for any other missing objects. Seems like all the other stuff--not much, admittedly, besides some milk crates full of records and books, ashtrays full of the Earl's ash, empty forty bottles, a few chipped dishes--is still here. I've shared this one bedroom on Avenue B with the Banished Earl for about nine months, though it wasn't always a one bedroom. It used to be a studio. We threw up a high wedge of plywood to make a little sarcophagus for the Earl. I sleep on a foam mat near the door. "Hey, Jonathan?" "I told you, I'm Jack now." "As in Jack Shit?" "Exactly," I say. "What made you change it?" "I just like how it sounds." "Cool." "Okay. Later, Dyl." "Wait." "What." "I heard you guys are looking for a new drummer." "Preferably a girl drummer," I say. "I can be a girl drummer." "No, Dyl. You don't hit hard enough." "I hit hard." "Not in time." "I'm better, Jona-- I mean, Jack. I've been practicing all month." "No." It's touching how much Dyl dreams of joining the band, but some were meant to lead, others to follow, and still others to hang around, devoted mascots. "Well, how about a second guitar player?" Dyl says. "Think about it. A fucking sonic curtain, right? And, no offense, but I've got better chops than you or Cutwolf." "That's true," I say. "But the very fact you said chops disqualifies you." "What does that mean?" "Think about it. No offense. I've got to find the Earl." In our world, you may not say chops or axe or jam . You may say gwee- tar, fish, tubs, bitch out, beat bag, bag fever . Every subgroup has its own linguistic code. We're not even a subgroup. We're just the Shits, a fast-disintegrating band. We used to have solidarity. We used to have esprit de corps. We used to have, according to Sour Mash magazine, a "scabrous, intermittently witty, post-skronk propulsion not unlike early Anal Gnosis." But then bag fever set in. The Banished Earl is the worst. The abscess in his arm is a black, ragged wormhole. You could swan dive into it, time travel, get shot out into the future, the year 2000 perhaps, or a few hundred years in the past. Picture old France. Picture beauty-marked men who prowl and preen, in tights, in wigs. Their skinny swords serrate the air. It's sort of like some of the bars we play. It's sort of like us some nights. The Shits do like to dress up. The Shits are a writhing, shimmering society of the spectacle. The Shits are fierce and noisy and wounded and sad. The Shits fear not art. But you may not say art . But you may certainly say that the new year, at least so far, slurps the sandpapery, drippy johnson of a clapped-out rhino. I'm happy to say it along with you, or even compose a melody, if you think there's a song there, though such retrograde, faux-transgressive vulgarity is not quite our style, even if we are called the Shits. Point is, it's only January and I'm almost broke. My girlfriend, Vesna, has ditched me for good and, perhaps most catastrophically, my J-Bass is gone. Point is, I must locate the Banished Earl before he surrenders my fish for a measly, probably half-beat bag of Tango & Cash, which, if word in the bars can be trusted, is the most undiluted dope east of Ludlow Street. Point is, I need my bass and we need the Earl. If the Shits are not utterly atomized, we have a show at Artaud's Garage a week from this Saturday. We are guaranteed 13 percent of the door. If twenty-five people come at five bucks a pop that's... well, you do the theorem. I don my thermals and various sweaters and shirts--my mother taught me the laws of layering early in life--and step out into the frozen bleakscape. My city is a tundra. The wind whips in off the river like the river is one of those cool dominatrix chicks just doing it to finance her comp lit degree and the wind is, for instance, a whip. Cutwolf's sister Drusilla was a domme for a time, until she dropped out of the pain game to become a serious cake maker. That's not even a euphemism. She's on the American Fondant Team, flies to Antwerp for major competitions. I've never been to Europe. I've never been out of the country, unless you count Canada, which I don't. But a dude in Barcelona has been playing our second seven-inch, "Shits for Real," on his indie radio show. He sent us a very complimentary postcard. That could lead to something. A few dates in the Gothic Quarter? A European tour? A person can dream. But not without his instrument. No bass, no band. I hold down the bottom. I also write the songs. I am not exactly music, but I do write the songs. Or at least the tunes to a lot of them, along with Cutwolf and Hera. The Banished Earl is our front man, our lyricist and lead screamer. His brief includes but is not restricted to howls, whimpers, banshee shrieks, declamations, provocations, semi-ironic rooster struts, blind dives into the mosh pit, simulated or else revocable genital self-mutilation, and, of course, spectacle. Spectacle above all else. Though now that the Banished Earl is the Vanished Earl, all bets are off until I find him. But first, sustenance. The pizza joint on Avenue A boasts a permanent special: two slices and a soda for a dollar fifty. Most days, that's a decent portion of my life savings. Now I stand at one of the tall, circular Formica tables, shake out some oregano on my oven-blistered slabs. New York pizza is the best pizza, so let's not have that conversation, but I'm not one of those process fascists when it comes to your eating technique. Fold the fucker, eat it flat, cut it into baby bites with a plastic knife, run it through a blender on frappé at home and chug. It's a free country, at least when it comes to stuff that doesn't matter. Apropos of which, there's a TV mounted over the counter, and right now it shows a bunch of people in overcoats, a formal procession, almost like a funeral if everybody seemed semisecretly delighted, which I guess is sometimes the case. There is a grinning man with good political hair, a woman in a red plaid coat. Soon the man has his palm on a leather book. "They all have to drink a pint of pig's blood before they're sworn in," says a gaunt fellow beside me. He's somewhere between twenty-three and seventy-eight years of age, wears a denim jacket over a torn mesh half-shirt and ragged designer jeans that feature these weird smears and stink like he's pissed them. It's a tight look. He plucks a jar of hot pepper flakes off the table, sprinkles some into his mouth. "Hey!" the counterman yells. "You gotta buy something to use that." The fellow shrugs. "Pig's blood?" I say. "Secret ritual. They all do it. Except Jimmy Carter. He refused." This neighborhood does crank out the cranks. It's one of our cultural products, like pocket quarterbacks in western Pennsylvania. But who am I to judge? I'm just a relative newcomer, a callow youth with a degree in modern media, a couple of part-time jobs, and a dream of moderate underground success about to swirl down the crapper. Maybe the Denim Ghoul here knows of what he speaks. Maybe this Bill Clinton guy did knock back a nice warm glass of porcine plasma before he strode out to take his place in history. The Ghoul taps out more spice flakes onto his tongue. "This fucker," he says, flicks his chin at the screen. "He's from Arkansas. He'll find brand-new ways to ream us. Be like nineteen eighty-four all over again." "The book or the year?" I say. The Ghoul nods. The funny thing is, I read 1984 in 1984. Perhaps this makes my perspective unique. I cried when Winston's mother gave him the lion's share of the rationed chocolate, kept none for herself and just a sliver for his sister. I realized what an ungrateful prick I'd been to my mother and would have been to my sister, if I'd had one. It was a depressing year, what with the cruelty and tedium of high school in New Jersey and my father running off with a paralegal from his office. I missed him, but I didn't miss the fights, my mother in tears every night, though in a way it was worse after he left, my mother's fury on full blast, me the stand-in for millennia of dickwaddery. "When you grow up," she said, "just promise me you won't be one of those men." "Which men?" I asked. "Any of them. All of them." My father returned to the farce after six months to reprise the role he'd originated, and they live together in occasionally tender detente to this day, but in the interim I spent a lot of hours brooding in my room. I'd stare at the water stain on the ceiling made by our leaky roof, write bad poems about staring at a water stain, beat off. It wasn't the most nuanced adolescent experience. But one day I discovered music. Not the kind on the radio. I knew all about that. Some of it, the older stuff, the records my mother played when she did her calisthenics, I adored. But the newest FM pablum made me gag, this music designed by robots for consumer zombies. It was death by a thousand saccharine-sweet cuts. This older guy, a neighbor, decided to join some snake-and-drum cult in Florida, had to divest himself of worldly possessions. He gave me a ripped A&P shopping bag full of punk rock records. I brought them home and put them on my turntable, each one a revelation, an orgasmic punch, a shock like I'd licked a terminal on the world's tallest battery. Ferocious and exquisite sound realms beckoned. I'd found the answer to my anger, my suffering. I got monastic, studious, bought a cheap bass guitar, a Hondo. Four thick, glinting, nickel-wound strings: What could go wrong? I wrote a song called "Stain of Water." The rest is not yet my place in history. Excerpted from No One Left to Come Looking for You: A Novel by Sam Lipsyte All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.