No One Left To Come Looking For You by Sam Lipsyte

No One Left to Come Looking for You
By Sam Lipsyte
Simon and Schuster, 2022

The guitarist narrator of No One Left to Come Looking for You says of a childhood friend, “He knows zilch about music, for instance, besides whatever’s on the classic rock block.” The year is 1993, and that ignorant friend could be me. But I do know when a novelist enjoys creating or, more likely, remembering a microworld, in this case the outraged and outrageous punk rock scene in the Lower East Side of New York City.

Sam Lipsyte’s collection of stories, The Fun Parts, is despite its title rife with random acts of violence. No One Left has beatdowns and a murder, but they seem like genre necessities of the detective plot that should provide continual fun even for the uninitiated, those readers, for example, who don’t understand the narrator’s wonderment when he spots a person named James Newell Osterberg Jr. on Tenth Street. I did my due diligence and found he was better known as Iggy Pop. With obsessive research, I might find that No One Left is an elaborate roman a clef about occasionally off-key players.

The story begins when Jack Shit--formerly Jonathan Liptak, bass guitarist for “The Shits”—realizes his prized Fender has been stolen by his heroin-addicted roommate and the band’s vocalist “The Banished Earl,” “The Earl” for short. Almost all of the characters are known by their stage names or nicknames, and Lipsyte extends the fun by inventing (I assume) the wacky names of punk bands competing around Tompkins Square Park. Jack enlists friends to find “The Earl” and soon discovers that the guitar is in the hands of one Heidegger (sic, sick) Mounce, a gigantic figure out of professional wrestling, who may have killed “The Toad,” a slightly older songwriting icon to the 20-something punkers.

Lipsyte is in no hurry to resolve the plot, so we get scenes of non-punk “art”: a pretentious two-person concert that makes almost no sounds, a woman’s performance piece that involves Jack’s spilling her menstrual blood on his head while she films. Jack and bandmates and a groupie have occasional run-ins with street people and dive bar denizens, meetings that produce long stretches of repartee that passes for punk wit. In fact, most of the novel is dialogue, as if Lipsyte wanted to render voices often drowned out by the feedback of their instruments.

The monster Mounce, Jack discovers, has broken legs and worse for the Trump organization—and may also have killed “The Earl.” With this information, and several appearances in the novel by Donald Trump hunting page-six publicity, the book becomes more serious—(and more interesting to me because I have been regularly reviewing anti-Trump novels since he was elected). One of them--Lipsyte’s previous novel, Hark--satirized the kind of gullible public that might vote for an ignorant man with fraudster charisma. No One Left makes the connection between the downtown punks’ rage against the machine and the midtown exploiters represented by Trump the mobbed-up developer.

While Lipsyte usually treats his rag-tag punk crew with tenderness because of their bombastic idealism, he—despite the similarity of his name to his narrator’s, a fact pointed out by a character in the novel—manages some distance from Liptak. The author may even ultimately agree with a critique of the crew voiced by a detective who saves the band when they are taken prisoner by Mounce:

You get to live in your sweet, protected world, your little dirt- bag Disneyland, because other people have arranged it for you. Because it’s good for business all around. You move in and pre- tend it’s nineteen seventy-six, but it’s not. You’re just yuppies, but with torn jeans and track marks instead of oxford shirts and squash injuries.

Near the novel’s end, Lipsyte’s characters seem to accept the critique as they move on from their bohemian existence.

No One Left is Lipsyte’s seventh book of fiction. He has been, as Jack says of his band’s music, “ferocious and exquisite,” admired for a style of intense force and, unlike punk lyrics, of surprising subtlety. Like his teacher, Robert Coover, and Thomas Pynchon in the generation preceding Lipsyte, he has been consistently enraged by American culture, its inequities and stupidities. No One Left seems like a sabbatical for the man who has moved uptown to be a Columbia professor. This genre-abiding book resembles Pynchon’s comic detective novel Inherent Vice that fondly recalled a pop-culture subculture of dope and music. The earlier pugilistic Lipsyte does emerge briefly in the person of Guidry Tellman, a cult novelist dating Jack’s sister. The following is but a short excerpt from Tellman’s much longer cameo rant about Americans:

No, I won’t say we are an exception. Of course not. But we might be an acceleration. In either direction. Toward total and irrevocable destruction of our world. Or maybe something else. Maybe something better. I know it sounds vague. It can only be vague at this point. But now there is this last chance that humanity can finally join together. Look, I’m a cynical old bastard from Flatbush. But it’s easy to see what’s coming down the pike. Do you know anything about greenhouse gases? Or food production? Population explosion? Are you aware of the ways transnational corporate consolidation creates entities more powerful and with greater reach into the lives of people around the world than anything seen on earth before?

The novelist who knows and feels all this may want to take a break from dramatizing such knowledge and remember an earlier and less articulate rage set to music. No One Left may not be one of Lipsyte’s best gadfly books, but it could well be the one that offers the most pleasure. Before “The Earl” disappears, he discusses with Jack the motivation for writing a book. “The Earl” says, “`You write a book to jerk off to.’” While punk vulgar and extreme, “The Earl”’s assertion does imply Lipsyte’s desire to give himself and his readers some fun in No One Left to Come Looking for You.

—Tom LeClair’s fifth and final novel in his Passing sequence, Passing Again, was published this year.