Book review: No One Left to Come Looking for You by Sam Lipsyte

By Simon Demetriou

A stroke of comedic brilliance

The purpose of Donald Trump’s existence is a teleological quandary that has perplexed many in recent years. The best answer we yet possess is that he was thrust into this universe to challenge and delight our satirists. For a satirist of talent like Sam Lipsyte, Trump is the kind of gift that anabaptist leader Jack Leyden once was for Thomas Nashe in The Unfortunate Traveller (a book that inspires both the novel itself and the names its characters chose for themselves within it).

This is a longwinded introduction to the declaration that casting 1990s Donald Trump as a semi-articulate, goon-wielding version of a Raymond Chandler villain is a stroke of comedic brilliance. And you need to be brilliant if you’re going to repeatedly refer to perhaps the most virtuosic satire that the English language has ever produced (I’m a Nashe fan, in case you can’t tell). Thankfully, Lipsyte’s bravura is warranted. No One Left to Come Looking for You is as funny and entertaining a book as I’ve read in a long time, and if you have any fondness for the 1990s, for punk rock, for murder-mysteries, or for the comic picaresque, you will have a very pleasant few hours in the company of Lipsyte’s hero-narrator Jack Shit (nee Jonathan Liptak).

Shit is the bassist and heart of The Shits, a band possessed of a ‘scabrous, intermittently witty, post-skronk propulsion not unlike early Anal Gnosis’. The Shits are in trouble: their frontman, the Banished Earl, has absconded with Jack’s bass and is lost in New York’s junkie underground; their drummer, Hera, has quit the band to join an art-rock duo called Thorazine; a homicidal giant by the name of Heidegger Mounce has Jack’s guitar and might be murdering homeless people and jaded left-wing punk-rockers; Jack’s ex is dating the drummer of Mongoose Civique, a band Jack hates “for their polished songcraft and serious major-label interest”; and The Shits have a gig in under a week.

These various crisis points prompt Jack to put on his thermals – “[his] mother taught [him] the laws of layering early in life” – and plunge into the New York of 1993, a New York where Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein babble and quiver at art openings, and where having read Baudrillard proves an insufficient quantity of life experience to deal with bent cops, violent real-estate negotiations, or even just one’s own bandmates and romantic entanglements.

Will The Shits rise again in all their “deconstructed neo-proto-art-scuzz” glory? Will the Banished Earl resurface? Will Hera see the error of her ways? Or will Jonathan Liptak have to shelve his dreams while wannabes in bands like Mongoose Civique score all the record deals and girls? I’d recommend finding out.