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"Nowhere is this plainer than in the pages of The Subject Steve, a novel about a man diagnosed with a deadly disease with no cause, no symptoms, and no cure. (Sharp-eyed detox nurses and rehab trustees would be well advised to ban this novel from the premises.) The source of Steve’s affliction might be drugs, or sex, or religion or a combination of all three. Consider this rumination on Steve’s love interest at the Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption:

“It was organized religion that stole my baby’s legs away. Some soused bishop jumped a curbside in his El Camino. This was in her hometown in Neptune, New Jersey. [Ed. Note: On Venus Drive, perhaps?] Renee was just seventeen, window-shopping for a slutty top for school. She spent a year in bed and a few more trying to be a miracle of physical therapy, dreamed of the day she’d stagger through a cheering gauntlet of male nurse beefcake, but she never got past the cold flops on the padded floor. She took to gin, launched a newsletter called Gimp Snatch. Heinrich [the center’s founder] found her doing wheelchair donuts in the parking lot of Arman’s Adult Motel. He told her he was trolling for souls. She said she’d blow him for a ride home.”

What are the lessons that can be learned from this worldview? It amounts to nothing more and nothing less than this: You see an El Camino coming at you, get the hell out of the way. Are we supposed to admire those who got out of the way, pity those who don’t? Of course not. Leave it to a man with an advertising background to take the visual clichés and received knowledge passed down from after-school special and give them a thorough cornholing. This is why admiring Lipsyte’s characters is like admiring the bravura of a crack addict as he leaps from the window of a burning building. It’s a terrible thing. A tragedy for the families. All that. But Lipsyte understands that what we really want to know is this: “Did the asshole start the fire?” "