High School, Not So Confidential

It’s confession time, readers.

A few years back I signed up with Classmates.com, that online haven for reunion-addicts. Not out of any desire to (shudder) reconnect with old high school alumni. No, I was motivated solely by sheer morbid curiosity. Who was doing what? Who was rich? Who was divorced? Who was still a loser? Fat chance the last question ever being answered, since according to the online forum, everyone is just so gosh-darn happy and gushing with peachy-keen memories of those halcyon days of overactive hormones. Ne’er a nasty thought to be found. In fact, I’m willing to bet that if someone did write a negative diatribe on that forum, it would be taken down PDQ. So where does one go to find the truth behind the empty smiles of the pretty hair and teeth crowd? If you really want to satisfy your urge for honest high school confessions of the acerbic variety, you’ll just have to read Sam Lipsyte’s painfully funny novel Home Land.

Behold Lewis Miner, a.k.a. Teabag (a moniker created from an unfortunate experience in the school showers with Eastern Valley High’s football team), self-professed loser, who since graduating Eastern Valley High School in 1989, has spent his life to date in a dope-induced masturbatory under-employed haze. But Miner’s not ashamed of his appalling state: “my misadventures have taught me to covet the little things, to cherish, in short, the short straw.”

In fact, Miner is all too willing to share his love for the short straw with the entire alumni of Eastern Valley High. Pressured by his former principal to contribute an update to the alumni newsletter, Miner rises to the challenge, and lays bare the truth behind the obvious fact that he “did not pan out.” Of course his updates never see the light of day; Principal Fontana wants only reports of sunshine and glee. Fortunately for us, Miner continues to churn out these self-indulgent missives in spite of being censored, and so we learn the sordid details of his less than stellar life: his girlfriend has dumped him; he earns a meagre living writing fake facts for a soft drink company’s newsletter; his mom has recently died from cancer; and he spends an inordinate amount of time either masturbating in front of his computer screen or getting stoned with his only high school pal Gary, whom it could be argued, is leading Miner in the race to Loserville.

In the hands of another writer, this narcissistic rant could have become pretty tedious, pretty darn fast. Other than a bizarre high school reunion denouement (called a ‘Togethering’) near the end of the novel, not much of import really happens outside of Miner’s twisted inner dialogue. Fortunately, Lipsyte is a gifted master of words, and he creates a perfect balance of humor and pathos in the ramblings of this sharp-tongued loser. But why is this self-indulgent, caustic, often profane rant from this flop who refuses to “buckle under expectation’s yoke” so appealing?

Home Land resonates so strongly because in a perfection-seeking world where all your problems can (and apparently should) be solved, where everything from your personal life to your appearance to your job to your home can be subjected to an ‘Extreme Makeover’ by an army of lifestyle gurus, Miner is a refreshing breath of bleak, existential air. He is the anti-Oprah. You can’t feel sorry for him, or revel in his misery, for as he himself states: “I’m quite happy in my unhappy way.” What do you call schadenfreude turned in on itself?

But the loser angle gets even better. Apparently Lipsyte’s agent had no success in selling the book in the US, so he ended up selling it in the UK where it got rave reviews. Once back in the States in paperback, Home Land became the love child of the lit blogosphere, which started people asking why in heaven’s name didn’t the US publishers snatch up this beauty in the first place.

It has been suggested that Lipsyte’s failure to initially woo U.S. editors had a lot to do with his apparent lack of writer cachet: he’s a fat, balding, middle-aged mid-list author, with one novel and a book of short stories already under his buckling belt. Zero cool factor for an industry desperately in search for the next Jonathan Safran Foer or Nell Freudenberger. Or so they thought. Home Land has become the unexpected valedictorian who will belch and scratch his balls during his profanity-laden speech. The loser, writing about a loser, wins. How life affirming is that? It’s enough to renew one’s faith in failure.