Sam Lipsyte’s Venus Drive, a collection of short stories revolving around a
nameless small town that is home to the title street’s shattered land of
dreams, reflects a deliciously dark sensibility and humor, yet also one that
shows an understanding of the beauty and meaning that everyone seeks to find in
life, and how this lack of beauty and meaning can result in meaningless living,
addiction, and depression. His language
is as fierce as it is gentle, all while describing people and places that reek
of both pain and ennui. The narrative
perspectives taken are critical and realistic at the same time that they are
compassionate towards the circumstances that have so profoundly and deeply
shaped the lives of these flawed yet easily identifiable characters. This is a compassion that is unspoken but
obvious to the critical reader.

One of the primary characters of
these stories is Gary, a one-time punk rock icon who feels a failure and who
now is a inconsequential drug dealer and self-actualization guru. Gary travels throughout many of the stories,
often serving as a symbol of the intangible idea of redemption for which these
characters are all searching.

Perhaps the collection’s most
touching tale, "The Morgue Rollers" is the story of "The Chersky
Girl" and her best friend, a Chinese-American girl named Mona. The Chersky girl lives in a Jewish household
that is weighed down with its own anti-Semitism and alcoholism and one in which
the girl craves her father’s attention and sheer beautiful experience in equal
measures. Lipsyte’s language is incredibly poignant and appropriate to the
young girl narrator, as when the girl describes her relationship with Mona as
"we are best friends with our shaved ices on the spit-brown stoop, and we
are best friends on our roller skates. 
Everyone who sees us together, the Chersky girl, the pretty one, the
only one, and Mona Yee, Chinese pretty" (28). The girls skate through the town together, past racism and
neglect and pain, all the while fascinated with the story of the narrator’s
Uncle Joey, a gambler with debts to pay.

One night the girls go out to be
"secret night rollers" (30) and end up at the morgue. Lipsyte’s talent for evoking the essence of
a wise-beyond-her-years yet still very confused at the painful adult world girl
is formidable. The girls enter the
morgue, feeling thrilled at their adventure, and end up finding Uncle Joey
there, who has been shot, which reaffirms the narrator’s confused vision of the
world as painful but with so much simultaneous potential for beauty. The story ends with the line, "looks
like an epidemic to me" (33), appropriately reflecting the story’s perspectives
on pain and death.

These stories are dirty, painful,
seemingly hopeless, but simultaneously lovely in their refusal to live in
anything but the intense present. 
Paradoxically, somehow, these stories of the wasting of life instead
subtly yet vigorously reaffirm and redeem the idea of life’s precious
nature. Lipsyte’s world is a ghost
world, a commercialized and frequently sterile life whose inhabitants are
wandering around aimlessly, looking for beauty and meaning wherever they can
find it, but more often losing themselves in a daze of addiction or pain on the
road there. This is a world populated
by young sadists at a childrens’ summer camp, stone Trotskyites, morally
questionable babysitters, and bored, hopeless corporate workers, among others. These are important stories from an
extremely gifted and beautiful writer. 
Pick them up, they will effect you with their desire, regret, and
unflinching hope in the potential for beauty and redemption.

©
2002 Miranda Hale

Miranda Hale is a
first-year graduate student in English Literature who lives in Spokane,
Washington and who reads entirely too much Sylvia Plath.

Categories: Fiction