He explores with merciless and lacerating precision the demoralized state of the urban man-boy and alterna-dad. Lipsyte Man—a baffled and wounded specimen.
We’ve traveled a long, long way from the storied four-decade publishing association of Alfred Knopf with Thomas Mann, nostalgia for which is a fairly useless emotion in our Godzilla vs. King Kong world of death-match throwdowns against Amazon and Apple and Google and the Justice Department.