No One Left to Come Looking for You

July 1, 2022

In 1993 Manhattan, New Jersey musician Jack makes his way through the drug-heavy, dive bar--littered East Village in search of a band member who has absconded with Jack's precious bass just day before their breakout gig, presumably planning to sell the instrument for a quick fix. Billed as literary, described as suspense, and aiming at readers of both; from the author of Home Land, a New York Times Notable Book.

Copyright 2022 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 5, 2022
At the start of this charming comic mystery set circa 1993 from Lipsyte (Hark), 20-something Jonathan “Jack” Shit, who plays in “the Shits, a fast-disintegrating band” on the fringes of Manhattan’s East Village music scene, is awakened by a call from Dyl Becker at King Snake Guitars. Dyl tells Jack that the band’s smack-addled lead singer, the Banished Earl, was just in his store with Jack’s bass guitar trying to sell it days before a big gig. Earl disappears, and the stolen bass, probably swapped for drugs, ends up in the hands of a thug named Mounce, whom Jack confronts as Mounce also tries to sell the instrument. A subsequent murder raises the stakes. Jack soon connects Earl’s disappearance with an aggressive real estate mogul known for stiffing his business associates while scheming to profit at any cost from the urban renewal of New York City. A wild array of neighborhood characters and scenesters guide Jack, including Corrina, an affectionate devotee engaged in mysterious art projects. This whodunit homage comes complete with dark satirical observations of New York 30 years ago. Spinal Tap fans will want to check it out. Agent: Eric Simonoff, WME.

Starred review from August 15, 2022
A portrait of the young bass player in 1990s New York, with a mystery to solve. Just as Jonathan Liptak changes his name to Jack Shit, because what could be more perfect for a member of a band called the Shits, he discovers that his frontman and roommate, the Banished Earl, has stolen his bass, undoubtedly to raise funds to purchase heroin. No sooner does Jack take in the situation than he receives a call from his friend at the pawn shop--the bass has been spotted. But before he can lay hands on either his vanished instrument or his strung-out friend, the situation becomes categorically more complex. There's a murder. There's a prospective girlfriend and a potential gig. There's a visit from a couple of New York's finest, a run-in with Donald Trump, and a brief retreat to the Liptak homestead in New Jersey. But most importantly, there's a flaming truckload of humor, wit, and joy in the creation of this best-of-times, worst-of-times moment in New York music history, from the band names (Mongoose Civique, Count Fistula, the Annihilation of the Soft Left) to the dive bars, restaurants, and clubs and the ragtag musicians and neighborhood characters, among them scene patriarch Toad Molotov. "To watch Toad munch a revolting quantity of his beloved mint-jelly sandwiches, swill Cuervo Gold, and scratch unrelentingly beneath his fatigue shorts at his hairy legs and crotch was to come of age in the rock underworld." Lipsyte clearly knows whereof he speaks, evoking with verisimilitude and even fondness the experiences of snorting "nose Comet," of dealing with a clogged bar toilet, of acting in a short film that requires being drenched in menstrual blood, and of playing "post-wave neo-noise art punk with a sincere approach to irony." Of the Shits: "When we are on, we are still terrible but also one of the best bands you ever saw." No doubt. A badass book with brains, wit, moral decay, and radical outrage to spare.

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Starred review from October 1, 2022
Lipsyte's latest careens through the early 1990s Lower East Side, affectionately lampooning the writer's own art-punk roots. Our protagonist is Jonathan Liptak, New Jersey-born and semiotics-educated but better-known these days as Jack Shit, bass player for the "writhing, shimmering society of the spectacle" that is the Shits. The band has a gig coming up at Artaud's Garage, but Jack's bandmate, the Banished Earl, has absconded with Jack's beloved bass. The whole aesthetic project, already as precarious as an unofficial Avenue A sublet, is about to disappear, just like everything else, into the "black, ragged wormhole" in the Earl's arm. Jack is a classic Lipsyte narrator, edgy, confessional, cracking jokes while scoring from the bodega or staring into the abyss. His sentences are as pungent and hard-hitting as the Shits' set list. Fans of Lipsyte'sThe Ask (2010) and Hark (2019) will appreciate a rollicking, cartoonish side-plot sending up an all-too-familiar real-estate developer. But Lipsyte, famously, was once the "lead screamer" of noise-punk outfit Dungbeetle, and the novel's autobiographical touches, especially regarding drug abuse and success-envy, temper its satire with a refreshing new vulnerability.

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