Book Review – ‘The Ask,’ by Sam Lipsyte – NYTimes.com

In truth, satire remains alive across most American media. In print and online we have The Onion and others; on TV we have “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report” and “The Office.” Satire clearly still has the power to captivate; American culture does not suffer from a lack of smart satire in general, or even of irony, as culture watchers bizarrely predicted after Sept. 11.

No: only in literary circles is satire recently missing in action. It’s as if publishing is afraid to be both literary and funny anymore — as though, in hedging its bets against the competitive advantage of other media, publishing fears the literary comedy and even more the literary satire. And we’re a weaker intellectual culture because of it: other forms simply don’t do the same work that great satirical literature does. It takes fiction, with its subtlety and interiority and sentence rhythms and essential made-upness, to marry the individually uproarious to the systemically tragic in a way that can be laughed at without, finally, also being laughed off.