The Ask (2010) (edit title/settings)

Ridiculously Simplified Synopsis edit see section history

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Summary edit see section history

Characters/People edit see section history

• Purdy: Add a description of this character.
• Bernie
• Maura
• Don Charboneau
• Milo Burke
• Horace
• Llewellyn
• Melinda
• Nick
• Claudia
• Dean Cooley
• Sasha
• Vargina
• Francine
• Aiden
• Paul
• Lena
• Nathalie
• Maddie
• Christine
• Lee Moss
• Denise
• Maurice
• Billy Raskov
• Constance
• Predrag
• Todd Wilkes
• Maurice Gunderson
• Charles Goldfarb
• Mckenzie
• Vasquez
• Roger
• Larry
• Michael
• Jamie
• Lisa
• Nabeel
• Teitelbaum
• Carl
• Schopenhauer
• Candace
• Ginny
• Jimmy Easter
• Jane

Quotes edit see section history

• “yes1”

• Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers

• “We are going to eat ice cream and we are going to eat shit. The trick is to use different spoons.”

  Highlighted by 36 Kindle customers

• Stories were like people. We pretended they all counted, but almost none of them did.

  Highlighted by 28 Kindle customers

• “No, I mean, if I were the protagonist of a book or a movie, it would be hard to like me, to identify with me, right?” “I would never read a book like that, Milo. I can’t think of anyone who would. There’s no reason for it.”

  Highlighted by 24 Kindle customers

• You pay a whore to make you feel like a man, you fund a philharmonic to make yourself feel like a refined man.

  Highlighted by 22 Kindle customers

• Child care was like everything else. You got what you paid for, and your child paid for what you could not pay for.

  Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers

• I lost out to kids who lived on hummus and a misapprehension of history, the bright newbies bosses exploit without compunction because these youngsters are, in fact, undercover aristocrats mingling with the peasantry, each stint entered on their résumés another line in the long poem of their riskless youth.

  Highlighted by 19 Kindle customers

• I’d become one of those mistakes you sometimes find in an office, a not unpleasant but mostly unproductive presence bobbing along on the energy tides of others, a walking reminder of somebody’s error in judgment.

  Highlighted by 17 Kindle customers

• We were stuck between meanings. Or we were the last dribbles of something. It was hard to figure. The fall of the Soviet Union, this was, the death of analog. The beginning of aggressively marketed nachos.

  Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers

• But no matter my conversational machinations, I knew the truth. Nobody ever mentioned it, of course. It meant not much. Physical bravery probably held the same value in our milieu as skill at parallel parking: a useful quirk. But the box score stayed in my wallet, or the wallet of my heart, so to speak, a smeared and origamied scrap to remind me how little I resembled the man I figured for the secret chief of my several selves.

  Highlighted by 15 Kindle customers

• You really had to hustle to recruit the right people to prop up your delusions, but the moment somebody broke ranks, or just broke for a protein shake, the whole deal teetered.

  Highlighted by 14 Kindle customers

Setting & Locations edit see section history

• America
• Nearmont
• Europe
• Connecticut
• Manhattan
• Hollywood
• Iraq
• Staley Street
• New York City
• New Jersey
• Utica

First Sentence edit see section history

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

1. Sam Lipsyte (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Awards edit see section history

• Amazon Best of the Month (March 2010: Fiction, #6)

Classification edit see section history

• Library of Congress: PS3562.I648A85 2010
• Dewey: 813.54

Notes for Parents edit see section history

A light humorous adult novel. Sex, drugs, language, existential despair. What more could you want?

Subjects edit see section history

• Books › Literature & Fiction › Women's Fiction › Single Women
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Literary
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Comic
• Books › Literature & Fiction › Contemporary