Even though Steve, which is not his real name, feels like he is in "fine fettle", he is actually dying of "something absolutely, fantastically new." He is dying of Goldfarb Blackstone Preparatory Extinction Syndrome, otherwise known as PREXIS, which means that Steve "is going to die for no known reason. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but eventually, and irrevocably."
Upon learning of his terminal fate, Steve does not pass go or collect two hundred dollars; he goes directly to his employer and quits. During his exit interview - as if he "had to interview for the right to quit" - Steve defines his contributions to the company like this:
I was quiet in my cube. I never fastened personal items with tape to the wall. I leered at female coworkers in the most unobtrusive manner possible. My work, albeit inane, jibed with the greater inanities required of us to maintain the fictions of our industry. I never stinted on pastries for my team.This dry humorous style weaves its way throughout The Subject Steve and is what makes Sam Lipsyte's novel an entertaining read. At times, however, Lipsyte's writing is nonsensical, which makes reading his book sporadically tedious. In fact, when I first read this bit - some calm of the high ordinary pulsed out of him, soft, metronomic, a charisma of reduced noise - it caused several of my neural synapses to misfire, which made my left eye twitch uncontrollably. I felt like I had stumbled into a White Noise knockoff, but then the faux-Delillo feeling faded, and I returned to a stable synaptic state.
[Whew!]
After Steve quits his job, he decides to sin. For a week, Steve snorts coke and diddles prostitutes, all for the low low price of seventy-three thousand dollars. [Inanely maintaining the fictions of industry must pay well.] And after the hookers come and go, doctors arrive with prescription drugs and proactive chemotherapy - a poisonous mix that creates the symptoms for which Steve has been waiting. Once pumped full of medicine and nuclear radiation, Steve's fine fettleness fades, and his PREXIS worsens.
But, alas, the Subject Steve, which is not his real name, does not die. Instead, he enters The Center for Nondenominational Recovery and Redemption, founded by Heinrich of Newark; a center which later metamorphoses into a reality TV show named The Realms; a center where a mother must publicly fellate her teenage son in order to keep him from being cut in half from the buttocks up.
As nice as The Center sounds, Steve doesn't particularly care for its teachings or torture. He'd rather hang out with his disaffected daughter, his ex-wife, and her husband - an altogether different kind of torment. Out of the frying pan and into the fire Steve goes, a masochistic antihero plagued by a fabricated disease.
Sam Lipsyte has created in The Subject Steve a 21st century morality play that exposes the perversions of American culture and the ridiculousness of modernity. Or it could just be a story about a guy not named Steve who is dying of life and tired of death. Either way, I neither recommend nor oppose reading The Subject Steve. Whether or not anyone reads Sam Lipsyte's novel isn't going to change the fact that we're all dying of PREXIS, so why does it matter?
...
*Originally published in the Charleston City Paper on January 15, 2003.
