Sam Spade was searching for the Maltese falcon; Jack Shit (né Jonathan Liptak), from the punk band the Shits, is searching for his Fender Jazz bass. With No One Left to Come Looking for You, Sam Lipsyte has written a novel firmly in the noir tradition and fused it with satire in such a way that he makes pairing crime fiction with comedy seem as natural as pairing a Gibson Les Paul with a Marshall stack.
It's January of 1993, Manhattan's East Village is gentrifying, and the Earl, narrator Jack's bandmate and roommate, has run off with Jack's prized possession, presumably to sell it for drug money. How does Jack know that the Earl stole his bass? Through a phone call from Jack's friend at King Snake Guitars, where the Earl tried unsuccessfully to sell the instrument.
Jack pays a visit to the Earl's ex, Hera Bernberger, who has recently quit drumming for the Shits. (Jack admits that they're "a fast-disintegrating band." Before the Earl's drug use got ridiculous, "we used to have, according to Sour Mash magazine, a 'scabrous, intermittently witty, post-skronk propulsion not unlike early Anal Gnosis.' ") Does Hera know where the Earl is? She doesn't, but she promises to sit in one last time with the Shits at an upcoming gig on the condition that, first, Jack finds his bass and the Earl. When King Snake Guitars reports another attempt to sell the bass--this time the would-be seller is a mountainous goon who refers to the Earl by his real name, Alan--Jack starts to fear for his bandmate's safety: "The Earl hates his name. He would only give it up under serious duress."
Things get darker fast, but they never stop being funny. There's Jack's Spinal Tap-ian overblown sense of importance ("We have a pretty huge following in Catalonia"). There are some brilliant song titles ("Orange Julius Rosenberg,""Salad of the Bad Cafe") and hilarious lyrics not fit to print here. No One Left to Come Looking for You is a twisty caper, a reverberant period piece and an affectionate parody of the youthful quest for authenticity. (Jack, who frets that having gone to college threatens his legitimacy as a punk, wears the fact that Lou Reed studied poetry at Syracuse University like armor.) While Lipsyte (The Fun Parts; Hark) never swerves into mean-spiritedness, a running gag involving Hall and Oates comes smile-makingly close. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer
Shelf Talker: Set in Manhattan's East Village punk scene in 1993, this novel is a twisty caper, a reverberant period piece and an affectionate parody of the youthful quest for authenticity.