Book Review: No One Left to Come Looking For You by Sam Lipsyte

I'm headed out on a trip to Jersey City tomorrow, and had wanted to find a book that would put me in a New York state of mind. I was digging deep through Amazon's recommendations, and stumbled across No One Left to Come Looking For You. The description said it was a mystery novel about a punk in Alphabet City in 1993 trying to find out who stole his bass guitar, set amongst the gentrification of the neighborhood. Alphabet City! Punks! Rent with punks! This sounded like a great read to me!

Unfortunately, the experience did not live up to the hype. For most of this novel, it could have taken place in Buffalo in 2008 and concerned a jam band - the setting and set-up, which I was most looking forward to reading, had very little impact on the story. This is a real shame - there could have been more on what buildings were going up and what buildings were going down, there could have been more on the city actively pushing the poor and homeless out of those streets - you could have set it up to coincide with the Tompkins Square riot! And when the Rent part of the story does happen, it's very heavy-handed. There's one main villain in this book - who apparently is responsible for ALL of the downtown gentrification - I'm not going to spoil who it is, but he's a future president whose last name rhymes with "dump".

This could have been saved if we cared more about the characters; however, I didn't feel any real connection with any of them, and having poor punks who can quote obscure European literature made me want to jump into the world of the book just to slap them for being annoying. Maybe it's punk rock to have annoying main characters - but it doesn't make for good novelization.

So, pretty disappointing - four out of ten hot dogs.