INTERVIEW: Andrew Lipstein (Something Rotten)
Something Rotten
Ali Lipstein
FSG
Interview by Anu Khosla
Andrew Lipstein seems to have ridden onto the literary scene aboard some sort of full strength moral tornado. Each of his novels present thorny ethical questions, and offer no easy answers. His first novel, Last Resort, considered writers stealing ideas from one another, where the second, The Vegan, examines the guilt of a wealthy hedge fund manager after a prank gone wrong. In his third, Something Rotten, out in January from FSG, a New York media couple heads to Denmark for the summer. Reuben has just been fired from his radio job after accidentally doing a dirty deed with his Zoom camera still rolling. His wife, Cecilie, has recently given birth as they head to Copenhagen, with baby in tow, to see her family and friends, including Jonas and Mikkel –– none of whom Reuben has a particularly good relationship with.
On Zoom –– where, I assure you, nothing untoward occurred –– I told Lipstein that his work reminded me, at times, of Robert Kolker’s 2023 article “Who Is the Bad Art Friend?” in New York Times Magazine. Lipstein said that the issue with the Bad Art Friend story is that they were both writers. One writer was taking away the other writer’s ability to tell her own story. But if you’re not a writer yourself, having your story written by someone else is a thrill, a gift of preservation, even if it is a bit scary.
I wanted to know: whose story was Lipstein telling in Something Rotten?
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Anu Khosla: I've seen some of the press around your previous books, and I must admit I was expecting a bit more of a Nolita Dirtbag vibe from you.
Andrew Lipstein: Oh, you got me all wrong. I mean, I have three kids, you know, there's no room for that type of thing.
AK: As my error became clear, I did wonder how you see yourself as a writer. Do you consider yourself a provocateur?
AL: That's such a good question. I approach every novel I write wanting to dislodge the reader from their moral position. Whatever the book is about, I want to make them feel morally uncomfortable so that they can have the room and freedom to figure out what they actually think about the characters and the situations I present. So, yeah, I think that can feel like provocation. And I like that word. It's not like I don't want to be considered a provocateur, you know, put that on my tombstone. But that is the heart of what I'm trying to do. I want the reader to feel like… not like I'm their antagonist, but that I am challenging them. I don't have the answers to the moral questions I propose, I want the reader to have to think about them.
AK: I understand you have a background in math. How, if at all, has your math background informed your writing?
AL: In college math it's all proof based. So you're not solving equations with numbers, you are rigorously proving that something is true or not true. I think that that has helped my writing in a sort of subconscious way. In writing, if you’re trying to figure out how to get from one point in a plot or a character’s development to another, you are engaged in an act of imagination. With a math proof, you typically know that something is true and you're trying to figure out why it is true. It’s a similar attitude that I apply for both: I know that I can get from here to here, I’m going to accept it as truth and force myself to do it in the way that takes the least number of steps and is the most elegant. You have the start and you have the finish. Are you going to find the links in between?
AK: You wrote this book when we were in a “post-Trump era,” but we're once again in a Trump era. You’re processing everything that's going on in the world right now and the changes we're having in the country, knowing that your book is coming out very shortly. Is the political situation changing how you're thinking about the work?
AL: It is funny because I do feel like we are still in a post-Trump era. The first Trump era was defined –– at least in our milieu, which I'm assuming is a liberal, coastal, literary milieu –– by such earnest energy and positive thinking. You think of the resistance movement, the hats, the marching. To imagine that that would happen in the next few months is sort of a farce, because the mood now is so realistic and cynical. Every time there's a new appointee that is even more odious than the last, we're not, like, signing the petition anymore. We're just moving forward. So, to me, this era is still post-Trump. It is totally different than the first time Trump was elected. I can't even imagine something so overwhelming and activating as the #MeToo movement happening now out of this election. Because liberals are just like, yeah, we suck. We're not meeting anyone where they are.
Obviously, the book is, in large part, about masculinity, both liberal masculinity and American masculinity. Whether people like it or not, masculinity is now front and center in American politics and life because we have the biggest caricatures of the concept now leading government organizations. Every single one of these guys is taking one of the worst parts of masculinity, raising it to a thousand percent, and then just having that be their personality.
I actually listened to the Joe Rogan episode with Marc Andreessen yesterday. I don't think I've ever listened to a Joe Rogan episode before that. I was with my son on the playground, and I just figured I should do it. It was the first time I've ever heard someone refer to Vivek Ramaswamy as handsome. I had to think about it, I was really trying to have empathy with that point of view. I feel like I got there, but it's sort of earth-shattering to be a liberal and to think about this new world we live in. Which is all to say the book was obviously not written in a world in which Trump is the president, yet we're doing this all again, but now more cynically. In that way, its themes might actually be more important than I first imagined they would be.
AK: This idea of the cuck, which comes up in the book, is a really powerful concept right now in American culture. I've seen it be used as a joke for many years, but now it seems like it's become a much weightier theme in our culture. How do you make sense of the power of the cuck in the American imagination?
AL: Oh, my God. Yeah, I can't hear that word enough. I think we need to say it much more now because I think you're right, a few years ago you would get it from the dirtbag left as they were dipping their feet in everything conservative as a provocation, and kind of an empty one at that. They’d talk about trad wives, cucks, whatever, all of these shibboleths of far-right America, because it was kind of revolting. But it's now newly unironic. That’s what’s so shocking about this moment. There were all these things before that were so loathsome that we could only approach them with irony, and now we are undoing that irony. That's not the normal course of irony. Normally irony goes on top of something that has run its course so that we can still reference it in a way that feels new. It used to be about flipping the thing, but now we're undoing that. That's what feels so disconcerting.
The concept of cuck is something that fits into that paradigm super well. I’m not a dirtbag left person, but I did use the word a lot a few years ago as a joke with friends because I thought it was funny to even say out loud. Using that word is an attempt to say: “I can reference and leverage this idea that a man is only a man if he has ownership over his sexual partner,” or, ”I'm so comfortable with manhood that I can make fun of people who are uncomfortable with it and have to use the word cuck.”
AK: Wow, yes.
AL: But now we're in this moment where people who the right see as “cucks” are the ones who are losing control of the country. The people who are gaining control of the country are people who would earnestly use the word “cuck.” I see it all the time from leaders on social media, like, it goes without saying, Elon Musk. All these men are now reclaiming it as something that can be said unironically. And it's not funny anymore to the left because it's the new reality. The people who use the word cuck earnestly won.
There is something extremely disconcerting about this reflexive need to focus on sexuality as a battleground for conservative men. With trans rights especially, I would love to be in a place as a country where you just take for granted that someone's identity is who they are. Why the fuck do you need to talk about it? The issues with sports and restrooms are inflated past the point of relevancy because that's the only way trans issues can actually be provocative to the majority of the country.
There's this creepy, weird aspect of the conservative image of masculinity where you have to proactively be a man. It gets to the heart of the book; it is a problem you don't really see in places like Denmark where they have been so progressive on gender and sexuality for so long. There isn't any nervous need to prove who you are. It would be weird for a Danish man to, through jokes or whatever, make clear to you that he really is straight. That his wife is faithful to him, you know, that his sons are straight. It would really, as it should here, make clear that he's pretty insecure in his own sexuality and gender. But that weirdness is at the core of our conception of gender and masculinity in America. There is no healthy masculine option now. There's just the weirdos on the right who are nervously scratching their wrists and telling you that they're straight, or there are liberals who don't have any cohesive idea of masculinity.
AK: This is fascinating to me as a woman because it's this thing that we're trying to make sense of. We're having these conversations, like, what’s going on with these men that are dipping toes into the manosphere?
AL: It's honestly shattering to hear you be like, “us women are confused, are you guys okay?” That makes sense that that would be your perspective, like, “I hope they find their way.”
AK: I noticed that you reference the primatologist Frans de Waal and his research on gender in the book, whereas a lot of the other references were fictionalized. How do you decide what to fictionalize and where to reference real things?
AL: I always like to work something into the book that's real. I'm not going to write paragraphs about Frans de Waal, but if a reader finds what I wrote about him interesting, they could Google him and look up his book and maybe have the same impression I did about it.
Generally, I love pinning things to reality. Especially places like restaurants. In all my books, my publishers have tried to change things to be fake. In this case, they wanted to change NPR and The New York Times into fake names. It's fun to reference reality and, on a very basic level, give the reader another tool to suspend their disbelief. I am talking about The New York Times when I'm talking about how Cecilie thinks of The New York Times. I'm definitely talking about NPR when I mention it. There's no other concept like NPR out there. You can't invent a liberal, national, partially nationally funded radio station that sort of looks like NPR because it's a unique institution, and it stands in for so much of liberal America. It would be ridiculous to try to hide that I'm talking about NPR.
You know, the character of Mikkel is fully based on a single person. That was kind of a byway I had into the book, our friend in Copenhagen. And so even from the get go, I was thinking of the book as already blurring that line in my head, which I love to do because it feels wrong and also inspires me creatively. My first book is about blurring fact and fiction in art and life. I find it internally provocative to do that with people or institutions.
AK: I would not have guessed that about Mikkel. I'm mostly a nonfiction writer, so I talk about this a lot: the ethics of putting real people on the page. Were there ethical challenges or friendship challenges that you faced in doing that?
AL: Well, you sort of know the guy because you've read the Mikkel character. The idea of doing something that's wrong in a way that's interesting, he more than anyone can appreciate. But I think it presents totally different questions than a nonfiction writer. I'm basically using someone in all of the moral complexity that that involves. I'm using somebody's persona and my read on them without having any of the responsibility of being truthful. In that way, I'm kind of like a toddler. It feels kind of wrong in the right way that I think a lot of fiction writing can. I don't have to accurately represent him, I’m just using the questions that his existence proposes to me. I asked him about it before I wrote it, and he seemed very interested, so I don't have any qualms about it.
AK: I have to ask, while we're talking about inspiration from real people, was Jeffrey Toobin’s Zoom masturbation incident the inspiration for Reuben?
AL: I definitely thought about Toobin before I wrote it, but to be honest, that character is a composite, and there's even a few other notable people in the mix. I don't know that much about Jeffrey Toobin's private life, but of course, that story lives indelibly in all of our minds. It's probably gonna be the last thing I think about before I die. What's so interesting about that story, especially in the #MeToo context, is –– and this is true of Reuben, too –– he deserved what happened to him while also being a victim of what happened because it was purely an accident. That question is core to my second book, The Vegan, where somebody did something that they need to own, but because it was an accident, they have trouble reconciling their fault with their lack of intent. That's what's so rich about the Toobin story. You feel bad for him, but on the other hand, what else could have been the result? It is sexual abuse in the workplace.
AK: If I'm being honest, I didn't think about the Toobin situation too deeply when it happened, because I was just kind of like, “Oh, man, what are you doing dude?” As a millennial, there was also an aspect of, “what is this Boomer doing!?” It was sort of sad because he's done a lot of important work, but we can't talk about the books anymore. Though it’s also very relatable. We've all done some version of not turning a camera off or not putting mute on when we should have.
AL: I think calling out that he's a boomer is important because it was only his inability to grasp technology that created the problem. It's very generational. I think your initial brushing it off and not thinking about it too much either is something I definitely feel because it was so comedic and it seemed like that was the value of it. Imagining any New Yorker writer of high prestige having their special parts broadcasted via an unflattering video conferencing service is too rich not to imagine. But yeah, I've had things happen on work calls where if I was extremely famous and it was a little bit worse, I probably would have been fired too.
AK: I'm not going to ask you what you mean by that because I wouldn’t want to be asked.
AL: I'll give you the outline. The first was right when Covid hit. I just gave my wife a kiss on the lips, okay. And it was a very private moment. What we didn't realize is she had entered into a one-on-one meeting with someone she's never worked with before. Her computer was on mute, so she couldn't hear that he was there. And then she realized.
The other one was that I sent my wife a graphic link that was supposed to be funny , but instead of sending it to her on Slack, I sent it to my work Slack. I didn't realize until basically everyone in the office had watched it.
AK: It's so relatable. You know, the example of you giving your wife a kiss on the lips, the scenario in the book is obviously a more charged, dramatic version of that, but when you think about it as just a kiss on the lips between a husband and a wife…
AL: Right, if anything, we should celebrate that! But also, you're confronted to, you know, act normal. I think that person probably did suffer in some way. But the same thing could be said for Toobin. If we believe him that it was accidental, which I think we do, maybe it isn't bad on its own. It's obviously not a loving kiss between spouses, but it's no crime. Maybe Project 2025 will make it so.
AK: As liberals, that's a good example of something where we're like, theoretically, we want less judgment about people, you know… whatever, pleasuring themselves. But we also don't want that to be done in a public setting. So it's strange.
AL: I mean, you want your cake and eat it too. Liberals, figure it out! If you want people to do it, it's got to be public! That's what I think.
AK: I think we've cracked the problem for Democrats.
AL: Let's put this on Twitter, hit send, and just let the nation heal.
