A Nihilist's Guide to Parenthood

With scabrous zeal and surpassing empathy, Sam Lipsyte returns to explore the anxieties and indignities of a culture in thrall to an artificially intelligent fever dream

Wyatt Sardo, washed-up veteran of the last high-flying days of the glossy magazines, has some things he needs to convey to his teenage children. From hiding.

Written in the form of a letter meant to give a full accounting of his violent acts with something called the Planning Committee, A Nihilist’s Guide to Parenthood is a stinging assessment of the tectonic shifts that technology has wreaked on every aspect of our lives. Wyatt once tried to get with the program, but the program bounced him anyway, and now he knows where he went wrong: “I’d brought this on myself,” he says. “I’d wandered like an idiot into the threshing blades of the internet.”

The story describes, in hilarious detail, Wyatt’s fall from mainstream society and his introduction to a ragtag crew of disaffected oddballs who share his disillusionment with the system (and an obsession with the cult classic Highlander) and who, like him, long to be aligned with human good. At every turn, Wyatt tries and fails to do the right thing, to defend human feeling and connection, but those turns take him to increasingly bizarre manifestations of the internet age, where less and less makes sense. “What was to be done to make this world a place that wouldn’t pulverize us all?” Wyatt asks. His letter is an attempt at an answer, and Sam Lipsyte’s new novel confirms him as one of the most galvanizing and provocative writers on the American scene.