This is an ebullient, irreverent and deeply serious novel in the noble tradition of Mark Twain, Sinclair Lewis (especially Babbitt and Elmer Gantry) and John Kennedy Toole. Sam Lipsyte certainly hits his prime target — the cultish behaviour around mindfulness, motivational speakers and pallid spiritual beliefs — but one of the joys of the novel is that over and above that there is a scatter-gun sniping at various fads. Although it is laugh-out-loud funny, it swerves towards the end (the reasons would be too much of a spoiler) into slightly more melancholy and mystical modes.
At the novel’s centre is the eponymous Hark, a strange, naive man who has developed a sort of lifestyle therapy he calls ‘mental archery’. The thing about mental archery is you don’t need to know how to use a bow. Instead, you can concentrate on the poses — wittily rendered throughout with such names as the Mind Nock, the Nottingham Surprise and Mongol Mare Shot.
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