Looking back over years of friendships, encounters, jobs, moves, art, music and everything in between, the narrator in Nate Lippens’ remarkable novel Ripcord is very clear where he stands, “When I think of who are considered credible witnesses and reliable sources and good people, I don’t want to be aligned with them. I am not good. I’m not on the side of that at all. I’ll stay over here with ex-cons, former junkies and dropouts and fuckups”. If you know you’re an outsider you know where you stand with other outsiders, especially as age begins to strip away your illusions and the self-interrogation begins. Then again how do you age gracefully as a man, or more specifically as a gay man? “I am at the age where young men’s daddy issues work to my advantage, but I can’t bankroll my end of the deal”. And though the narrator may be aging, gracefully, or more probably otherwise, his bullshit meter is in very fine fettle indeed, “When I hear people brag about their authenticity and honesty, I hear privileged and lazy”. The narrator does a fine line in self-deprecation too, and it’s much needed when he wonders about his place in the world, “I don’t understand the world now. I feel like a faggotus rex. But the truth is I didn’t understand the world back then either.” Packed full of sentences and paragraphs that fizz with electricity Ripcord is one of the best novels I’ve read this year. And please note, in the nineties I made it my job to read and review books like this, I was always going on about ‘transgressional literature’, outsiders and hating the Oxbridge white guys who ran publishing (and, quietly, probably still do) so I know that books like Ripcord are very rare beasts indeed. God bless that other America. Totally recommended.

Ripcord – Nate Lippens published by Pilot Press - £14.00

Steven Long