- Hardcover: 296 pages
- Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux; 1 edition (2 Mar 2010)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0374298912
- ISBN-13: 978-0374298913
- Product Dimensions: 21.7 x 15.4 x 2.5 cm
- Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 447,149 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
The Ask
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Social networking, iPads and the sadness attendant,
A Kid's Review
This review is from: The Ask (Hardcover)
Technology gives us lots of shiny, virtual joys - and sometimes it makes us think that these are the real themes of life. The Ask, in the most funny way possible disputes this. The Ask describes the "cultural failure" of a virtual world and explains that the real themes of life continue to be very analogue: love, death, desire, failure.It's funny. It moves fast. And it makes you want to glory in the words. We live in an era of "aggressively marketed nachos." says one sentence. It describes with much hilarity the "new" world and it a reminder that every moment spent blogging or virtual friending is one moment removed from real living: the real smells, fissures and hot-desire of our true, 'offline' worlds. I loved it.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ask and you shall receive....,
This review is from: The Ask (Paperback)
I read The Ask in a week. It is a funny book. The writing is a total joy to suck through the eyeholes. Aside from being funny it is a real book where things happen and the characters remind you of people you have met and you care about what will happen. Its about Iraq, fatherhood, money, education, deciding who you are, who you are not and what is the best way to spend your time here on the planet. But mainly its about fatherhood. Which does not sound terribly exciting does it and I suppose its not but The Ask is a really really good, buy this book!
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
If this is where it's at I'd prefer to be somewhere else,
By Tamara L (North West England) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Ask (Paperback)
Contemporary, fast moving, smart, witty, blokey, virtuoso prose, New York sensibility. I didn't like it much. I suspect this is not the right novel for me, a rather ponderous, British, Northern woman. I admired it in a detached sort of way but it just wasn't my cup of tea.Someone left a comment on one of other reviews saying they had hoped (in vain) for something akin to Confederacy of Dunces. I'd considered similar comparisons. The protagonist, Milo Burke, is cut from the same cloth, but he's no Ignatius J. Reilly. Where Ignatius is hateful, arrogant, outrageous, hilarious and unique, Milo is simply annoying: a generic, leering, self-absorbed Sit-Com American loser. Maybe for reasons about myself cited above I found it difficult to identify with him, though when I recall other self-pitying American misogynists I have engaged with e.g. the eponymous Wilson of Daniel Clowes's brilliant graphic novel, I wonder whether it's more than just a cultural thing. This felt like the sort of dazzling new novel you are supposed to enthuse about because you can sense how clever it is, but secretly you would rather watch an episode of Emmerdale. The other characters in the novel appeared to find Milo as tiresome as I did, though I didn't warm to any of them much either. The risk attendant upon assembling such an unlovable cast is that the reader has little incentive to care about what happens to them, and where does that leave the plot? I was fairly indifferent. Unlike some of the professional reviewers cited in the opening pages It didn't make me laugh out loud, I found the scenes between Milo and his mother quite funny but generally the conversations were a bit too slick and scripted. Like others I came to this via the Guardian's glowing review but that's fair enough. I can be dispassionate enough to see that some people would rate it. How do you score a book? According to how good you suspect it might be (five stars all round for War and Peace) or how much it moved you on a personal level. I've plumped for the latter. I'm not saying it's poorly written, it just didn't speak to me. I can think of lots of other well-regarded novels that have done nothing for me either. Thank heavens we don't all have the same taste.
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