Today in Awesomeness

Sam Lipsyte's new novel "The Ask" has been getting a lot of praise everywhere, and that's because it's a beautiful, hilarious, amazing and heartbreaking new book. I just finished it last night, in bed, still sick with some weird fluey thing. This part caught me by surprise...a rare meaning offering in a book which ardently resists the preachy. I'll share it here because it resonated so much with me. It's a conversation between the main character of the book, Milo, and his son.

I took a knee on the sidewalk, clasped Bernie by the shoulders. I'd seen fathers kneel like this in movies, standard posture for the rushed essentials, the Polonius rundown. A little too in love with itself, Don might judge the moment but that didn't diminish its necessity. Bernie might not understand what I told him today, but he would carry the words with him forever, and with them, me.
"Listen," I said.
"Yes, Daddy?"
"Squander it. Give it all away."
"Give what away? My toys?"
"No, yes, sure, your toys, too. Whatever it is. Squander it. Do you understand?"
"Not really."
"Don't save a little part of you inside yourself. Not even a scrap. It gets tainted in there. It rots."
"What does?"
"I can't explain right now. Someday you'll know..."

In the spirit of this passage, a part of me wants to give away the plot of the whole book, but you'll have to check it out here instead. What do I love about this passage? Oh, everything. I love Milo's self-conscious fathering. I love how everything adults say is lost in translation. I love the random stream-of-conscious writing Lipsyte attempts when writing the kid's character. I love that Milo is so bitter, and he knows it, and he wants it to stop but doesn't know how. I love the message of squandering it all, and I love the way it sounds like it might actually be a bad thing, and that that's because we've cast it as a bad thing, when it's really the greatest thing. I love how the moment pops out of nowhere, the way really important moments tend to always pop out of nowhere, and how it ends quickly because it's so rare for two human beings to ever have an epiphany on the same deep level at the exact same time.