Ripcord by Nate Lippens review – acid-tongued meditations on middle-aged homosexuality

It’s hard to place Nate Lippens within an obvious lineage. His writing, which has been championed in the UK by Pilot Press, is fragmentary and exists in that weird liminal place where you’re not exactly sure if what you’re reading is memoir or fiction.

Lippens’ latest book, Ripcord, is subtitled “A Novel” but with its close first-person narration, its constant asides and frequent essayistic journeys into popular culture, you’d be forgiven for believing it to be pure memoir.

Lippens’ narrator is a middle-aged gay man who works at a bar in Milwaukee. With only a handful of close friends, he lives a fairly hand-to-mouth existence, lamenting his reluctant entry into middle-aged queerness. “I’m in an abusive relationship with time,” he says at the beginning of one chapter. This sentiment feels central to Ripcord as a whole.

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In an era where gay writing is still obsessed with the queer coming-of-age narrative, Lippens’ writing is a very centring take on what happens post-twink death: shockingly, you just keep on living.

Lippens is undeniably the master of the one-liner and the novel is absolutely littered with them. His narrator describes himself as “a mix of Rip Van Winkle, Jack the Ripper, and Rip Taylor: comatose, murderous and frivolous” and his turn-ons include “1970s and 1980s performance art”, “punk drag queens”, and, rather fittingly, “fragments.”

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The narrator’s occasional moments of life advice are, too, hilariously memorable – “Note to self: You can stay in bed all day but that doesn’t make you Colette.” The best way to describe Ripcord’s narrative voice is catty, but it is an earned cattiness. Here is a gay man who is simply fed up and he is more than willing to let you know about it.

This is all to say that if you are one of those people who likes their novels with a side of plot, you’re going to be furious. The book’s own jacket calls it a book of “meditations”, as if Lippens were some homosexual Stoic. And yet, with the book’s narrator living by fairly basic means, analysing contemporary culture with his acid tongue, and proselytising the simple homosexual life, one could argue that Lippens’ narrator fits well within the role of urban philosopher.

Ripcord by Nate Lippens is out now (Pilot Press, £14). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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