In his latest novel, Nate Lippens explores what it means to be an aging queer artist <\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAny honest description of survival isn\u2019t inspirational, it\u2019s frightening,\u201d writes Nate Lippens in Ripcord<\/em>, his second novel. This line, spoken by the book\u2019s unnamed narrator, refers to the character\u2019s taste in poetry, to his distaste for pieces of writing that are supposedly universal. The narrator prefers poetry that others claim is not poetry, narratives that are the opposite of uplifting. A more optimistic friend takes him to see a \u201cstrenuously life-affirming movie\u201d and he is quick to pick it apart afterward, gesturing at its emptiness. Ripcord<\/em> is a novel that lovers of the life-affirming narrative or the tidy trauma plot might shy away from; it is often frightening in its directness, its refusal to lean into empty optimism, its insistence on keeping death in view. It is also, for these same reasons, a galvanizing read that records a fragmented intention to continue existing, at least for now, despite the many reasons not to. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lippens\u2019s debut was My Dead Book<\/em><\/a>, published in 2021 and a finalist for the Republic of Consciousness Prize<\/a>. My Dead Book<\/em>\u2019s narrator, haunted by insomnia and the past, flips through memories of dozens of friends who aren\u2019t around anymore, and reflects on his own history as a teenage runaway. Ripcord<\/em>\u2019s narrator returns to this ruminative space. He\u2019s a middle-aged white working-class gay man living in Milwaukee, working bar shifts and catering gigs, engaging in a sort-of affair with a younger married man and living somewhere between the past and the present. Often stuck in bed or on his couch with the \u201cblack dog\u201d of depression, other times navigating the icy streets of his city, he tallies the many losses of his life, with a growing sense that love, at least romantically, may be over for him. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Lippens joins the ranks of working-class queer writers like Eileen Myles, Michelle Tea, Brontez Purnell, the late Dorothy Allison<\/a> and others who write class intentionally into their work\u2014the blunt details of day-to-day living on low wages and bad jobs, the indignities of capitalist demands, the rejection of upward-mobility fantasies, the aversion to easy outs or comforting pronouncements\u2014and the biting humour of all of this too. Ripcord<\/em> is a novel about middle age that does not fit the typical arc of \u201cmid-life crisis makes protagonist reconsider their life\u201d\u2014because, as the narrator points out, those stories assume a certain level of financial stability and a certain type of normative life up until the point of crisis. What about middle-aged queer people who have never had \u201cnormal\u201d life trajectories, who have no established place of comfort from which to fall apart? Lippens is specifically interested in the lives of working-class queer artists who \u201cwant love and freedom\u201d like everyone else but have been thwarted over and over by capitalism and heteronormative structures. \u201cI am an institutionally illegitimate person and I conduct myself accordingly,\u201d the narrator says. A friend\u2019s preteen child asks him why he isn\u2019t married, and he replies that this simply wasn\u2019t an option when he was younger. Now that it is, he doesn\u2019t consider it. Part of being a working-class gay man who came up in the 1990s was rejecting victimization by raucously embracing everything that was said to be wrong and disgusting about him. As he puts it, \u201cSome people get the glory. Some people get the glory hole.\u201d His friend Charlie, an aging queer punk, writer, collagist and collector of printed matter which he refers to as \u201cMy Heap,\u201d agrees: \u201cWhy not age disgracefully?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Charlie\u2019s heap of printed materials and his penchant for collage provide a structural guideline for novel itself: it\u2019s composed in fragments, which at a glance might seem to be arranged at random, moving between distant past, recent past and present; between various lovers and exes and friends and jobs and ruptures and cities. A recent ex of the narrator complains that collage is a tired art form, calling it \u201ccobbled together garbage.\u201d \u201cYet here I am,\u201d says the narrator, \u201cpretending to be a whole person.\u201d Who isn\u2019t? <\/p>\n\n\n\n In fact, this fragmentary approach mimics the eddies of living more accurately than a linear narrative does, or at least it mimics the way an agitated mind attempts to make a story out of all of the life that has come before this moment. Lippens\u2019s prose has a startling, immediate quality to it, so that past recollections and regrets share a plane with the narrator\u2019s current state, whether that\u2019s listening to regulars\u2019 complaints at his bar shifts, or considering a graffiti invective to \u201cKill the rich (no exceptions\u2014sorry)<\/em>,\u201d or lying in bed for days, letting time run together.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n