MY TEN FAVORITE THINGS ABOUT SARA LIPPMANN'S LECH BY MAUREEN LANGLOSS
Before I ever met Sara Lippmann, I was a huge fan of her work. We rarely solicit from authors at Split Lip Magazine—and only for print issues when we do. But I couldn’t resist asking for work from Sara. I just wanted—NEEDED—to see her singular voice in the pages of Split Lip. “Har-Tru” in our first print edition is one of my favorite stories; it’s now in her outstanding collection Jerks.
Since then, Sara and I have become good friends and are in a writing group together. Sara had mostly written Lech before our group formed, so I never had the pleasure of reading it until now. Even sick with COVID and spectacularly grumpy with the world, I fell madly in love with this book about five characters struggling to find meaning in the Catskills. As part of Split Lip’s tenth anniversary blog series, I would like to tell you ten things I love about Lech.
1. Title! Let’s start at the top. It’s so hard to pull off a one-word title. But Lech rivals Prince Harry for Spare. It’s catchy as hell. LECH! It starts to roll off the tongue, then sticks on that “ch.” It makes you curious. Who is the lech? What lecherous things are about to occur? It prepares us for what is to come/cum.
Lech is a multi-layered, evocative word. Our brains ignite with sex, booze, all that is skeezy. It is also the shortened version of one of the book’s main characters, Ira Lecher. Lecher himself is an older, pony-tailed yet balding Jewish man who is always trying to get it on with the ladies, forcing himself into their lives in uncomfortable, gross ways. But he’s also totally lovable and funny; Lippmann makes us empathize with this lonely man, understand the Lech. But by using lech as her title, Sara extends the reach of this word beyond this single character. It has a universalizing quality for the book, casting a certain seediness over all the characters, the entire place. Lecherousness is in everyone, everywhere.
2. Characters! I recently watched an interview with Prince’s engineer/producer, Susan Rogers, who explained that many musicians use a triangle shape when producing their music, meaning certain tracks are more important and are given more weight, and others are designed to fade into the background. She said Prince’s music-writing, on the other hand, was spherical. Each and every instrument/beat had to be able to stand on its own. Each was the star.
Sara Lippmann’s book may have five main characters, but “Baby, I’m a Star” could be the theme song for each and every one. Even Tzvi, whose tiny chapters read like micros, is a star. Sara shares Prince’s genius in going big EVERYWHERE. Often in books with multiple perspectives, there’s one character we enjoy more or whose story we’d like to skim. But I wanted to stick with each character in Lech. They are all likeable and hate-able. They fuck things up; they do the right thing. They fail; they are redeemed. They steal; they give back. They are round characters in a spherical-shaped book. And the way Sara weaves their story lines together is mesmerizing.
3. The Catskills! This book is oozing with setting. Lech is the living, breathing embodiment of the Catskills. Setting is evident on every page in tiny details—in the old, abandoned hotel, the summer camps, the lake, the real estate office, the diner, the summer rental, the drugs, the shady deals, the festival, the fireworks. From the prologue: “If these hills could talk—the region has seen it all. Nothing is how it was (only of course it is).” The picture Sara paints of this decaying, almost mythic place is slippery; the minute you think you know it, she unravels another layer. And with humor! “Can the Catskills save a marriage? Stay tuned! Live at Five!”
The setting also does what any good setting should: reflects the characters’ motivations, as well as functions on a symbolical level. For example, in a book with many controlled substances, this passage reads just right: “Get your rod. The river is high from last week’s rain.”
4. The Jewishness! In a time of rising antisemitism, this book, which is very much about Jewishness, feels even more important. What I appreciate most is that, in addition to presenting disturbing and revealing moments of antisemitism, Sara also lays out the complexities of the religion and culture. She shows the good and the bad. You can smell her Jewish characters’ sweat. She gives us the cardboard yarmulkes, the kishkes, the overburdened Hasidic pregnant mother of four, the ramshackle summer camp.
When writing about a persecuted group, it might be tempting to present them in a purely positive light. But doing that flattens the characters—dehumanizes them. Sara’s Jewish characters are oh-so real, oh-so human. But in the end, Lech teaches us that all humans are more or less the same—the Jewish and the gentile women “summering” in the Catskills, the Hasidic drug dealer and the “Amish cocaine ring in Lancaster County.” Of these Amish, she writes, “Righteousness and separatism, beards and hats, can’t mask the fact that we’re all humans, reaching and ruined in similar ways.”
5. The bodies! The human body is on display in every chapter of Lech. It’s tired, it’s knocked up, it’s going bald, it’s horny, it can’t speak, it’s falling to the ground, it’s pressed against a wall, it’s running, it’s kicked in the gut. In one of my favorite scenes, Ira Lecher ends up in the hospital, where the doctors perform loads of tests and observe him for days. But they still don’t know what’s wrong with him. They don’t fucking know. The human body is a mystery.
6. The mystery! Speaking of mysteries, every book needs one, and this one has a mysterious death by drowning. Lippmann resists turning the book into a murder mystery, but it’s satisfying from a suspense point of view to have the death lurking in the background of everything else that happens. It’s also incredibly poignant to follow the arc of her son Tzvi’s grief for her.
7. The Compression! I love the driving force, the speed, the breathlessness that comes from absolute pitch-perfect compression in Lech. Sara’s writing has a tendency toward lists, toward escalation, which gives a feeling of abundance, of pouring over. Yet if you read closely, Sara also leaves a lot off the page. She can leap in a single paragraph from point A to point L to point Z. She trusts her readers to make the connections. As someone who has written, read, and edited a lot of flash fiction, I know that compression is extremely hard to do well. It’s easy to give too much in spots where it doesn’t matter and too little where it does. You can tell Sara is a master of the flash form, because she wrote a whole novel that feels like flash, compressing each chapter to its elements. The energy this creates is like medicine. Shoot it in my veins! And for a book that contains a lot of drugs and booze, the dizzying effect of the prose mirrors the content in delicious ways.
8. Motherhood! “Beth bleeds as she drives.” This is the first sentence of main-character Beth’s first chapter. Bam! We are introduced to her with blood. Beth is fleeing from her husband to the Catskills for the summer with her son after just having had an abortion. Given the dismal state of reproductive rights in the U.S. since the Supreme Court took away our right to abortion and bodily autonomy, Lech feels all too relevant.
The book offers up mothers of all kinds struggling, trying, struggling again—from the mother with so many children to the single mother desperately grabbing for elusive financial security to Beth who does not want more motherhood. Beth’s role as mother and wife brings her to the brink of breakdown, while at the same time, she enjoys motherhood in an almost sensual way. “Becoming a mother ruined her as it saved her.” A truth for all the moms in this book.
9. Lines that Hit You Right in the Gut/Kishkes! Sara Lippmann serves up lots of fantastic sentences, the kind you underline and think about for a while:
“He wanted to reach out, squeeze her raw, pink hand. Whisper as no one had whispered to his mother: go, run, live.”
“‘I’d sit alone by the radiator, play with my pet fish.’
‘How do you play with a fish?’
‘Lonely people can play with anything.’”
“…it’s freeing, to disappear into someone else’s memories.”
10. More Stunning Lines—I can’t stop, there are so many!
“Every day her daughter becomes more unreachable, like an earring dropped in the drain, where all attempts at retrieval only push it down more.”
“The water’s so deep no one’s ever hit bottom.”
“Nothing is only one thing”—which could be the mantra for this whole wild, deep-water world Sara Lippman has so beautifully created.
Sara Lippmann (@saralippmann) is the author of the story collections Doll Palace, re-released by 7.13 Books, and Jerks from Mason Jar press. Her work has been honored by the New York Foundations for the Arts and has appeared in The Millions, The Washington Post, Best Small Fictions, Epiphany, Split Lip Magazine, and elsewhere. She teaches with Jericho writers and lives with her family in Brooklyn.
Maureen Langloss (@maureenlangloss) is a lawyer-turned-writer living in New York City. She serves as Editor-in-Chief of Split Lip Magazine. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Kenyon Review, Best Small Fictions, Ploughshares, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Copper Nickel Editor’s Prize in Prose. Her work is listed as a Notable Story in the 2022 Best American Short Stories and has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Find her online at maureenlangloss.com.