“Does a satirical novel need heart?”: Andrew Lipstein’s “The Vegan”
By Tate Gieselmann
The Vegan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023) is Andrew Lipstein’s second novel. Last Resort (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022), his first book, is about a scammer/novelist who steals his college friend’s story and turns it into a bestselling novel. Lipstein continues in his trend of narcissistic, unwell, conniving, self-deluding, white male protagonists who think they’re smarter than they actually are and brings us the character of Herschel Caine, the narrator of The Vegan.
Herschel is the CEO of a quantitative trading fund and a wealthy homeowner in Cobble Hill. He’s in his forties and married. He’s the sort of guy that believes any in-person missteps can be absolved by the perfect follow-up email. As the novel begins, his biggest worry is whether or not he’ll receive the investment needed to get his fund, Atra Arca, off the ground.
Herschel does not treat others with the same care and consideration he gives himself. His brain is always firing. When meeting new people, he doesn’t listen when they speak, instead building imaginary personalities for them with based on a single phrase, leaping haphazardly into a sort of authorial Lincoln Log construction that can last pages, all on a foundation so slim that by the next time that person acts in the novel, it topples the structure.
Herschel sees himself as the heart of Atra Arca, as opposed to Milosz, the fund’s math-wiz brain. Herschel’s job is to simplify difficult topics like quant models, algorithms, and, eventually, market manipulation into investment-winning phrases like: “Math may be elegant; reality isn’t.” He believes he is book-smart, but that’s not enough. He has to be the smartest person in the room. At a dinner party contrived to impress Philip and Clara Guggenheim, their nepo-baby vegetarian neighbors, he meets Birdie, his wife Franny’s college friend. He describes Birdie’s voice as clarion, her comments as aperçus.
But Birdie is a playwright, and when she mocks him in French, he doesn’t understand her. To his chagrin, she’s better with words than he is. In a neat paragraph of exposition, he envies her, then resents her. (Lipstein then somewhat nullifies the paragraph’s effect by having Herschel think: “Perhaps I envied her, resented her, even.”) Birdie demands Herschel fix her a cocktail; the second time she asks, Herschel spikes her drink with ZzzQuil in the hope that it’ll shut her up. It works a bit too well: she quickly excuses herself from the party and, unbeknownst to the yuppies, slips in front of her Uber and hits her head, falling into a coma.
The next day, Herschel and Franny visit Birdie at Brooklyn Methodist. The doctor pulls back Birdie’s eyelids to show them how unresponsive she is. Herschel, instead of feeling guilty, suddenly becomes very aware of his body. At the expense of mystery, Lipstein keeps the reader minutely aware of Herschel’s inner state: while looking into Birdie’s blanked-out eyes, Herschel wonders: “Why wasn’t I vomiting at such a dreadful sight, and one I myself was responsible for?” Descriptions like these feel a little like having your eyelids pulled back by the author.
Herschel rarely elides his own thinking. On the unreliable narrator spectrum, he’s more Humbert than Caulfield. This suffocating narrative tone, when it works, creates a comedic effect: Herschel and his wife (and, by extension, Philip and Clara) are such short-sighted, small-minded, rich, Brooklynite, wealthy fools! The characters in The Vegan are believably awful. Only Franny, who designs elegant chairs and is “the kind of person to search Google for bagels near moi,” seems likable. Lipstein does a great job mocking the Brooklyn elites he portrays, but a novel can’t live on castigation alone. As I read The Vegan, I kept wondering: where is its heart? (Does a satirical novel need heart? It certainly needs to feel alive—more human than a collection of well-drawn characters.)
Post-coma, the novel concerns itself with Herschel’s guilt or the various ways in which his inability or unwillingness to feel that guilt manifest. He spends a lot of time thinking about the gaps between words and what they actually represent. He has to remind himself of the existence of metaphors. He notices animals and notices them noticing him. A bird outside his Uber; his neighbors’ dog, Lucy.
Lucy, Herschel says, “recognized my guilt. Yes, guilt: that word…wrapped fully around its meaning. It was such a pure, true thing, guilt, it was something even a dog could understand. And she did.” He contrives an excuse to be invited into his neighbors’ house to see Lucy again. When he looks at her, he cries. Later that day, at a lunch meeting, he finds himself unable to eat the lamb shank he ordered. My god, he seems to realize for the first time in his life: lamb means baby sheep.
Herschel’s guilt over having (essentially) taken a human life continues to escalate into concern for the lives of animals. Neither Herschel, Lipstein, or the reader seem to take seriously the notion that going vegan would atone for killing. So Herschel’s veganism appears as a route toward giving the novel some heart: we expect Herschel’s veganism to funnel him into an appropriate response to rendering Birdie comatose.
Later in the novel, Herschel adopts twin anoles, a species of lizard. In the pet store, he expresses distaste when the attendant opens the anole’s dewlap, “violating him,” as if keeping the lizard captive in a small cage isn’t a similar violation. Herschel’s blind spots are many and, at times, darkly humorous: he wants people to treat animals well, but fails to see the human inequalities his Brooklyn lifestyle depends on, like the many Uber Blacks he orders and the constant stream of food delivery that keeps him alive. In the deepest throes of his moral crisis, he still thinks from a rich, Brooklynite perspective. He ends up creating such an inhospitable home for his two anoles that the larger lizard eats its smaller counterpart.
By the novel’s climax, Herschel can’t read, he’s yelling at his vegetarian neighbor for not being vegan, and, in a fit of temporary insanity, he burns down his own office and plans to poison a competitor with botox. The aforementioned funnel appears: he confesses his role in Birdie’s fall to Franny. She holds him. He cries until he falls asleep. The next morning he wakes, well-rested and convinced that his veganism was a product of a temporary insanity
Herschel is—to put it mildly—not a great spokesperson for vegans. When he is deep in the trance of his own changing mindset, his observations take on a childish timbre. Reading The Vegan, I felt like I was back in college, trapped in a tiny dorm room beside someone experimenting with acid for the first time. It’s comically wrought, but at no point does it make veganism appealing, and hell, I’m vegan.
Of the myriad reasons someone might adopt a vegan diet, the most oft-cited are for animal rights, for health, and to stymie climate change in the most capitalist of ways: by adjusting purchasing decisions. I am vegan for the better treatment of animals and because, as a not-rich, not-powerful American citizen, I feel the only power I have is in what I buy (or don’t). My own change to a vegan diet, three years ago, was slow. At first, I craved carnitas and bacon and spicy tuna rolls and fried chicken. I cooked with all of the horrible processed substitutes. I ate something that looked like a square sheet of plastic and tried to pretend it tasted like gouda. Eventually, the cravings stopped, and now I happily subsist on meals cooked with mostly non-processed foods. I behaved, I think, like a normal person. I didn’t, as Herschel does, go through a guilt-induced neurosis that caused a physical revulsion when I looked at “plates used to serve countless meals of cows and pigs and chickens.”
An unwillingness to eat animals has often been used as a sign that something is off with a literary character. J.M. Coetzee’s titular Elizabeth Costello draws controversy for comparing slaughterhouses to Nazi concentration camps. In Han Kang’s The Vegetarian (the success of which may have inspired this novel’s title—why read about a vegetarian when you could read about someone even more hardcore?), Yeong-hye's refusal to eat meat is only the first indicator of a full retreat from society. Joy Williams’ animal-centric fiction is often described as kooky for the crime of writing about animals as if they have emotions, memories, and habits, which, as we know, they do.
Compared to the three writers I mentioned above, Lipstein treats animals like the butt of a joke. Any sense of mystery or allure that a new lifestyle might offer Herschel is immediately dragged into ironic territory. Herschel watches an animal documentary one night. The next morning, Mr. Guggenheim, his vegetarian neighbor who, we are told, has made a film with pro-animal overtones, suddenly isn’t dedicated enough. Herschel lectures him: “I’m passionate, but that’s only because I know change is possible. If you let yourself believe in something it will change you, it will make you want to change the world.” This amount of self-righteousness all from one documentary; imagine if he watched three or four! Lipstein takes great effort to paint Herschel as a bad person, and makes it clear that veganism isn’t going to awaken kindness in him. It seems that, from Lipstein’s perspective, there is no hope for Herschel, whether he’s vegan or not.
This nihilism is made worse by the fact that, at the end of The Vegan, Herschel’s veganism is tossed away. Finally, Herschel cries before an intubated, comatose Birdie (and it’s pretty clear his pity is for himself). He’s done what the novel needed him to do. His care for animals disappears. He walks out of the hospital and into a diner. He orders a steak. He bites it. It tastes fine. He returns to the status quo.
Behind any question of animal experience, Lipstein is asking another, more intriguing question with The Vegan, one I too often wonder about: do individual actions matter? In an oligarchic society, what hope does the individual have of affecting change?
Lipstein articulates this question through Herschel’s veganism, yes, but also through his work dilemma: Atra Arca discovers a new way to predict the stock market, but the stocks they predict are minnows, and their method looks a lot like market manipulation. Herschel, again the paragon of misdirected guilt, sets fire to his own company’s servers, destroying his company and costing himself millions. But he is not convinced that his actions have made a difference—hell, the newspapers barely even cover the fire—and by novel’s end he believes that some other fund, perhaps also run by Milosz, will use the same methods to “upend the very definitions of public stocks, investing, money itself.” Lipstein’s answer to the ‘can humans change the world’ question is a resounding no.
I tried, while reading The Vegan, not to read it from a vegan perspective. We vegans are seen as notoriously judgmental, after all, and I wouldn’t want to read the novel on the basis of my own experience and perspective. This is a work of fiction. Lipstein is not writing a vegan or anti-vegan manifesto. What Lipstein does seem to be writing is an anti-human manifesto. He suggests, in Herschel’s work plotline, that the way humans treat animals is perhaps how A.I. will one day treat us. Herschel ponders: “[Our] algorithm’s victory was only quantitative, like ours over animals; a dog can understand human language—it understands its name—but at such a small scale. That was who we were to the algorithm: dogs. We understood it bit by bit but were lost in its orders of magnitude.” Lipstein writes almost as if from the perspective of A.I.: Stupid humans. None of them get it. Little things like love, courage, and a willingness to change are almost totally ignored in Lipstein’s rendering.
The Vegan is a satirical, nihilistic novel. It ends nihilistically. One can imagine Lipstein’s goal being to alert the Brooklynites he portrays of their blindness, their comic shortsightedness, and their position atop an unequal social structure. With lifestyles like Herschel’s (and Franny, Clara, and Philip’s) there is no hope of authenticity, and gestures toward that authenticity (going vegan, sabotaging your own company) will necessarily end in failure. The novel is bleak on a line level, a thematic level, and a character level, and nothing in its rendering suggests anything human to pull from it. Even the darkest, most satirical novels contain a human element in them. Otherwise, what hope do their authors have of getting anyone to spend time reading them?
By sending him back into the world of the carnivores, Lipstein is suggesting that there is no hope for Herschel. That, considering the futility of his situation, Herschel should stop pretending that he is better or smarter than anyone else, that he should stop judging teenage girls in Central Park for their vapid slang and fake smiles, that he should stop trying to prove his singular worth, that he should just shut up and take a bite of steak. After all, everyone else is doing it.
But as predictable as Herschel’s blind spots are, as vapid as his thinking can be, his twisted guilt is a sign that there’s a human under the crust. As a reader, it’s disheartening to watch Lipstein squash Herschel into conformity after he tries to become a better version of himself. At the end of the novel, Herschel is exactly as he describes Edward Hopper when he sees his lonely paintings in the MoMA: “Craven, a coward whose work only calcified the status quo.” It’s a nihilistic worldview, and as the novel ends, we’re left wondering if Lipstein believes there is anything worth fighting for.
Lipstein is a skillful, technical author. The Vegan succeeds on the level of craftsmanship: the sentences are tight, the metaphors well-chosen, the characters well-drawn, and the themes well-layered. It’s reminiscent of Franny’s furniture: elegant, contemporary. But what is craftsmanship without heart? It’s like a perfectly-made chair you can’t sit on.