Expand your misunderstanding of the world.
It could be advice or a song lyric or even from a fortune cookie. But there’s a knowing and growing segment of readers who would instead squint and pick up the words, one by one, before coming to the logical conclusion: it’s very Nate Lippens. Which isn’t to say that line couldn’t also be a lyric or fortune cookie message. Lippens is a vast hoarder. The best kind, really. A collector of one-liners, two-liners, Tallulah Bankhead liners, that one vicious note Diamanda Galas hits. It all accumulates to the point of becoming a sentient being. Specifically, a gay man in his 50s living in Wisconsin. Who else?
With Bastards, Lippens’ final installment in his Wisconsin trilogy following My Dead Book and Ripcord, we once again witness the narrator sort through his hoarding. Sharp glints of the past inevitably buoy to the surface. It’s the same way you can never fully sweep up broken glass. There’s always a shard you missed ready to cut you days, years, decades later.
Bastards begins with a confession of sorts. “Alone between midnight and dawn is best because I don’t have to stay in character”. For readers familiar with the Wisconsin trilogy, being in character is central to the narrator. It runs like a proper three act structure. First the narrator glues together identity from those disappeared from his youth via drugs/AIDS/suicide in My Dead Book. Then, through Lippens’ spectacular wordplay, his identity becomes a fully formed character in Ripcord. We’re in a one-man show, complete with what is surely one of the decade’s most memorable opening lines. Now, in act three, our narrator is finally leveling with us. Letting the character slip.
Early on we are introduced to Rudy. A mentor to the narrator and, we learn, recently deceased. Death is a consistent flex throughout the Wisconsin trilogy, but here the pinch is different. It isn’t so much about the shock of death in Bastards. It’s the shock of still living. Which means, as a gay man in his 50s, witnessing how death must now be shared with others. The private losses in the fog of his sex and substance-abuse youth now, with Rudy, morph into a tacky rush for proximity by the usurpers of the art world. Grief must now contend with the “hype for the resurgent interest in the dead artist”. Uploaded. Made into content with a neat little caption. A flash mob screaming I knew him too! The narrator cannot abide. He soon after has a breakdown and is briefly placed in a psychiatric ward for a seventy-two-hour hold. In Lippens’ world, this is the only reasonable course of action.
Past the shock of still living, Lippens wades deeper to ask: what does it actually mean to survive? Often, as we see, it much resembles dying. A friend of the narrator considers selling his collection of vintage erotic and signed memorabilia from the 70s and 80s. His relics, proof of life, are witness to a history the dominant culture tried viciously to erase. Surviving long enough means witnessing that history hit market value. And unlike the vultures capitalizing on Rudy’s death, this friend doesn’t even get to enjoy any collateral clout or esteem. He must sell his past simply to keep on surviving. The history that isn’t sold winds up taken away regardless. Sure, in time the dominant culture might catch up to the underground paths the narrator and his peers were forced to forge. But what good is that when the next wave of rebel youth casts them out as dinosaurs?
“We’re the scummy fags serving the queers with expensive degrees and little status fetishes in beautiful homes” the narrator deadpans. Flippant smirks become righteous snarls aimed at the present-day cultural landscape: The growing sterility of queerness, sensitivity trainings for gays calling each other girl, and the manic Conservative fury over drag queen story hour (“We don’t want to fuck your ugly kids. We pity them because they’re yours”). Lippens strings them up to be flayed by an anger mostly dormant in his previous books. It’s a welcome lash. The narrator’s one-man show going off-script for his final performance. These are especially effective curled tightly into Lippens’ short paragraph styles. Each mini-rant goes off with a loud pop, enough to let the “marriage-and-mortgage conformists” know this dinosaur’s still got it!
Bastards, and the Wisconsin trilogy as a whole, refuses to celebrate survival so much as be constantly baffled by it. The narrator is still here. Still going. How the hell did that happen? Well, in many ways. There’s survival through a psych ward, of course. Being young “with a smart mouth and tight ass” one day and repeating you will never be rich in the mirror the next after examining your paystub. Also, the moments of rhinestoning your friends gowns while they rest before a drag performance or telling your dying friend you love them despite not “talking like that”. Even when it feels like being dragged, the narrator is still going. No survivor’s guilt here. Just survivor’s snark. “I enjoy being the wrong man” he states. “Or not a man, not a woman, not nonbinary, not gay, not queer. A faggot. A fuck you.” By the end of the book, it’s tempting to want to start it again. Jump across chapters. Rummage through the hoarding. Bastards, at its core, is a truly life-affirming read. Just don’t tell that to the narrator.
By Zach Grear
Bastards by Nate Lippens is published by Semiotext(e) on September 29th, 2026 in the US. Available from Pilot Press in the UK.
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