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[Lipsyte continues]... younger than me. I was class of '86. So these characters [in Home Land], their formative years were the Reagan years.

Shteyngart: Right! As Lazlo, the armless boy turned political operative says, "Look at me now. I made it. Fuck the victims! I mean, victimhood."

Lipsyte: [laughs] Yeah, all that by-your-own-bootstraps stuff. Sometimes you hear the most brutal, reductive reasoning from people like Lazlo.

Shteyngart: In Home Land there's not a page that isn't pure bitter comedy. But there's also a wistfulness, almost a nostalgia about high school. There's one sentence that stuck in my mind. Teabag, the narrator, says of his classmates: " I could have sketched the pimple distribution of the chins of the boys whose names I barely knew." What is it about high school?

Lipsyte: Well, I think I write about institutions. The Subject Steve was about the medical institution. Home Land touched on all these young people, hormones coursing their veins. You're in this kind of controlled frenzy, and it's not really nostalgia for wonderful times, it's nostalgia for a certain kind of closeness and intensity—even with people you don't know or aren't friends with—that never really appears again.

Shteyngart: And of course there's the famous Teabag incident, how he gets his name.... These football players mash their balls into his face in the locker room. But what hurts him most isn't the sexual assault, it's that he doesn't get accepted afterward, that it's not an initiation ceremony. And when another high school student who gets 'tea-bagged" sues his school, Teabag is outraged.

Lipsyte: Right! That's his anger at what he sees is a weaker generation coming up and suing. Whereas he thought the whole thing was just to take it.

Shteyngart: That's a great set-up, the tea-bagging. How do you feel about the speech Teabag gives at the high school reunion in the end of the book? The great heroic speech. You're making fun of high school movies.

Lipsyte: What I said to myself was, "You put these characters here, you better at least deliver that moment." The choice was, do I maintain my cool and not have him say anything although I know that tradition [the speech at the end of a high school movie] does exist, or do I at least acknowledge this familiar terrain and try to subvert it? So that's what I was trying to do.

Shteyngart: You do great male-to-male conversations in your books. Here's Teabag's friend Gary talking to him:

"What was that?"
"What?"
"The sound you just made."
"A laugh. I laughed."
"Is that a new laugh?"
"That's my laugh."
"You've been working on a new laugh."
"The hell I have."
"Fucking poseur."

And that to me is just pitch-perfect conversation between two male friends. I had a lot of male friends in high school, but I couldn't recreate the conversations so well. Mostly we were pretty high.

Lipsyte: I had a lot of male friends, too. I don't know if we had these kinds of conversations. I think that's what we can do with fiction. In a way, two guys talking—that's a comfort zone for me, and maybe I don't want to get too comfortable. It just feels very natural to take this in some absurd direction, let their dialogue ricochet around. But you're more likely to get that kind of satisfaction on the page then talking to your friends.

Shteyngart: The way you write is getting better and better, from book to book.

Lipsyte: I hope so.

Shteyngart: I'm just glad you're not going to write about 19th century daguerreotypes. I noticed you have an attachment to the first person.

Lipsyte: Some people cannot write in the first person, some can't do the third-person. Some can do both. But I have a real problem with the third person. I don't know what it is. When I write in the third person, it sounds stilted, it sounds wooden, fake somehow.

I think it's the phrase "he thought," that a good writer doesn't really have to use. But somehow the ghost of it is still there. I think it's psychological for me, this stumbling block, not aesthetic.

Shteyngart: Back to the role of fiction today, are we asking too much of the middle class to buy our shit? To get into it?

Lipsyte: Those are two different things. To get into it, maybe. But we're not asking too much for them to buy it. [lots of laughter]