Hodges Figgis, on Dublin’s Dawson street, is having one of its periodic stock-clearance sales that may make you regret coughing up full price the first time around. One of the stacked books I spotted on Sunday was Home Land, by Sam Lipstye, going for a near-steal at €5.99 (or was it only €4.99?).

This epistolary pisstake comprises a series of profane newsletter updates (destined never to see the light of day), Catamount Notes, written by one Lewis “Teabag” Miner to his fellow high-school alumni. Lipsyte’s literary godfather seems to be Frederick Exley, whose A Fan’s Notes represents the Ur-text of over-educated slackerdom. (For example, the 1968 “fictional memoir” features a chapter entitled “Journey on a Davenport,” which recounts Exley’s increasingly delusional year spent on his mother’s couch watching daytime TV.)

Like Exley’s autobiographical proxy, Lipsyte’s creation is lugging heavy baggage (Miner’s mother has died from cancer and his girlfriend seems way too interested in her brother, a neurotic Hollywood actor). While occasionally stirring his bubbling cauldron of despair (he insists “I did not pan out”), Miner shares observations about his contemporaries: some successful and so well rounded as “to be almost spherical,” others, like his former school principal, suitable for forcible commitment.

The plot’s thin, and teeters into farce toward the end, but it’s Miner’s voice, delivering an unfeasible number of funny, dark, and often pretty filthy lines, that make it worth bringing this novel to the counter.

A family-friendly example of the Miner spiel, lifted from an NYT review:

Warned by a former locker-room bully to stay out of the mall, Miner observes: ”It was a silly thing for him to say, Valley Cats. No man can tell another man to stay out of the mall. . . . That’s not what the framers intended.”