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Elusive Lawyer Michael Rips Revealed as Prodigy Novelist

A well-connected New York lawyer, once poised for a Nebraska congressional run, who instead disappeared into a small Italian town and returned with a memoir far stranger and more literary than his publisher's comparisons suggested.

Michael Rips at the Art Students League Of NY [STartUP] Gala in New York City (2018). Getty Images for The Art Student

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Then, earlier this year, a friend said that Mr. Rips had dropped the political ambition and instead gone to live in a small Italian town for a while. Now he was coming out with a book about the place. I smiled respectfully. I’d sat at the other end of a dinner table from Mr. Rips now and then, and felt sure that his book would be charming but slight.

Just the same, the idea of a lawyer taking up a pen at 45 was intriguing, and when Mr. Rips sent me Pasquale’s Nose in the mail I threw it in my bag and took it to the airport, figuring I could leave it on the plane after a few pages.

When I opened the book, I was stunned. It was exquisite, far deeper than its charm. After 30 pages, I told myself Rips couldn’t keep the stunt up. After 150, I thought, “Well where is he going to take this?” The ending was merely flabbergasting.

Mr. Rips’ prose was fine, mad and laced with history and philosophy. And while Little, Brown was marketing him as following in the steps of Peter Mayle, he seemed to be tracking Borges.

Here he describes a local man’s method of skinning a porcupine:

“[A] sharpened knife is held with both hands directly in front of the skinner’s body. Approaching the porcupine with the knife held out, taking care to walk slowly and deliberately, the skinner shifts his concentration to one of the bald patches on the feet. As soon as the porcupine is within reach, the knife is plunged into the patch …. The incision done, the knife is set aside, and the skinner begins to fill his lungs. His lungs filled with as much air as possible, the skinner bends over the porcupine and wraps his lips around the hole. Making certain that his lips are tightly sealed on the porcupine (the blood from the hole should be spit out), the skinner’s lungs are expelled into the interior of the animal. Repeating this three or four times-inhaling and then releasing air into the hole-causes the skin and quills of the porcupine to drop off the meat. The rest is easy.”

Mr. Rips’ Nebraska sister-in-law, Jane Rips, sums the book up well: “If I didn’t know Michael, I’d put this book down and say, ‘This guy is crazy, and I’ll buy the next thing he writes.'”

I called Mr.........

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