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A Brooklyn writer with a book deal navigates impending fatherhood, a superstorm, and the slippery boundary between fiction and reality. Lerner's second novel is one of those rare books that makes you see your own life differently while you're reading it. He writes about late capitalism, art, and everyday fraudulence with such intelligence that the novel becomes the critique it describes.
Lerner names his narrator after himself, gives him the same six-figure advance that produced this novel, and readers call the loop self-satisfied rather than daring. The vocabulary draws the sharpest fire: his own term for crying, “a short lacrimal event,” gets quoted back by reviewer after reviewer as proof the prose is showing off rather than communicating. One reader sums him up flatly as “a deeply mediocre man,” a narrator who mostly retells the stories of the women around him while they stay thin on the page. Plot barely registers and the opening is the hardest stretch to get through before anything clicks, if it ever does. A damaged-art set piece gets waved off as “the museum of broken art,” and more than one reviewer decides flatly that “the world did not need a pretentious book.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
