Lerner’s book reminded me to a certain extent of Schweblin’s Fever Dream. A short sharp read which embraces various elements of contemporary life through the medium of a related narrative. In Lerner’s case, this is actually three different, associated narratives, linked by the presence of an enigmatic, Archimboldi figure, Thomas, a refugee philosopher from Germany, onetime disciple of Adorno, who lives on a North American university campus. The first narrator is an ex-student who goes to interview Thomas. He’s a friend of the third narrator, Thomas’s son. A short section narrates how the first narrator attends a seminar in Madrid about Thomas and is criticised for something he did when he interviewed him. The story is by its nature fragmentary, slightly dissatisfying, leaving the reader wanting to know more about Thomas who remains, to all intents and purposes, a deus ex machina. At the same time, the story permits the author to interrogate the themes of society’s digital addiction, the pandemic, the bloated nature of 21st c US capitalist society, parenting, and the work of art in the age of mechanical representation. No small selection of topics, given the slight nature of this beguiling, determinedly North American text.
As a postscript it should be noted that there seems to be, in the circles I sometimes circumnavigate via, natch, social media, an ambiguity around Lerner, a suggestion that he has pumped up his volume. I haven’t read The Topeka School, the novel that appears to have prompted this reaction, but I still feel as though he’s one of the more dextrous prose writers working in the English language. One whose debt to Bernhard and others who explore the limits and powers of ‘a voice’ is something that gives his writing an elasticity that more conventional narrational methods struggle to achieve.
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