A Portrait of the Artist as an Artist Portraying the Artist

In 2014, in London for a bookfair, I found myself at dinner with an English editor who expressed his admiration of Ben Lerner’s Leaving the Atocha Station. I had read it not long before for an essay I’d been drawn into writing on W. G. Sebald’s influence on the contemporary novel, and the thundering praise heaped upon it puzzled me. When I inquired as to what the editor had liked about it, he mused, “I just thought it was very funny, you know. How pretentious the main character is, but how he’s always undermining his own pretension.” I asked the man for his favorite joke. He said he couldn’t remember.

This is captious, but illustrative, of an aspect of what a future biographer will call Lerner’s “meteoric rise.” The most famous literary writers acclaimed him; he won the MacArthur “genius grant”; the New York Times crowned him “the most talented writer of his generation.” And yet, when one digs into reviews from the period in search of substance, it is hard to find much to hold onto. Even James Wood falls into the art-museum-placard trap of gesturing toward an aesthetic task as though insinuation were tantamount to accomplishment. Leaving the Atocha Station, he writes, is “about communication and translation, about what can be truthfully expressed,” about poetry, about a young man “measuring his failure and fraudulence.”

To believe such requires a charitable view of aboutness. To take a subject up properly, one must go beyond the initial point of inquiry, penetrate and not simply ponder. Lerner rarely does this in his account of a poet in Spain on a fellowship at the time of the Madrid train bombings. His preference is rather for the rhetorical question, the half-empty reference, the prophylactic of “perhaps.” Remarks like “Maybe only my fraudulence was fraudulent” or the pseudo-humility of “The closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was . . . a profound experience of the absence of profundity” do not take one very far.

Early champions of Leaving the Atocha Station were right, however, to see a talent there, one that came more plainly to light in its follow-up. 10:04’s metafictional hijinks are facile and dispensable: A narrator almost identical to Lerner gets a six-figure book contract on the basis of a story in The New Yorker, and Lerner’s own story from The New Yorker appears in this book for which he presumably got a six-figure advance.

This is fun, I guess—critics certainly thought so—if you’ve never heard of Peter Altenberg or Lunar Park, or missed that there was a pilgrim named Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales, or you didn’t get around to reading Karl Ove Knausgaard, or . . . I could go on and on, and possibly ought to, because the American reading public’s cultural memory is comparable to a hamster’s, and it lets these old tricks fly as though they were novel and self-justifying, without demanding a deeper attachment between them and the development of ideas, contesting visions, or character relations. What compensates for this frivolity in 10:04 are occasional moments of euphoria, such as this invocation of the afterglow of a kiss:

She said she hoped she would see me again, and the next thing I knew I was running through light snow back to my dorm, laughing aloud from an excess of joy like the schoolboy that I was. I had an overwhelming sense of the world’s possibility and plentitude; the massive, luminous spheres burned above me without irony; the streetlights were haloed and I could make out the bright, crustal highlands of the moon, the far-sprinkled systems; I was going to read everything and invent a new prosody and successfully court the radiant progeny of the vanguard doyens if it killed me; my mind and body were as a fading coal awakened to transitory brightness by her breath when she’d brushed her lips against me; the earth was beautiful beyond all change.

This is, despite the protagonist’s intellectual aspirations, an interlude unencumbered by the need to be clever. And it is poetry, and as such one of the things mostly missing from Leaving the Atocha Station, though the latter is, ostensibly, a novel about a poet. Defenders would say that is the point of the earlier book—that its theme is the elusiveness of inspiration, the gap between artistic posturing and the artistic way of being. Justifications of this kind are defensible for an anecdote, but not for a novel entire. A writer can’t just be boring in a book about boredom, pompous in a book about pomposity, aimless in a book about aimlessness, sidestepping the hard tasks art poses to announce afterward, like Pee-wee Herman, “I meant to do that.”

At times, at least, in 10:04, the quest for vision reaches its target, and the solipsism of its predecessor abates. There are moments of gentleness and sensitivity and real warmth, as when the protagonist takes a Salvadoran boy he is tutoring to the Museum of Natural History in New York. The result of their observations is To The Future, a short book that Ben pays $2,000 to have professionally printed and bound. The text is inset within Lerner’s own, and has a poignancy that his more self-conscious experiments lack, particularly when the narrator, more pleased with this publication than he has ever been with his own work, gives copies of it to the boy, who doesn’t seem “proud or particularly impressed,” and proposes that next time, they make a movie on Ben’s iPhone.

10:04 breaks the sophomore novel curse. It is a step forward or upward or sideways, at any rate a formal and thematic broadening. At the same time, problems that were present in Leaving the Atocha Station here begin to show signs of chronic infirmity. There is the willful turgidity, what H. W. Fowler diagnosed as “love of the long word” that surfaces most often when Lerner must report on the body and its doings: not only stereo– and astereognosis, agnosia, and prosopagnosia, but an instance of intercourse that brings to mind the old Raymond Pettibon piece, “Sex with you is like watching scientific wrestling”: “I was no longer physiologically prepared . . . I stopped her from initiating oral stimulation. . . . Lubrication, however, still posed a problem.” Thrice, instead of crying, Ben has “lacrimal events.” The counterpart to this tweezing of intimacy is the ready resort to platitudes elsewhere: After a hookup, Ben feels “gaslighted”; it is a “great honor” when he is asked to be a couple’s literary executor; he attends an “elegant dinner” with a “distinguished professor”; he and the Salvadoran boy have “a nice lunch at Shake Shack near the museum—a fast-food restaurant where the meat is carefully sourced.”

It is as if Lerner has heard from the sensuous, or the finer threads of involvement, the commandment noli me tangere, and has turned his back on mundane forms, esteeming higher his intellectual or metaphysical sense of them. The metaphysical part is hit or miss; the intellectual part rarely goes beyond the ethos of Gen X and early millennials as they molt into their own kind of boomer, with the political obsessions of 2008 to 2024—i.e., from Obama’s first term to the dawn of Trump’s second—doing duty for Woodstock and Vietnam.

Fundamental here is the role of the university, a favored topos of Lerner’s, in substituting for knowledge and understanding an obscurantist lexicon that purports to serve as an instrument of politics, but is rather a marker of class. 10:04 throws out a bien-pensant muddle of terms like “normative male fantasy,” frets over global warming, and feigns embarrassment at the comforts of wealth. Inevitably this flows into the responsible consumer discourse that is the Living Word of contemporary liberalism: “I liked having the money I spent on food and household goods go to an institution that made labor shared and visible and that you could usually trust to carry products that weren’t the issue of openly evil conglomerates.” Pitched higher are odd lyrical speculations that are irreducibly ambiguous, sublime from one side and silly from another, but attractive in the manner of Sudoku or a Rubik’s cube, as when he addresses the reader directly: “Say that it was standing there that I decided to replace the book I’d proposed with the book you’re reading now . . .”

For each of these fragile exercises, there are many more passages of what philosopher G. A. Cohen has called “unclarifiable unclarity”:

Whenever I looked at lower Manhattan from Whitman’s side of the river I resolved to become one of the artists who momentarily made bad forms of collectivity figures of its possibility, a proprioceptive flicker in advance of the communal body. What I felt when I tried to take in the skyline—and instead was taken in by it—was a fullness indistinguishable from being emptied . . . discovering you are not identical with yourself even in the most disturbing and painful way still contains the glimmer, however refracted, of the world to come, where everything is the same but a little different because the past will be citable in all of its moments, including those that from our present present happened but never occurred.

This offers itself as revelation, but in content is quite close to Deepak Chopra; it has the same illusion of depth, the same suggested but unextractable meaning, along with sprinklings of Art English and post-Marxist theory that virtually demand a reader in Lerner’s own image, with an academically trained faith in the polysyllabic as a form of liberation.

Real experience struggles to worm its way in amid the wordage: Hardly ever do we have a sense of what people look like, their habits, or their tics. Ben learns early in the book that he has a potentially life-threatening cardiac condition but appears oblivious to the prospect of his own death. His best friend wants him to impregnate her, but their discussions of it are pallid in emotion, as though it were a question of refinancing a car and not engendering a life. Ordinary doings are denatured into mechanical abstractions: A porn film called Asian Anal Adventures is described as “audiovisual assistance” that will “expedite the process” of the narrator “deploying” his hands “onanistically” to nut into a cup at a fertility clinic; jokes about the astronauts who died in the Challenger explosion are a “powerfully unoriginal linguistic practice.”

This fetish for the sterile serves no clear artistic end—replace all this in your head with simpler, coarser words, and you’ll get a more vigorous text—but it does fulfill one of the central concerns of Lerner’s fiction: to show his avatars doing and thinking the right things. He helps out an undocumented family and thinks to himself how brave they are; he supports Occupy Wall Street and lets a protester shower in his home. He volunteers at a food co-op, offers to pay for his friend’s IVF. Even his shortcomings are teachable moments, instances of misguided concern a swiftly summoned standpoint epistemology sets aright. When he worries, over an “artisanal cocktail,” about choking his fuck-buddy during sex (“the breath-play thing,” he calls it mawkishly), a female friend rebukes him, “What if you stopped worrying about protecting women from their desires?” There are many good answers—even unimpeachably feminist ones—to this entry-level bromide from the Sex Positivity handbook. But to voice them would incite conflict, and conflict brings the risk of error; and so Lerner—excuse me, the protagonist, Ben—retreats into the lay scholasticism of psychologizing:

Now we were walking down Delancey, a gas I hoped was only steam rising from the street vent. “Maybe it’s how she grapples with and overcomes a fear of death.”

“Maybe it’s how she grapples with the threat of voicelessness.”

A passing ambulance threw red lights against us. “Or takes pleasure in making you confront the pleasure you take in those threats.”

“The flood of oxygen upon release.”

His third novel, The Topeka School, continues with the theme of the person similar to Lerner doing mostly good things and learning his lesson when he does not very bad ones. This is not to say that it lacks virtues. The opening pages crackle with local and distant evocations: of half-formed sexual attraction, of the balmy loneliness of nights in the suburbs, of the Big Gulps and McMansions and Marlboro Reds that gave the late twentieth century its brash but faded coloring. The novel is gripping on the fine points of student debate, and its main character, Adam, is a convincing portrait of youthful ambition and ambivalence, of giftedness with one foot in the promise of the future and the other in freestyle rap battles, drugs, and baseball, those dull distractions small-town life in America offers. Especially admirable is Lerner’s mimicry of voices from the past. Adam’s parents are both psychotherapists at the Foundation, a “world-famous psychiatric institute and hospital” based on the Menninger Foundation, where Lerner’s parents worked. Long passages are delivered in their voices, and the cadence, the verbiage, the shape of their concerns—all these things feel astonishingly right.

More dubious is Darren, a schoolmate of Adam’s, a slovenly oaf, and the archetype of toxic masculinity. More dubious still is that he stands at the center of the only real drama in the book. There is infidelity, but it is handled in the clement tones of person-centered therapy. Adam has misgivings about the inauthenticity of his rapping, but resolves them in one of those opaque raptures Lerner is so fond of:

If you take this mysterious pill you can abstract from the absurdity and offensiveness of their vocabulary to regain a sense of wonder before the mere fact that any kind of formally pressurized language game held social weight, that the masculine types would in this appropriated manner create a theater where speech might be recycled, recombined, however clumsily or outrageously. . . . At that point it didn’t matter what words he was plugging into the machinery of syntax (a sublime of exchangeability), it didn’t matter if he was rhyming about bitches or blow or the Stingray surveillance program; it didn’t matter that he looked like an idiot; what mattered was that language, the fundamental medium of sociality, was being displayed in its abstract capacity, and that he would catch a glimpse, however fleeting, of grammar as pure possibility.

Darren is the one character in the round who does something unequivocally, flagrantly bad: shattering a girl’s jaw with a billiard ball, knocking out several of her teeth and leaving her permanently impaired. A stab at a portrait of psychological deviance would be welcome amid so many pages about people being kind and comprehensive and fretting over their infinitesimal shortcomings. But already on the first page, we know that Darren is a cipher and not an individual. When he is seated in an interrogation room in the aftermath of the assault, and a cop tells him to “start at the beginning,” Darren thinks, “he would never have thrown it except he always had.”

I will not say that to Lerner, Darren is symbol of unwashed masses constitutionally inclined to violence against women. I will say it reads like it, and that Lerner knows his target audience will look at it that way; he knows they won’t be close enough in real life with such a person to see where the character’s reductiveness breaks down, and they’ll nod approvingly at the implication of structural male violence. Adam notices Darren’s awkwardness and seems at times to try to grasp his humanity. But there is no dynamism, no mystery, nothing to draw us into the other’s story. He wears camouflage and collects Buck knives, calls women “whores” and a biracial child “half-breed,” hangs out in the woods and works in a grocery store and feels inwardly tormented because some of the kids call him “faggot.” If these details weren’t stereotyped enough, Lerner also situates him ideologically: “white and able-bodied: the perverted form of the empire’s privileged subject.”

Adam grows up, moves to New York, finds some form of success. When his own opportunity to commit violence comes, at a park where a boorish father is letting his kid act like an asshole, he restrains himself, invoking his own father’s wisdom to help him sympathize with the other man (“This guy clearly has a lot going on, look at how he’s shaking; maybe he feels incapable of managing his son and doesn’t know what to do, maybe his marriage is falling apart, maybe he has a horrible diagnosis”). When his “managerial compassion” fails, to quote Chris Lehmann from a recent issue of this magazine, he can’t help knocking the guy’s phone out of his hand, and laments that in this way he partakes of “the archaic medium of male violence that literature is supposed to overcome by replacing physicality with language.” On a trip home, he sees Darren, fatter and “almost certainly armed,” protesting his poetry reading with the Westboro Baptist Church of “God hates fags” fame. The counterimage comes a few pages later—fictional redress for white male wrongdoing—when Adam, family in tow, goes to the Jacob Javits Building on Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan to protest against ICE, part of a “public learning slowly how to speak again.”

The dreadful seduction of the topical, to steal a turn of phrase from the literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, has dogged Lerner since his first poetry books, 2004’s The Lichtenberg Figures and 2006’s Angle of Yaw, with their references to war, school shootings, and 9/11. But events around him—or whatever distillation or distortion of him inhabits his novels—keep failing to correspond to his ambition. In Leaving the Atocha Station, though his narrator fantasizes about being “contacted by History” in a fiery death, neither he nor anybody he knows is harmed in the Madrid train bombings, which he reads about in the Guardian and the New York Times. As life leaves his protagonists not only unscathed, but materially and emotionally triumphant through 10:04 and The Topeka School, our “privileged cracker” (his words) resigns himself to becoming a chronicler of contemporary liberal preoccupations as they come to him via screen. A phone novel would thus seem to be in order; and a phone novel is what Transcription seeks to provide.

The main technique for emphasizing the unavoidability of this device is the repetition, dozens of times, of the word phone. This is reminiscent of the narrator’s “project” in Leaving the Atocha Station, a “long, research-driven poem” often mentioned but little elaborated upon. One must respect Lerner for mostly sparing readers Jonathan Haidt-style talking points about the attention crisis, but the novel’s duty to be beautiful or interesting or at least make us want to turn the page is little served by the litany of “I looked at my phone. . . . I unplugged my phone. . . . I needed my phone. . . . I checked my phone. . . . I was glitching, craving my cellular phone on a cellular level.”

The narrator had intended to use his phone to record an interview in Providence with his aged mentor and former professor, a writer and multimedia artist named Thomas. He can’t, though, because he knocked it into the sink. There’s an Apple store nearby, but if he goes, he’ll be late, and that will worry Thomas, “maybe frighten him.” He discards the option of stopping by, explaining the situation, and rescheduling for the following day; for unexplained reasons, “to tell him the truth seemed impossible.” Did it, though?, I have written in the margins like a philistine because if such truth-telling is actually impossible for the narrator, then his neurosis, his hypertrophied self-consciousness, deserves more investigation than it gets. If it isn’t, then I fear, as is frequently the case, Lerner is instructing readers to see drama where it is not.

The narrator, like Lerner, attended undergraduate in Providence, and phantoms from the past assail him as he walks to Thomas’s house. He recollects a professor who kept a cyanide capsule in a locket to kill herself in the event of a nuclear war; the sight of an old acquaintance, now a professor, dredges up memories of Anisa, a girl who helped him through a psychiatric breakdown. On a trip to Boston, the two of them visited the glass models of plants at the Harvard Museum of Natural History.

I have the feeling, without possessing any real justification beyond the return to the subject at the end of the text, that this is meant to be the figurative core of the book, the central image to which all events are fastened and through which they are meant to acquire significance. I am certain, moreover, that the museum visit exemplifies the aspects of Lerner’s prose that are customarily called “beautiful.” Typically, it involves him telling the reader he is “astounded,” and “couldn’t quite believe” the flowers; no less typically, less space is devoted to the glass wonders themselves than to the narrator’s own revelations concerning them, this “new way of looking, or this new hinge in my looking” that he says he would later learn to call “fiction.”

As for what comes next, I would like to tread softly, because Transcription is in part an homage to someone Lerner was close with, the poet and translator Keith Waldrop, who died in 2023. I wish neither to disdain his mourning nor speak ill of the departed and have no idea how much of Thomas’s interview is quoted and how much is invention (to me, Thomas’s flitting from the cave artists of Patagonia to the language of elephants sounds a great deal like Lerner’s collaborator, Alexander Kluge). The best thing is perhaps to treat it as fiction; and as fiction it feels interminable. Christian Lorentzen has remarked, about Leaving the Atocha Station, that it has “a progress rather than a plot.” Across three subsequent novels, this has not changed. A point always comes when you realize that nothing is happening and that nothing will; that the digressions and digressions-from-digressions, sometimes shimmering, sometimes tiresome, have led nowhere, and the end is not yet near. Perhaps Lerner’s love of poetry is at fault. Poetry can evoke and outline, weave an arabesque and then vamoose; a novel demands animating tension, and resolution rather than just an ending.

I don’t know. Maybe comparing writing on an overhead projector to “a primitive screen” or “advanced cave painting” is deep. Maybe “every discovery is rediscovery,” as Thomas says. Maybe “waking does not end a dream” and “we extend the dream when we share it” and “like the eyes, all dreams are brown until they are shared.” Maybe there’s something to the puns “screen time” and “you screen time,” “heirlooms” and “air looms.” Maybe politics really is “when we sit around the fire and make the dream social.” Or maybe Thomas has it backwards, and dreams are brown when kept secret, and every rediscovery is a new discovery, maybe it is dreams that do not end wakefulness. That these utterances, like so much that is idea-shaped in the book, can be modified without losing or gaining significance suggests that their function is not to be interrogated, but rather marveled at without skepticism.

We leave Providence in the thin second chapter, “Hotel Villa Real,” which presents readers with the now-familiar scenario of the protagonist feeling self-doubt, having strong feelings, and coming to an ambivalent but more or less self-flattering conclusion, but this time in the rarefied moral arena of the international lecture scene. Lerner-not-Lerner, with phone, is in Madrid, where he has spoken at an event in honor of the now-deceased Thomas about the spurious—because reconstructed—nature of their interview. The set-up is dry in the manner of the opening, and one wonders why Lerner bothers with these perfunctory sentences that so obviously bring him no pleasure: “I opened a new browser. . . . I went to my room, showered, changed, and drank one of those Nescafé espressos from the machine. . . . I told the waiter I was part of the group from the museum.” It is as if he knows that the stage must be set, but he can’t bring himself to care. The writing is all rind and no juice, and predictably, he pulls his favorite escape lever, the improbable imagined scenario: “By virtue of arriving first, I suddenly felt like I was the host, that I was responsible not just for the dinner but the entire conference.”

One of the curators, Rosa, sits across from him. He has “known” Rosa “for many years,” and she is “intensely devoted” to Thomas; the poet was her “oracle,” and a conversation between them about “how nobody has really written the history of reversal” inspired her first book. She and the narrator take a walk at the end of their meal, and she needles him with the remark that his presentation about Thomas was truer because “it was more in his spirit to be real, to take a risk, than to deliver an encomium.” The narrator balks, and she continues, “You more or less confessed that you falsified a big part of what many of us thought of as his last, I don’t know, testament.” The argument that ensues is about fidelity, sincerity, what memory records and what it erases—the kinds of things that sound good on a book jacket—except it also isn’t because nothing definite is said about them. Learner trails off into another vagary, imagining the printout of his presentation in his hotel room “rearranging itself . . . recomposing itself into a startling confession.”

We cannot quite blame him for dwelling on such quibbles; this is a cultural problem and not just an artistic one. But Lerner is the emote-GOAT, the sensitivitymaxxer, the 33rd degree mason of writers writing about writers writing about writers, and to detail the problems of his novels is to identify one of the abiding ailments of the literary fiction of our time: the contraction of ambition, and of notions of achievement, to the manias of a culturally and politically homogeneous readership.

Why this has happened is a long story, involving the consolidation of publishing, the overproduction of underemployed elites who cannot turn their politics into reality and so have made of them an object for public display, and of course, the fascination with the curated self that social media has turned into a pathology. Lerner has not so much critiqued as capitulated to these phenomena, and doing so has made his fiction less artistic than a courtly ritual, or a filter for readers’ mental selfies by which their probity and imagination are enhanced. I am reminded, when reading him, or the dozen other writers hoping to be him, of this quote from Vladimir Jankélévitch on the danger of smuggling consequence into the inconsequential:

In despair at so much ease, the decadent spirit will create imaginary difficulties and invent artificial obstacles in order to restore by veto that healthy resistance that is the only thing that can preserve life against boredom and stagnation; in the absence of real problems, the mind takes refuge in charades, enigmas, rebuses.

The conclusion of Transcription, “Hotel Arbez,” baffles the reader briefly. Then something clicks, and you say, ohhh, it’s a transcription—or is it? There is a long dialogue between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max; the two men have been friends since college. Most of it centers on Max’s daughter Emmie, who is diagnosed with Avoidant/Restrictive Food Intake Disorder (ARFID). Max terms this acronym an “envelope for ignorance,” and his cynicism (“You go in with a problem—‘My daughter won’t eat’—they ask you some questions, then they give you a diagnosis that repeats what you said with more technical-sounding language, as if this process of translation constitutes a gain in knowledge”) touches on an aspect of therapeutic culture that warrants more suspicion than it gets. Lerner evidently knows this, but his safety-first approach inhibits overt critique, reservations, or regret.

Emmie was slightly premature, “had a little trouble nursing, difficulty ‘latching,’” was a small child who never ate much. Max and his wife were worried about her but also worried about worrying, about inducing problems that weren’t there by overstressing them. One physician tells them their daughter is fine, that “what mattered was her own personal curve, and it was moving in the right direction.” But then, when she gets the flu, another doctor informs them that she is “extremely underweight” and advises they see a nutritionist as soon as she recovers.

Lerner is good on the strife such problems cause a concerned parent. Max’s speech, like the monologues of The Topeka School, has the feel of real life, and the narrator is sympathetic, in part because his own daughter has had eating struggles, which he alluded to in his interview with Thomas. By the time Emmie enters third grade, the situation is critical:

It was like some kind of horrible performance art: I’d cut half a bagel in half again and

she’d eat less than half of that. She’d scrape the cheese off the pizza and fold and unfold her slice and then take one bite. Excruciating origami. She would balance a single salmon egg on the end of her chopstick, spend fifteen minutes ingesting the little orange, gemlike spheres one by one—what is that, twenty calories?

Spoiler alert—the problem resolves itself when they let her gorge on junk food and watch unboxing videos during meals. These videos, per Max, “filter out the world” and put his daughter in a kind of “fugue state.” The sounds of crinkling plastic wrap, torn paper, and gasps are a kind of ASMR, and in one of various instances of Lerner treating contemporary fixations as natural kinds, “ASMR,” a phenomenon first described in the late 2000s, “treats ARFID,” a diagnosis that entered the DSM-5 in 2013.

One can appreciate how difficult something like this must be in reality and yet affirm that it is weak sauce for fiction. The subject is not undignified, but a dramatizing context is absent. The main things we know about Max are that he’s a lawyer, a friend of the narrator’s, and Thomas’s son; we don’t know much about the narrator, either, and so the stakes of their conversation are no higher than those of words overheard between strangers on a plane. It is a truism that you should review the book in front of you, not the one you wish the author had written, but greatness helps one see where non-greatness falls short. And so I think of the anguished parents in Raymond Carver’s “One Small, Good Thing,” or the loving observations of Jean Grenier’s Considerations on the Death of a Dog, portrayals of care that earn their aesthetic power through sharp attention to how others fit into the world, and I ask myself, could such a feeling of transport, of grasping the luminous edge of truth, ever eventuate from reading a torrent of uninterrupted chatter:

We could just frankly tell Emmie that while she could still have plenty of desserts and sweet things, and while we still wanted her to make a lot of choices when we shopped, we were going to try to be a little more balanced in what we had around the house. . . . she didn’t care at all, just said OK, but could she still have mini-blueberry muffins for breakfast and Oreos as a treat? Absolutely!

With ARFID more or less dispatched, Covid makes its appearance. The narrator already disclosed that Thomas had been sick during the first wave; that story is now told in detail. On a call with Emmie, Thomas starts coughing. Max’s wife asks how he’s feeling, and he tells her fine, it’s just seasonal; he’s avoiding people and having his groceries delivered and has done nothing to risk infection. Max spends a sleepless night loading and reloading the Times, “reading tweets from epidemiologists about protein spikes and droplet dispersion, CFI and CFR, superspreader events at conferences, on cruise ships,” and calls his father repeatedly in a panic the next day. Thomas, tired and wheezy, says he must have a bad cold. Two days later, he’s in the hospital, gravely ill and on oxygen, and a nurse connects Max to him for what might be their farewell. The Zoom link keeps breaking up, though he does catch a glimpse of his father in bed, unable to react, with tubes running up his nose. Finally the nurse calls on her personal phone and connects them. Max says the things one might say in these situations: “I love you,” “I know you did your best,” “I want you to be at peace,” “You are a good person,” “Let’s forgive each other.” He reassures the old man that he doesn’t blame him for his mother’s suicide.

Thomas doesn’t die, but once recovered, he’s forgotten all this: “When my body was in the hospital, my mind was on a distant star.” The intimations of some secret unity between Max and the narrator grow as he flies to Providence to see his father in a quasi-reprisal of the book’s opening. Just as it was “impossible” for the narrator to admit that he’d broken his phone, it is now “impossible” for Max to repeat what he’d said when he thought his father was dying. Max’s walks during his stay are, like the narrator’s, walks backward in time; he even repairs a window sash the narrator will notice is sagging again during his visit. On the last night, his father cooks—“Sauerbraten,” the narrator guesses; he had expected to be served Thomas’s “famous sauerbraten” the last time they saw each other. Max corrects him: “He never made sauerbraten in his life. He made a version of beef bourguignon.” At last, these similarities lead Max air his unease. “Maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger.”

What Max manages to do that the doppelgänger could not is hit the record button on his phone. Thomas brings up the organization Dignitas, pentobarbital, and the possibility of a trip to Switzerland. Max realizes he is asking to be accompanied there for assisted suicide. The narrator appears earlier to have forgotten that he and Thomas were together in Switzerland; now Thomas forgets that he and Max were together there. Thomas says Max told him about the glass flowers the narrator saw with Anisa, and they conversed “about art and life, the hinge between them.”

There is no such hinge, though. Art and life are distinct elements, and only great pressure can transmute the one into the other. “The trouble with life,” Martin Amis writes, “is its amorphousness, its ridiculous fluidity. Look at it: thinly plotted, largely themeless, sentimental and ineluctably trite. The dialogue is poor, or at least violently uneven.” Art has ways of treating banality: John Updike did it in the Rabbit books, and Marie Calloway in What Purpose Did I Serve in Your Life; J. J. Voskuil’s uneventful, five-thousand-page epic of office life, Het Bureau, is one of the funniest, saddest books ever written. But Lerner has too much affection for his material—his narrators and their sensibilities—to lay them on the autopsy table and saw through the bone, showing readers the nasty bits, the ineradicable vulnerabilities, the inner lining of death. His good fortune is to have come of age when the signal pastime is taking pictures of oneself, and getting attention for these pictures an imperious craving.

Lerner’s politics, his habits, his wink-nudge references to Shklovsky, Agamben, and Kafka, guarantee that a certain type of reader will be drawn to, and will see himself in, his books—and a critical insistence on the exemplary nature of the Lerneroid means that more and more, there is no other audience left for serious fiction. Such readers will be shocked when Lerner’s protagonists are shocked, will gather wool when they gather wool, will think to themselves, “I too am humble” when Adam or Ben or the unnamed one allow themselves to be reprimanded for some micro-infraction. Such readers—and how many of them are writers too!—see the broader world mostly on a screen, and have come to treat it as an epiphenomenon of the screen. But it is still out there, a place of dreams and horrors; there is history; there is a future inexorably encroaching, the fore-flares of which are so unsettling, they could drive a person mad. To treat it as a blurry backdrop to a triumphant accounting of oneself speaks to a profound delinquency in our contemporary understanding of art.