Transcription

On the face of it, Lerner's fourth novel seems, after his big, and more chewily traditional, third novel, The Topeka School, to be a return to the more elliptical style of his first two, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04. And in some ways it is: it's slim, and characterized as much by what it leaves out as puts in as it hovers again on the edge of anxious, present-tense semi-autobiography in its story of a writer's interview with his beloved, forbidding mentor that goes slightly awry. The episodes he recounts feel clipped, without explanation, from a vaster story, but they are straightforwardly told, full of the awkwardness and earnestness of loving and difficult relationships, and especially the burdens of being a parent and a child in our device-mediated age.