Book list
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Lerner has been hailed by The New York Times as “the best writer of his generation,” and his fourth novel lives up to the hyperbole. The ostensible subject appears to be how smartphones enable and double our experience of the world, complicating life for everyone, especially for those who experienced life before devices and our new A.D. era: Always Devices. Arriving back in Providence, where he attended college, to interview his mentor, Thomas, the narrator promptly drops his phone. Deviceless, he walks into his past: not quite a ghost, and not quite the person he was or is. He then fakes the recording, wondering if Thomas knows. About half of the book is a conversation between the narrator and the great man’s son, Max. The paranoia that accompanied the onset of the COVID-19 lockdown complicates the uncanny slippage between Max’s experience and the narrator’s, between past and present, boundaries and borders, real and fictional, and screened off (separated from) and screened on (available though distanced, disembodied). Thomas once told the narrator: “We hear as if. We are together, erring.” To riff on Rilke (“For beauty is nothing / but the beginning of terror”), Lerner’s tale suggests that beauty might be only the beginning of error.

Kirkus
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A writer’s meeting with his mentor goes complicatedly awry. Lerner’s slim fourth novel opens with an unnamed narrator arriving in Providence, Rhode Island, on a magazine assignment to interview Thomas, a professor who’s “among the world’s most renowned thinkers about art and technology.” Just before leaving his hotel, though, he accidentally knocks his phone in a sink, bricking it. His sole means of recording the interview gone, he triages, suggesting that he and Thomas conduct a pre-interview that evening and do a full-dress conversation the next day, after he can get the device fixed. The setup seems thin, but, this being a Lerner novel, rich ethical and philosophical questions fly off it: He’s concerned with the ways that an interview poisons authentic conversation, with our over-reliance on technology, and the moral dilemmas of talking to an unreliable source. (Thomas, 90, seems distracted and sometimes dotty.) Lerner’s true subject isn’t an interview so much as it is misapprehension and miscommunication; after the meeting with Thomas in the first section, the second and third parts are concerned with characters’ failures to understand something about each other, be it a romantic partner’s wishes or a child’s eating disorder. That last challenge makes for some of the most vivid, offbeat, and affecting writing Lerner has delivered—a surprise, given his fiction is typically marked by DeLillo-esque sangfroid. Another surprise is the relative embrace of a conventional story arc, as the narrator faces a reckoning about living in a “deepfake” world. This is slighter fare for Lerner but surprisingly potent given its length, interested in the ways that we manufacture our identities and how technology speeds the process along. A tart meditation on narrative and integrity. Copyright © Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Publishers Weekly
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In the beautiful and resonant latest from Lerner (The Topeka School), a middle-aged man constructs an elaborate farewell to his mentor. In the first of three sections, the unnamed narrator travels to Providence, R.I., to interview 90-year-old artist Thomas for a magazine article. The narrator plans to record their conversation on his iPhone, which he accidentally breaks just before the appointment. Unable to admit the problem to Thomas, he proceeds with the interview, and Thomas embarks on his characteristically stunning soliloquies on art, light, and sound (“There is always music playing that we cannot hear.... We are deaf to the bats singing in ultrasound, or the elephants conversing in their infrasound.... The air is alive with messages”). In the second section, set after Thomas’s death, the narrator travels to Madrid for a symposium on Thomas’s work, where he’s questioned after saying that he had drawn some of the now published interview with Thomas from memory. The novel concludes with a dialogue between the narrator and Thomas’s son, Max. The pair, who have been friends since college, grapple with their complex relationships with Thomas (“Maybe you were the real son, maybe I was the clone or robot or doppelgänger,” Max tells the narrator), and new mysteries arise over the course of their conversation. Lerner’s lyrical narrative brims with insights into how memories take and change shape, the nature of father figures, and the ways an artist’s influence echoes through time. It’s a knockout. Agent: Anna Stein, CAA. (Apr.)This review has been updated for clarity.