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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.
Autofiction at its most self-enclosed: a writer named Ben gets a strong six-figure advance to expand a New Yorker story into the novel you are holding. If you find that loop clever, the book rewards you. If not, it is 240 pages of a Brooklyn intellectual monitoring his own heart condition, his own sincerity, and his own brand.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
