Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.67 AVERAGE
3.67 AVERAGE
This book is about an author who has just published a short story in the New Yorker and has received a six-figure advance from a publishing house to turn the short story into a novel. At the time of writing this book Ben Lerner had just published a short story in the New Yorker and had received a six-figure advance from a publishing house to turn the short story into a novel. The verisimilitude between life and fiction in this book is humorous and enlightening as the author has the freedom to investigate many personal ideas from inner anxiety to thoughts about paternity.
This book almost felt too smart for me - though the almost there is doing a lot for my confidence. I thought when I began the book that I wasn’t going to be able to finish it - some of the language he uses to describe normal things was so over the top and off putting. Though to his credit - I think Lerner saw that and provided enough context in most of those instances that the reader could keep going without opening the dictionary (though I still did on multiple occasions).
Lerner seems to me to be an “author’s author” (your favorite artist’s favorite artist type of thing) - but I found myself really enjoying the humor and weird turns and vignettes that the story included. Despite myself, I even enjoyed some of the poetry, though thankfully there wasn’t a lot.
Having read The Topeka School - I did find this one more unique and less approachable, which tend to go hand in hand.
Lerner seems to me to be an “author’s author” (your favorite artist’s favorite artist type of thing) - but I found myself really enjoying the humor and weird turns and vignettes that the story included. Despite myself, I even enjoyed some of the poetry, though thankfully there wasn’t a lot.
Having read The Topeka School - I did find this one more unique and less approachable, which tend to go hand in hand.
beautifully written. not sure it really went anywhere. and because I grew up in proximity to the author, there were things that he likely got wrong on purpose that pulled me entirely out of the narrative
Brilliant and funny novel, reminded me of a mix between Jonathan Franzen and David Sedaris.
Meh. I came away from this book feeling as if this writer was really trying to say something, but ultimately didn't have much to say that would resonate with most people who are not writers from Brooklyn. There is a lot of rumination here, but it's mostly shallow. I am struck by this, in the blurb here: "Lerner captures what it's like to be alive now, during the twilight of an empire, when the difficulty of imagining a future is changing our relationship to both the present and the past." If only that were true. That is a book I would very much like to read. This is not it. Insert "as a certain kind of aesthete wandering aimlessly with no responsibility toward anyone else" into that sentence, after "what it's like to be alive now" and you have a more accurate blurb. Maybe Ben Lerner is this generation's Woody Allen, but with less imagination. I kind of feel sorry for him for not having enough actual struggles in his life.
emotional
hopeful
reflective
Not entirely sure how this made the NYT 100 list, but to each their own. Lerner is a strong writer, but the formal moves that interest him—this mishmash of fiction/non-fiction that works to create a novelistic space like the free-interplay space more natural to poetry—do not interest me. When he quits tinkering and gets out of that autofictive headspace, I really enjoy him.
As he visits Chinati in Marfa and encounters Judd's boxes in context for the first time, he reconceives of Judd's work (which had previously bored him) in ways that open him up to new possibilities. It's a beautiful section of the book as Lerner always has a keen and poetic eye for details—for light especially in this section—but it's the epiphanic moment that eluded me as a reader.
As he visits Chinati in Marfa and encounters Judd's boxes in context for the first time, he reconceives of Judd's work (which had previously bored him) in ways that open him up to new possibilities. It's a beautiful section of the book as Lerner always has a keen and poetic eye for details—for light especially in this section—but it's the epiphanic moment that eluded me as a reader.
The idea is pretty appealing – writing a fictional novel about writing the novel that you are writing – and the language itself is so crisp and picturesque… but the story itself seems stapled together. All these wonderful quilt blocks of verdant writing, but the stitches that sew them together are frequently way too visible, like using twine. And some of the blocks don’t even seem to fit properly. I enjoy a good metafiction as next as the next average joe, but I like it best when it orbits far from the heavy gravity of realism. Yeah, the story does stay aloft, but I sometimes feel like ardent wishery is all that keeps it from colliding with the ground. Someday maybe I’ll look for his first book, but I’m not ready to try that yet.