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As I read the first half of this book, I felt determined not to like it. I would call the genre Brooklyn metafiction, and everything about it and the author's hyper-articulate, neurotic narration annoyed me. But the particularities of Ben Lerner's life in New York and its proximity to my own is hard to resist. If you lived in New York during the year between Hurricane Irene and Superstorm Sandy, if you went to see Christian Marclay's The Clock, if you were a child when Christa McAuliffe was going to be the first Teacher in Space, this book will have a lot of charm. Basically, if you're a young to middle-aged liberal white person who likes art, this book is calling your name. Lerner attempts a Sebald-like unfolding of fictional and non-fictional stories (along with a few photographs) to pull the reader into consideration of the nature of our perception. He looks at the Manhattan skyline and notices the absence of the Twin Towers like a presence. He tells the story of a friend who finds out her father is not her real father, and then is left wondering if she can still call herself Lebanese. She watches her hand as it pales in her own perception now that she knows she's not really half-Lebanese even though she speaks the language, can cook the food, sing the songs. In all these stories, the fake, the fraudulent, even the true, but no-longer true cast their shadows over reality. How much can we control this dynamic through our thoughts, through art, through casting our minds back into the past? How can we integrate them into our present understanding? If you don't have patience for this, or if this sounds like a tedious exercise in privilege-inflected onanism, I completely understand. Ben Lerner walks a fine line, but for me this fell just on the right side of it.