Lerner’s third novel is his most successful effort at navigating between communal experience and individual feeling What saved them from self-indulgence was their sentence-by-sentence virtuosity, their imaginative density, and the fact that the cleverness of his prose always felt appropriate to the stories he told. Lerner’s first two works of fiction were intelligent novels of ideas about characters who were more or less like him: disaffected, overeducated young men. It’s a typical Lerner moment: an anecdotal event is mined for latent content, the literal uncanniness of Adam’s experience suggesting something of the uniformity – both comforting and terrifying – of suburban America. “Along with the sheer terror of finding himself in the wrong house,” writes Lerner, “with his recognition of its difference, was a sense, because of the houses’ sameness, that he was in all the houses around the lake at once the sublime of identical layouts”.
He goes into the bathroom and notices the toiletries there aren’t hers. The hardest part of quitting would be the loss of narrative function it would be like removing telephones or newspapers from the movies of Hollywood’s Golden Age there would be no possible link between scenes, no way to circulate information or close distance, and when I imagined quitting smoking, I imagined “settling down,” not because I associated quitting with a more mature self-care, but because I couldn’t imagine moving through an array of social spaces without the cigarette as bridge or exit strategy.N ear the beginning of Ben Lerner’s third novel, a teenager named Adam Gordon creeps into what he thinks is his girlfriend’s house. More important than the easily satisfiable addiction, what the little cylinders provided me was a prefabricated motivation and transition, a way to approach or depart from a group of people or a topic, enter or exit a room, conjoin or punctuate a sentence. “because the cigarette or spliff was an indispensable technology, a substitute for speech in social situations, a way to occupy the mouth and hands when alone, a deep breathing technique that rendered exhalation material, a way to measure and/or pass the time.
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