The acolyte has traveled to Providence to interview the older man, the famous expert and teacher, but finds the ninety year-old conflating him with his son. Meanwhile, he is distraught about having damaged his smart phone so that he cannot use it. He’d planned to record his talk with the world-famous man, and now cannot. The actual conversation they have is almost comic: they speak at cross purposes, the narrator becoming confused by some references of the old man’s. He subsequently goes along with the older man’s conversation in an attempt to get enough material to write up the interview. He spends the doomed interlude fretting about the video call he promised his troubled daughter—his smart phone is hors de combat.
The above recaps the anxious-and-failed interview, which constitutes the first section of the book. The surprising negative reaction to his eulogy/address constitutes the brief central section; it unsettles us while confirming the narrator’s issues of doubt about his own honesty and adequacy. The remarkable third section is a long conversation—or, rather, monologue—by Michael’s son Max. In it, we find the startling, even eerie, similarities between Max and the narrator. Both have been worried sick about their only children, their daughters; they both have deep, affecting issues with Michael, the father and father-figure; these issues have given both men turbulent emotional issues throughout their lives.
The novel holds up a mirror to our modern dependence on our internet connection, the baggage parents saddle their offspring with, through multiple generations, and modern approaches to neuroses in general. It is a novel for the third decade of the 21st Century through and through. It’s challenging, reverberative, spooky, and at times rather funny in spite of it all. Its satiric properties rise to the top. I’m recommending this novel for the expertise of the author, Ben Lerner, who brings his focus and powerful ability with prose to our modern double-dip of folly and hyper-concern.
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