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I re-read this novel two months after first reading it, to see if it could hold up to a necessarily closer examination. For the most part it did. My level of enthusiasm was certainly lower, but I still greatly enjoyed Lerner’s prose style, ideas, and motifs.

This time around I saw a lot more Kundera in Lerner, in his use of motifs, in the way he structured the novel around set-pieces, and in his narrator’s emphasis on honesty in the midst of playful deception. But the level where the honesty plays out is different. And the content.

The biggest negative I experienced was the fourth section, a visit to an arts retreat that, I thought, was a level below the rest of the novel. On the other hand, I found myself less critical of the ending, and more sympathetic about how hard it is to end a novel like this. I saw the end more as a way to pile up the novel’s motifs and create an interesting impression of circularity.

There are two types of novel: those that improve with each reading and those that get worse. Kundera's novels are among the latter (e.g., in working with the English-language translator on Kundera’s Immortality before it was formally edited, I read it again and again, in three languages, and by the end I couldn’t bear it; thankfully, most of the fiction I edited was of the first type). I found Lerner to be the third type: the novel improved for me in some ways, and got worse in others. All told, it held up pretty well.

Below is my review of the first read, from November 2014:

This novel is an incredible highwire act, in which Lerner eats his cake at one end, and still has it to consume at the other. His tongue is often in his cheek, and yet there’s a lot serious going on, and he has (and we have) it both ways.

Lerner wants readers to see things differently, not just through the usual metaphors, but also through self-contradictory views and approaches, which sometimes take the form of sentence-long oxymorons. There’s a touch of Nicholas Mosley, as well as of Frederic Raphael, which is to say that the novel often feels more British than American and can seem (or be) too much or too precious at times. But the risks Lerner takes mostly pay off, or at least they did for me.

Temporality is important to the novel, as its title suggests (and its reference to the film Back to the Future suggests the novel’s focus on self-contradictions or bringing opposites together). It’s also a novel of images as well as time, with photographs sprinkled throughout. Of course, the two often come together, as in the film The Clock and a reference to “two temporalities collapsed into a single image.�

This is a novel that manages to be both broad in the topics it touches on and extremely self-reflexive (Whitmanesque and yet not). It sometimes seems as if one of Lerner’s goals was to take self-reflexiveness to its summit, its apotheosis and, possibly, bring an end to it. At least, one wonders where it will go from here, not to mention where Lerner will go from here.

My favorite sequence involves his girlfriend’s Institute for Totaled Art. What a way to satirize the art world! “I held a work from which the exchange value had been extracted, an object that was otherwise unchanged ... an object for or from a future where there was some other regime of value than the tyranny of price.�

How does one bring such a novel to a close? I didn’t feel that Lerner successfully accomplished this very difficult operation. But I’d have to read it again to be sure. And I probably will, although not right away.

If Lerner can move on from here, he might become the leading novelist of his generation. I’m rooting for him.