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The narrator is a millennial, a successful writer, a valetudinarian. There’s no plot. The novel’s character and verbiage driven. He likes multisyllabic words but don’t we all? He drives around Brooklyn and Manhattan. He takes the subway. He walks to a bar in DUMBO to see vaguely realized friends. He lends an activist the use of his shower and cooks a meal for him. He fucks a woman who immediately rejects him. He has heart problems. He sees the need for reform of capitalism, and praises the Park Slope Food Coop. There are a few unfortunate sentences:

“Is that why you’ve exchanged a modernist valorization of difficulty as a mode of resistance to the market for the fantasy of coeval readership?� (p. 93)

Another show-stopper: “Only an urban experience of the sublime was available to me because only then was the greatness beyond calculation the intuition of community.� (p. 108)

These are what I think of as dream killers if, indeed, as John Gardner said, the narrative is the dream. But ultimately in a text so brilliant they’re momentary untowardnesses. Like a growling stomach at a wedding. What I especially like is Lerner’s ability to take relatively recent news events—like the New York Times’s story that Park Avenue Co-op members were sending their nannies to do their monthly labor (2011)—and fearlessly incorporate them into the story. And I thought Ali Smith was rushing things.

“It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn’t really the word, with which I‘d grown familiar, a new bio-political vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were � for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren’t really their fault � compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside. Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence. This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism � ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc. � in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality. It allowed you to redescribe the caring for your own genetic material � feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice � as altruism: it’s not just good for Lucas, it’s good for the planet. But from those who out of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children’s digestive tracts to know deep-fried, chemically processed chicken, those who happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.� (p. 98)

There’s much more here I’m not touching on. Climate Change—Hurricane Sandy; to become or not to become a father; a writer’s residency in Marfa, etc. It’s highly autobiographical. There’s too much post modernist hoodoo but the satire is brilliant. I think it an excellent novel of New York literary life. Others that spring to mind include Sigrid Nunez’s recent The Friend and Edmund White’s harrowing The Farewell Symphony.