This short novel explores a number of situations in Ben Lerner’s characteristic auto fictional style. The narrator is an unnamed academic who travels to Rhode Island to visit Thomas, a famous writer and thinker. On the way to the interview, the narrator breaks his phone so he has no means of recording what transpires.

As the novel goes on, we encounter Max who is Thomas’s son. Max is a kind of alter ego of the narrator with a similar family situation and their shifting perspectives on Thomas serve to emphasise the complexities of the relationships between fathers and sons.

There’s a notion also about how technology has changed the way that the interface between people works, so that while accepting the impossibility of really knowing another individual, you can use technology to – apparently – close the gap. No phone for the interview means that the narrator has to make up what was said and he is criticised by a colleague later as if this reduces the value of his account.

Along the way, there are diversions into the past and a plethora of dropped and rather learned, allusions to people and places. The effect is to create a mysterious, almost dreamlike, atmosphere contrasted with immediate, and more real, family situations.

It’s a strange book but an enjoyable and interesting read. Lerner’s style is a kind of stream of consciousness with a mishmash of perceptions and details which many people will hate but, somehow, it works and it’s well worth wrestling with to work out the meanings.