Watching Christian Marclay’s art film The Clock (from which the book derives its title), Lerner is free to consider the distinctions between real time and imaginary time. That can pack both an emotional and an intellectual punch. Lerner blurs the lines between fact and fiction not out of self-indulgence but as a way to capture experience that emphasizes detail over narrative structure. What to make of such self-referentiality? More than you’d expect. This echoes Lerner’s real life, in which his first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station (2011), was a critical hit the New Yorker story included in this novel did indeed appear in the magazine. As the novel opens, our hero has earned a hefty advance for his second book on the strength of his debut and a New Yorker story. It refers to the sense of where one’s own body is in relation to things, a signature theme for an author who’s determined to pinpoint exactly where he is emotionally and philosophically. “Proprioception”: The narrator of Lerner’s knotty second novel returns often to that word. An acclaimed but modest-selling novelist (not unlike the author himself) muses semiautobiographically on time, life and art.
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