MixedThe Minneapolis Star TribuneAlthough the character is stagnant, the language is not. Ben Lerner's phrases meander, unconcerned tourists, taking exotic day trips to surprising clauses before returning to their familiar hostels of subject and predicate. Language itself becomes possibility … Because so much of the story takes place in the subjective terrain of Adam's head, it's strange when objective reality intrudes, in the form of the 2004 Madrid train bombings. The inclusion of current events is inorganic infiltration … Until the bomb, the story was willing to languish in its mundanity, to unpack the familiar contents of its etceterism, and it figured as an honest, exciting account of what it's like to be a fairly regular guy in fairly regular circumstances.
