In order to contextualize Ben Lerner’s very strange and challenging novel, I thought you might appreciate the following:
- reviews:
- in the Manchester Guardian; NYT); and Slate
- As you can see, reception was pretty enthusiastic, but reviewers’ tolerance for the extremely close first-person, irony-saturated narrative differs, as I’m sure it does for students.
- autofiction:
- we’ll talk about this in class, but this novel is not “cli-fi” in the usual sense.
- It’s neither speculative and oriented towards “critical utopias” nor realist in the grand tradition exemplified and defended by Ghosh.
- In terms of genre, it’s much more an example of the “autofiction” of contemporary writers like Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard, who themselves point back to twentieth-century writers like W. G. Sebald and, above all, Marcel Proust.
- I included it in the course despite all this, since I think it represents a radically different strategy for thinking about deep time than the other two examples and represents a different strategy than either Ghosh’s or Butler’s in awakening our imagination to try to comprehend the “hyperobjects” of the Anthropocene.
