This inability to ‘read the realistic fiction the world appears to be’ frees him to experience it metaphysically, unbound by the restrictions of space, time and dominant narrative thread.

Put another way, he perceives his surroundings as an octopus might – a useful state, as it happens, for an American writer feeling his way around the twin pillars of David Foster Wallace and Jonathan Franzen in the 2010s. A short time later ‘the author’ – let’s call him Ben – experiences his first instance of impaired proprioception: he loses track of his limbs in relation to his body, and of his movement in space. The creature first appears as it is being eaten, head and all, by the unnamed narrator at a boozy lunch with his agent they are celebrating the sale of a previously published short story that will soon become the book we are now reading (that story, ‘The Golden Vanity’, appeared in The New Yorker in 2012 under the name Ben Lerner it shows up here as Chapter 2). An octopus, whether as sociable life-form, delicacy or mode of perception, is a recurring image in Ben Lerner’s second novel, a story within a story that tells the tale of its own creation in the overlapping realms of autobiography and fiction, where ‘everything is as it is now, just a little different’.

Ben lerner 10 04 review